There’s a shot in the first act of No Time to Die in which Daniel Craig’s James Bond recalls a famous photo of President John F. Kennedy, sailing his yacht in the waters of Newport. We’ve seen a number of maritime and sailing scenes in Craig’s Bond films before, but never before a shot that so clearly invokes the former President and the legacy of the Kennedys: tanned, fit, beautiful, and doomed. It’s appropriate for the final film in Daniel Craig’s James Bond franchise — the closing of a five-film series that ranks as one of the most commercially and critically successful in the history of film.
As an enterprise with both British roots (in Fleming’s novels and Eon Productions) and American (in distributors United Artists/MGM and the Broccoli family which finances the films) — a “Special Relationship” in the world of media, one which arose out of the post-war period — the Bond films have often implicitly reflected and commented upon the world order of two of the major powers. The first film to feature Daniel Craig as Bond, however, came out in 2006 — at a time when the world order of the hegemons was threatened from without and under fire from within.
Conspicuously, the Craig films never once touched upon the Middle East region (similar to how, in the interests of commerce during the Cold War era, international organizations like SPECTRE replaced the Soviet Union in the films, which did feature heavily in Ian Fleming’s novels). Yet they can’t help but reflect their times, and as a result of the political uncertainty facing the old order, Bond’s intelligence organization MI6, and its American counterpart, the CIA, are constantly threatened and ill at ease in the modern era — two world powers uncertain of themselves, forceful but not powerful, riven apart in several of the films by intra-governmental forces.
In most of the films, either Bond or his American counterpart, Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter, are up in some form or another against their own governments or at least lacking their support. Yet at the same time, Bond, as the best of what MI6 has to offer, is a symbol of that old order. This is an explicit theme in many of the films, as in Skyfall (Bond: “Well, I like to do some things the old-fashioned way.” “Sometimes the old ways are the best.”), as well as how that order seems to be inadequate, slipping away (literally in Spectre’s “Tempus fugit … doesn’t time fly?” or as expressed by two different M’s throughout Skyfall, Spectre, and No Time to Die).
Even as the buzz in the build-up to the release of No Time to Die this year concerned whether Bond was an outdated relic of an earlier age, what these discussions missed is that Daniel Craig’s Bond has always had a haunted, doomed quality missing from earlier iterations of the character. From Casino Royale onward, Craig’s portrayal has given the sense that Bond, and therefore what he represents of the old order, cannot last — a ticking time bomb underlying the character, which could never help but end with his death.
(In fact, Craig’s Bond attempts to ride off into the sunset no less than three times — not just after he appears to die in Skyfall, nor at the end of a job well done in Spectre, but even at the end of his very first outing in Casino Royale — yet is thwarted each time, signaling that for him there is no peaceful way out).
The hauntedness of James Bond in these five films means that there’s an inherent critique, adding a layer of distance for the audience, towards much of the behavior he engages in — from his womanizing, to a predilection for alcohol which is explicitly stated to be a debilitating addiction, to his penchant for violence. There’s an ugly quality to many of his “conquests” in these movies: the very first dalliance we witness in Casino Royale ends in death, and both here and in the next film, Quantum of Solace, his reaction to death is shock but not surprise — rather resignation — as well as chagrin at the admonishment of Judi Dench’s M, which he knows is justified. By the time we get to the seduction of a widow in Spectre, the effect is more of nihilism than eroticism.
This version of the Bond franchise also has a moralistic formula to its violence: those who engage in it tend to, in turn, meet a violent end. This includes not just the villains but also Judi Dench’s M. Though she becomes a replacement mother figure for Bond, over the course of her intelligence career she calculatedly and continually sacrifices operatives in the cold logic of utilitarianism, from minor characters like Skyfall’s Ronson to former MI6 agent turned villain Tiago Rodriguez (as played brilliantly by Javier Bardem), to Bond himself.
It’s the same coldness Bond displays in Quantum of Solace in a haunting, lingering shot after he throws the body of an old friend in the dumpster, declaring that as a fellow intelligence agent, “He wouldn’t care.” Skyfall, which most explicitly raises many of these themes, in some ways acts as a companion film to No Time to Die (whose opening scene closely mirrors the climax of the former). This is partly why it’s so appropriate that M’s necessary death foreshadows Bond’s own.
Eventually, the role of M is taken over by Ralph Fiennes’ Mallory, who was himself a victim of imprisonment rather than the purveyor of such violence. It’s one way in which the films subtly signal a new chapter for MI6 and the passing of the old ways, as represented by Dench’s M and Bond himself. Others include the casting of Black women for the role of the new 007, the offhanded mention of a queer relationship for Q, and the way in which Moneypenny decides that fieldwork is not for her and gives up the violent life of an agent.
The tragedy of Craig’s Bond is that from Casino Royale onward, the films make it explicitly clear that Bond is trapped by his inability to process and grow beyond the childhood trauma he experienced — the tragic death of his parents. (In Skyfall, his family estate’s groundskeeper shows M a hidden passageway and tells her: “The night I told him his parents had died, he hid in here for two days. When he did come out, he wasn't a boy anymore.” What the film suggests, though, is that neither was he a man — instead trapped by trauma in between childhood and adulthood. As Christopher Waltz’s Blofeld taunts Bond in No Time to Die, “You always were a sensitive boy.”)
Bond’s response to his trauma is to trust no one, form no attachments, and lash out in violence at a world that has proven its violence to him time and again. This means that, in an outcome tragically familiar to victims of childhood trauma, he faces a pattern of what he can only interpret as betrayal, in spite of actual intentions, in the few times he does let his guard down — beginning with Vesper Lynd (whose love and death he is unable to process in a healthy way, instead repeating his old patterns) and finally with Madeleine Swann at the beginning of No Time to Die (demonstrating how his trauma interrupts his ability to maintain even healthy relationships).
And unlike previous iterations of Bond, whose suaveness came in part from their Eton and Oxbridge educations, Casino Royale establishes that Craig’s Bond was at these institutions on the basis of either scholarship or someone else’s generosity, meaning that he himself lacked the wealth of his peers — fueling a resentment at his need and ability to navigate the corridors of power, along with the feeling that comes from not truly being or feeling a part of them, instead a perpetual outsider.
Because of how the films have consistently portrayed the failures of the old order and Bond's inability to live in the new one (even as he helps to bring it about), No Time to Die therefore concludes in the only way it can: with the first-ever onscreen death of James Bond, but also with his character, finally, at peace with himself — knowing that he helped to build something that will last beyond himself.
It’s also why it’s so appropriate that the final scene in the series ends with a bit of mythmaking as Swann tells her daughter of the story of someone named James Bond. As a stand-in for the audience, it’s not just the story of Daniel Craig’s Bond she’s telling — but the collective story we tell about James Bond, and what, over the course of its sixty-decade history, that narrative tells us about ourselves — a story that is still being written and told.