Peter Körte
Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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And that everyone is crying for him now, after many had declared him wrongly occupied in 2005, even before “Casino Royale”. Or that Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris are there again, as well as Christoph Waltz and that Rami Malek, Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody”, plays the villain.
What you didn’t know is almost certainly one of the things you would never have asked about. Or even Donald Rumsfeld’s things that we didn’t even know we didn’t know. “No Time to Die” is said to have cost 245 million dollars, plus the double-digit million amount swallowed up by the multiple postponements of the theatrical release.
Exotic and diverse weather
The film was shot in an appropriately exotic and weather-varied manner in Norway, Jamaica, Apulia, the Faroe Islands, London, the Highlands and in Pinewood Studios. The hero drives four different Aston Martins.
And during the filming in Matera, Italy, where Mel Gibson found his Jerusalem for “The Passion of Christ”, around 32,000 liters of Coca-Cola worth 60,000 euros are said to have flowed onto the streets to facilitate a risky motorcycle stunt. In the finished film, nothing of the flood of cola can be seen. It’s a shame, actually.
But there are issues other than soft drinks, the amount of alcoholic beverages, the number of cars, and the weapons used. For example, like the old macho figure, carefully reformed over the years, who defied competition from Mad Max, Rambo, Indiana Jones or Schwarzenegger in the seventies and eighties, like this veteran now in the world of #metoo, more diversity and ostracism of toxic masculinity should find its way into it; and how to get Daniel Craig a farewell at the same time who doesn’t disavow his interpretation of the old pop icon.
A delightful anachronism
Cary Joji Fukunaga (“True Detective”) as director and co-writer was not a bad choice for this complex task, he replaced the British Danny Boyle, who probably had more irony and gimmick in mind than the producers wanted.
It would have been a bad match for Craig, too. He is less cultivated, more brutal, more brooding than the bonds before. And through him (and the scripts) 007, who consumed cocktails and blondes, also got a story, feelings and doubts. The world around him changed in the 16 years of his “tenure,” but he adjusted just enough to remain an exciting anachronism.
Bond’s story now continues “No Time to Die”, which forms an independent narrative block with the four previous films. Out of sheer enthusiasm for series, this has already led some to attest the Bond films “horizontal narration”. But that takes a little more than that.
Because with all cross-references and back-references and the license for self-referentiality, it would not be a good idea to take the plot too seriously. Then you would quickly find gaps through which an entire armored squadron could fit because it was already unclear in “Specter” who raised the orphan boy James – an Austrian or the old ranger from “Skyfall”.
Overcoming the laws of gravity
For nerds, family relationships may be of vital importance; this is irrelevant for the dynamics and kinetics of a Bond film. It’s about linear, fast movement, occasional thrust reversal, also about how the laws of gravity can be overridden again and again, how bodies survive missions that caused broken bones, severe bruises and internal injuries in life, as if you were shaking the dust off the suit quickly.
“No time to die” begins, that’s how much spoilers it can be, in wintry Norway, in a house in the wilderness by a frozen lake. Everything is white, you can then see the blood better, a man in a mask comes to take revenge on the killer Mr. White known from “Specter” and “Quantum of Solace”.
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