No Time To Die’s villain was boring. Get Curiosity Stream and Nebula for 26% off: https://curiositystream.com/thecloserlook
Why was No Time To Die’s villain just so boring? This video essay breaks down the why, then suggests a better way they could have done their villain.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/henryboseley
My Discord: https://discord.com/invite/aJpYPQX
Hate me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HenryBoseley
0:00 – Intro
0:47 – A Sloppy Motivation
4:57 – An Awful Chemistry
9:56 – A Puppet For A Villain
17:11 – A Neglected Backstory
20:39 – A Better Villain
A massive thank you to my $10+ patrons:
LittleBits
Kyong Kim
Young Bi Kang
Matthew Brady
Frank D. Lemke
Mike Schmidt
[OG]
Attic
Chefda
ElizabethJustElizabeth
Felicity Franklin
Luminé
Mister Anderson
Thomas Feuer
Thomas Paczolt
Trace Sosebee
My Name In The Description
source
It was a crap movie
wth is nebula?
i went to see this movie with friends
i remember everyone just referred to him as "rami malek" the entire time after watching it
PUT THE MUSIC THAT YOU USE IN YOUR VIDEOS!!!
I’m 99% percent sure the minority safin wanted to kill were Africans due to a scientist saying that he didn’t want to kill all of her kind
i cant stand his face
No time to die is arguably the best Bond film to date. Of course, people are entitled to their opinion but no one can argue with the overall positive reception audiences have given it.
Plot of No Time to Die:
1.) Mek James Bond look super awesome and kewl.
2.) Diversity, ethics and inclusion training.
3.) Kill James Bond.
4.) Profit.
The new jamezzz Bond films are boring,,liked Rodger Moore and Priece Bronsan..they have humour…the new bond films are just dull.
agree, he ruined the film…..
He doesn't let the film down; many many other things conspire to do that.
man the predictive programming and symbolism is strong in this movie
Christopher Waltz is an incredibble great actor.
I really enjoy all of your vedios.They are very fun and interesting to watch. Can you tell the name of the background music that started playing from 3:16 .I would really appreciate it. Thank you….
Also "how to ruin a franchise"
Stop it at 1:20. A professionally trained agent, a killer, a soldier does not sit like this. This is how a bored user of social networks sits in 2022.
”You got Zeemo from Civil war, everyone remembers him” Literally who the fuck is ZEEMO
Wait a minute now, hold on there. There's not alot about this Bond film that's good. It's bad, really bad. Same as the others apart from the first one.
Rami should play joker, now that is a role he is suited for.
Diune have one of the most intriguing and exciting Villain i have ever seen, the character actually made movie for me
I actually liked him more than the last 3 because after casino royale every single villain was like yes I did that horrible thing to you not the last guy, they all tried to be better than le chiffre and failed miserably
I think there are two ways to fix Safin. Either expand on his motivations and backstory or do the exact oposite. Why not keep him as the creepy masked guy? A villain of few words, who is mysterious but also intimidating, would have worked well in a personal Bond centric story. Maybe if he got his facial scars when encountering Madeleine in the begining and wants revenge for it? It could have been that simple.
The annoying thing about Safin is that he was played by Rami Malek. I mean, this guy went from playing Elliot in Mr. Robot to Freddie Mercury and killed it both times. He's an excellent actor that the writers completely wasted with shoddy writing.
Apparently, Purvis and Wade were set to write the script for No Time to Die, but were instead supplanted by Danny Boyle and their original screenplay was scrapped. Eventually Danny Boyle quit working on No Time to Die, and his screenplay was scrapped, so they brought Purvis and Wade back in. Two other screenplays were rejected, one written by Paul Haggis, a co-writer on Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, and Scott Z. Burns, who previously wrote for the Bourne Ultimatum, and The Laundromat.
With all this flip-flopping around of the writers it's no wonder it was as bad as it was. It was literally Daniel Craig who looked at the script, saw how shitty it was and asked for Phoebe Waller-Bridge to be hired for script polish as a last-ditch attempt to fix it.
So, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were the screenwriters for No Time to Die, Casino Royale, and they co-wrote Skyfall with John Logan. Unfortunately, Purvis and Wade also wrote Die Another Day, Quantum of Solance, and Spectre. So this film could have gone either way if the screenwriters weren't constantly fired and rehired.
Watched the first 20 seconds on my reccomended page and had to click on it to say that I don't know who the fuck zemo from civil war is. Terrible example.
Thats because the motivation isn't important. In fact the entire story isn't important. What's important is that there was a black women using 007s callsign and doing badass spy shit. That is literally the only important thing in the film, and what all the headlines were about and what the entire film was for. To push the message.
All films today are made to push the message. Ignore things like storytelling, emotive responses, screenplay, cinematography. You know everything that makes a film good. The only thing that matters is how many progressive politics you can push into a film.
How you make no time to die an interesting and exciting film is by having the British Government the baddie and have James Bond fight his internal struggles between service and doing the right thing. Maybe following the raid on the lab, the british government are the ones that ship all trace of the nanobot virus thing to the secret island. Once Bond finds out about it, following the Spectre meeting, he is so disgusted by the British government's actions in creating this thing, and refusing to destroy it. He takes it upon himself to destroy it. Now he is pitting himself against the new black female 007 and his old friends in MI6. Maybe he convinces Q to join him, maybe he just steals Q's information and gadgets. Either way he discovers where the island is, sneaks aboard a navy warship, and launches the missiles, blowing the whole island up, destroying all traces of the nanobots. When he is captured afterwards, he explains his motivations, and why the disease nanobot thing is a terrible idea. He convinces them to not pursue the weapon again, but is ultimately sent to a secret prison in the British Antarctic Territories. Paving the way for either a bond escape in a later film, or a new direction for the bond franchise.
