Matthew Connell

One does not simply kill James Bond. No Time to Die falters because it treats Bond's death as a final and definitive end. The film certainly has its strengths. The action is often handsomely staged, Daniel Craig commits fully to the physical demands, performing many of his own stunts, and there is something deeply human in a man choosing to stand and face annihilation rather than endanger those he loves while saving the world. Good men and women have done precisely that throughout history when no other path remained open to them. To the warriors of antiquity, a death earned whilst advancing to stop the enemy was considered a noble one. In attempting to strip James Bond of myth and render him a diminished figure of loss, they inadvertently ensured that the ancient Spartan maxim still holds: with the shield or upon it. Heroic myths and legends are made of such sacrifice. So why, then, do I object to James Bond’s death in No Time to Die? Because the decision to extinguish Bond himself, rather than allow the character to absorb the blow and continue, reveals a failure to understand what the figure has always represented. First, one must understand of what Daniel Craig’s Bond was actually a product, and why he was not the quintessential James Bond. In many respects, this was the Bond of the War on Terror. From Casino Royale onwards, the series shed much of its earlier charm and entered a world of personal trauma, contested institutions, terrorist threats, and enemies who operate as much through networks and ideology as through conventional state power. It reflected a real-world mood of prolonged uncertainty, of vigilance without clear victory, of the sense that ordinary life had been interrupted by something darker. Much of the popular entertainment of the period followed the same path: heroes broken, institutions questioned, endings weighted with loss. The symptoms of the age shaped the work, and Craig's portrayal bore that weight with scarcely a trace of hope and no real catharsis. That is not Ian Fleming's James Bond; that is the Bond of the era. So, who, then, is Ian Fleming's James Bond? Matt Damon was wrong when he described Bond as "an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who beds women, swills martinis, and kills without consequence, and therefore repulsive." He was quite wrong. A man who orders the vodka martini, possesses hedonistic appetites, completes the mission, and who stands between the free world and its destroyers is neither anachronistic nor repulsive. He is necessary. What Damon missed is what the character consistently offers in return: the hope that the villains of the world shall not prevail; that the free world's tomorrow need not be a ruin controlled by tyrants; and that somewhere, someone competent and determined will stand in the way of those who would tear the world apart and tread it underfoot. Those who despise the figure often fixate upon the surface vices and miss the larger purpose. Hope is not a soft consolation; it is the practical conviction that the next morning is still worth having, and that life is still worth living. When that hope is fulfilled, what usually follows is happiness. The real James Bond must return because he gives us hope. That is why I object to the character's death, and why the decision to make Bond's death the final word remains the decisive error of Craig's tenure: it deprives us of hope and replaces it with loss. Ian Fleming put it plainly: "Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it." The original twenty films provide that breakfast far more readily than Daniel Craig's reboot series, which offers instead a fatal narrative of a tragic hero. Kill the hero who embodies hope, and you ruin the very breakfast Fleming recommended. Let us hope James Bond returns soon; he has been absent for far too long. Our breakfast is long overdue. Tonight's Bond film is Never Say Never Again. #JamesBond #IanFleming #DanielCraig #NoTimetoDie #NeverSayNeverAgain #SeanConnery