It may be strange to say at the end of a series reviewing late-Bond through a political lens but NO TIME TO DIE works by focusing on the personal. Instead of the thin political themes of QUANTUM and SPECTRE, we get a back-to-basics terrorist supervillain with an evil lair and zero motivation for his genocidal ambitions but also an actual narrative arc for James Bond and a script that gives Daniel Craig something to work with: the early scenes of Bond too broken by trauma to trust anyone are some of his best work in the role. There’s a smidge too many lines of dialogue that overexplain things to the audience but this is the first Bond script since CASINO ROYALE that does more than shuttle us from set piece to set piece.
Clearly there’s some significant symbolism in killing James Bond, symbol of Britain and England, but it feels like we’re at least a few years away from seeing that in context.