That would be an actually good film, which would have the motivations of the bad guys being the safety and security of the nation. While the motivation for Bond is the good of humanity against such an abhorrent weapon. Then you actually have discussion after the film over who was right and who was wrong and where the limits are in terms of the security of a nation state. Maybe even bring into question the existence of nukes. But that requires you to believe your audience have intelligence, instead of just putting a black women on screen doing spy shit to promote racial equality.
I think Rami that was great, but the entire script behind the villain was not memorable.
i mean. he was suppose to be a BORING villain. he kind of represented death and rebirth. its like a depressing but calming villain. he wanted to restart life on earth. like thanos vibes. idk. i liked him but maybe this would have worked in a different movie. bond movies need over the top villains i guess bc im in the minority
5:01 so you mean talk no jutsu is good writing. ngl I agree
Worst Bond villian ever…
I think they just had a checklist of motives and references to the previous movies so that Daniel Craig's tenure as Bond was the ultimate cycle of nudge and wink moments. Casino Royale was an origin story. Dominic Greene in QoS has throwbacks to Goldfinger, but for oil, rather than gold. In Skyfall, one by one we are introduced to rehashed versions of classic characters such as Moneypenny, Q and a new M. Spectre introduced the most noteworthy villain in the series. A motive of generic total annihilation of mankind, previously planned by Hugo Drax in Moonraker, was the last box to tick.
Craig's time as Bond has an important chronology, whereas most of the other movies in the series happen as though they are all the first. They were bound to run out of character tropes pretty quickly as the series ran episodically with a new villain every movie. Daniel Craig's Bond would start suffering from serious deja vu had he survived for a sixth movie.
while i was watching this movie. i gave up on the villain and just assumed this was a good bye bond movie that aimed to show us more james and less 007. so the villain was intentionally reduced into a generic threat.
Can I say that this was the most boring movie I've seen in a while, maybe after Wonder Woman 1984
no time to die was so good i had no choice but to forgive it for making me fall asleep when the villain is doing shit
This Bond film felt like they dropped the ball completely. It just felt very generic action movie, jumbled together with some beautiful cinematography, but there was very little spycraft or intrigue. Felt like style and very little substance.
bond died with skyfall
Your moviescript is much better than the original.
the sadness because i really like all these actors. what a waste, what a sad waste. I mean… it's fucking RAMI MALEK!
Really glad you found your way over to Nebula!!
Damn. I like your version much better lol.
“Bigging up…” such a great phrase I never hear in America!
I thought it his dullness/familiarity was deliberate, in the way he died pretty-much off-camera. The story was about Bond, him being forced to plod through the same tropes of Mad Bastards in Undersea Volcano Bases, shooting guards in second-person perspective, almost an expressionistic apology for the genre. In the same way all Marvel comics have a fight scene in, but sometimes that fight scene lasts a single panel establishing the winner: paying lip-service to the tropes but telling an a different story.
But then again the captain of the Titanic going "Ha Ha look its an iceberg!" doesn't stop the ship sinking.
My theory is that the film was heavily cut. There's a reason it was delayed for over two years. His true intentions where edited out. The geneticist says that he wants to eradiate "your kind" from the planet shortly before being pushed into the pool by black 007. Also its nanobots… that are grown in a bacteria/virus pool? Its not nanobots, surely its a virus, spread from person to person. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and global pandemic where black people refuse to take the vaccine, they HAD to change it, then re-film a whole bunch. So all of Safin's dialogue about cleansing was cut out, why the james Bond torture scene was cut out, and the ending quickly cobbled together by filming Ben Whishaw in a room on his own talking to nobody and they inserted a scene where Safin releases the little girl to patch an inconsistancy. "Fact checkers" actually deny this.
He did ok with what he got.
Having the daughter bite Safin and run off into the vents is an absolutely terrible idea, it makes the villain look utterly incompetent and weak and turns a toddler into Sam Fischer. It would be one thing if she was a ten year old or something but come on, she's like five. Do you really want the villain, a skilled assassin who took down Spectre, to be defeated by the combat prowess of a five-year old?
Your criticisms are valid, but many of your fixes aren't actually improvements on the source material. It's not that the writers are lazy, it's just that good writing is difficult at the best of times, and movie script writers often to write around a lot of constraints that aren't obvious to the people watching
Utter utter shite. Even Quantum Of Solace trumps this dud…Safin was 20% complete.
thats a much better take on what the script should be…
id like your take on the "Fast and Furious" franchise:
killing off a character without killing the character itself, hinting on the character existing and writing him off as unwilling to interact and engage (completly uncharacteristic of its backstory),
they could adress the death of the actor killing the character at the hands of the second FnF movie thats put in jail… saving face of the characters disapearence, keeping the story in track of cars and criminals, and not going into spy and warfare stuff…
Madeline could have been the childhood friend of Safin. This way she, and her father may have gotten access to Safin's home, and resulting massacre of his family.
Goldfinger wants to corner the global gold market, Zorin the global technology market and Eliot Carver wants to manipulate media to provoke wars that he profits from.
NTTD could have just been 120 minutes of Blofeld pulling strings from prison bringing James Bond out of retirement and putting him on a wild goose chase with a mole embedded in MI6 played by Rami Malek. Malek’s character is also setting off small nanobot attacks as dry runs for the main event at several exotic locales. Along the way he meets the new 007, Felix dies, he discovers he has a daughter, etc. Climax is when Bond finally realizes the mole totally fooled M, is working for Blofeld, and Bond kills both Blofeld and Rami Malel’s character. But in the process Bond is killed too. No Safin at all.