Sunday, January 23, 2022

Review of 'No Time to Die'

Not sure why people continue to watch James Bond films. Despite the constant bangs and crashes on the screen, and the constant level of tension and excitement that this is intended to create, I nearly dozed off a few times. The plot is more or less incomprehensible, the characters flat and uninteresting...though I almost make an except for Daniel Craig, who somehow manages to put a bit of emotional depth into the Bond character.

I suspect anti-vaxxers would rather enjoy the film...the evil super-villain, who is actually called "Lyutsifer Safin", has a secret super-factory where he is making a DNA specific bioweapon to kill off huge numbers of the world's population, and he makes an evil speech about his motivation that basically says people want to be controlled...and the bioweapon originated in a UK project run by Bond's boss M (who unaccountably sets it in a glass skyscraper in central London rather than say Porton Down)

They might not like so much that the baddies appear to be Russian (accents, the language that the evil genius base guards speak to each other, and the fact that the base has obviously Soviet-era murals on the walls, including a hammer-and-sickle logo), though they are not The Russians, not the Russian government of Putin, who after all pours money and resources into medical disinformation in the west. We know this because at one point near the end M is having to allay the concerns of the Russian goverment, who wonder why the British navy is launching a powerful nuclear missile strike on an island that the Russians claim is their territory.

The implication of the location is that this is the Kuril Islands.  Not the Spratly Islands, though that reminded me that there are absolutely no Chinese villains or mention of China in the whole narrative...it's like it doesn't exist. There is a section set in Cuba, which looks rather nice.

Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, via Amazon Prime.


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