All brothers-in-law in the world know that, in every James Bond film, there is a geopolitical analysis of the historical present filtered through the sieve of Western interests and complexes. Among them, the most well-read also understand that the Zeitgeist of a given era is not only translated into the tectonic movements produced by the war and miseries of great states (or large business corporations), but also into how certain men and women manage the ideals that have been imposed on them by mass culture. No Time to Die insists on these two traditional axes of the Bond saga, but dynamites the anthropological one by deconstructing the character himself and causing the demise of the notion of the hero that has remained almost intact during 25 films that have determined the desire for power of many countries and the longings for masculinity of the bipeds who one day dreamed of being a 007.
Most critics and Bondian fans have dismissed this very intelligent film creation by Cary Fukugana (with a script where brilliant touches by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the soul of the series Fleabag, are hinted at) because it blurs many leitmotifs of the series: indeed, the competitive presence of a new 007 (embodied by the black actress Lashana Lynch) is shoehorned in and the villain well played by Rami Malek is a poor wretch with Freudian problems for dummies from screenwriting 101. What most viewers of this fantastic film have not understood is that the creators themselves have emphasized the caricature of interracial feminism and have offered us an evil freak to laugh at quotas, because their intention is to give the secret agent the category of myth and, as such, leave him fighting only against himself.
Geopolitics is discussed, of course, and the creators of the film do well to dispatch a brief but very rich dialogue between Bond and M. Raised in the world of the Cold War and the great blocs, the head of the British services regrets having to face a new type of weapon that he has co-created and that suffocates the enemy when the latter has come into tactile contact with the source of contagion (the post-coronavirus reference is well-chewed). The problem, M acknowledges, is that England doesn't really know who the hell it's fighting or what it wants, and when Bond insinuates that the evil one is fighting against the free world, democracy, the usual, and so on, the two boomers end up sharing a cynical smile that sends them directly to the pre-retirement queue. It's not that the enemy has a point in wanting to kill us, but that we, the good guys, have so cheerfully prostituted our own ideals that we now only shoot out of inertia.
This would have been enough to have given birth to an interesting film, but Fukugana and his team wanted to go the extra mile and counteract the danger of a viral weapon with an unexpected source of morality that until now Bond had hidden in the rather unproductive interiorities of his crotch: his sperm. The best way to kill the character and Bondian masculinity, in effect, is to cause our friend James a small setback that most men have overlooked; namely, that when you perpetrate that nice thing of going around the world having unprotected sex with wonderful women... well, things can end up resulting in a small package of flesh and bone. Parenthood and the imposition of genetic ties that transcend any logic of interests is the ultimate ethical source of the human being: Bond will defeat the bad guys when he understands that the only thing that has made him truly fight and sacrifice himself is knowing himself to be a source of life.
It is very symptomatic that the act of bracketing the character's masculinity ethics has produced fits of rage in the plenipotentiary alpha male that we all carry in our stomachs. Upon leaving the cinema, dejected as if I had been beaten up, I was as mad as a bull at the filmmakers for having killed my hero, turning him into a fucking family man. But my anger was very symptomatic, because if this were a mainstream feminist product in which the creators had taken advantage to crush James Bond by making him more volatile and effeminate (as happens in the latest films starring Craig), it would be just another product of resentment. But No time to die perfectly explains that, in this present, Bond's only way out is to understand that everything he had fought for, even his lack of emotional involvement with others, was simply a lie.
I do not exaggerate when I write that No time to die is one of the most excellent products that feminism has given in the last quarter century and its creators, I insist, have acted sanctimoniously in making us believe that the key to everything is that 007's female professional competitors, his beloved, and the product of his sperm survive him, when the depth of his sacrificial transformation is much more dramatic. Bond only becomes a proper man and wins when he truly loves, and that is what makes him strong, putting in a huge parenthesis all his previous imaginary, an aesthetic that the filmmakers adore as always, pampering the usual action scenes, cocktail guzzling, and female seduction, but which they finally murder with the much higher value of generosity and the attack of empowerment that catches us all when we discover that our splendid blue eyes are still alive in another person.
This is a sordid world but life, Bond says when he is about to bury his friend at sea, has splendid moments. Therefore, there will always be time to die.
P.S.- Run to the cinema, really, I'm not exaggerating, and going back to the big screen is very exciting.
P.S.1.- In case there was still any doubt, Daniel Craig is the best James Bond in all of fucking history. Dear Connery, get in line.