The old is dying and the new cannot be born. Behind the onanistically triumphalist surface symbolism of this first post-Cold War Bond film with its literal graveyards of Soviet symbols and its rampages through freshly-capitalist Russia and communist Cuba, there is a hint of rot at the heart of both Bond and by extension England. Quite apart from the villain being a British double agent, Bond’s final act of killing for himself and not “for England” expresses the libertarian individualism that would eventually metastasize into Brexit. You get the sense from Martin Campbell’s first soft reboot of Bond that his direction was striving for more than could be allowed by the script’s caricatures—all the women and Bond himself come across as uncannily inhuman—and the ADRed quips clearly added in post.