For most of the runtime I was thinking: "wow, this is clearly the best Bond film (I've seen)". A lot of the Daniel Craig films are not very memorable. I couldn't remember whether I'd seen them all, but while watching No Time to Die, I felt that there were a lot of stand-out scenes that weren't just generic action/dialogue.
The ending is very bafflingly awful, and I'm very bothered by it.
They spend the film really giving James something to live for and then at the end he kills himself through sheer foolhardiness.
Why doesn't Nomi choose to be the person who stays behind to open the blast doors? She's a secret agent. This is literally her job. She's his replacement at MI6, but she takes his family to safety, and he finishes MI6's mission, and no one tries to stop him!!!
James only came out of retirement because his life wasn't eventful enough, but on the journey he found out that he's got a child with a woman who he's mutually in love with. Maybe now's not the best time to be putting his life on the line. Maybe now his circumstances are different and so his motivation to do secret agent stuff no longer applies. It makes sense to put himself in danger to rescue them, but as soon as they were rescued, he should have left with them.
My complaint about James's judgement isn't that he put the world ahead of his family or that he died saving people. He could have saved both and not died, if only Nomi did her job. An easy fix to the story would be to have Nomi be heavily wounded before the speedboat scene. Alternatively it would make sense for both Nomi and James to finish the mission. How hard is it to drive a speedboat; Madeleine could have done it.
Having said that, I actually think it's pretty sad that the writers killed him off after giving him a glimpse of a good life. I guess because it's a Bond film I had expectations that the ending would be less tragic because they're generally designed to be a fun ride.
Although he took a bad risk, it only led to his death for stupid reasons.
Bombing the island wasn't that urgent, especially once the international community showed up, so there's more people able to stop the virus suddenly being transported out. It didn't seem like there was any immediate risk of that happening, especially once he'd basically shot everyone including the guy whose scheme it was. It was James's decision to launch the missiles and to do it so soon. If he hadn't chosen that, there would have been plenty of time to open the blast doors and get out. A simple fix would be that the virus is loaded into a missile or a swarm of drones that is/are going to be automatically deployed.
The blast doors closed themselves after he opened them, causing him to spend time going back, because he didn't open them properly because he didn't bother to listen to Q's instructions. (Maybe the writers didn't intend for it to look like his fault, but damn that's what it looked like.)
After the doors closed themselves, he didn't have to try to re-close them, because it's not that urgent and he knew it would be suicidal. I don't buy that there couldn't be a way to get the nanobots out of him or to produce a vaccine for Madeleine and Mathilde. James went from denial to acceptance way too quickly. Also suicide isn't the answer to not being able to touch people again. I understand the film thought you would think that there was no other chance to save the world... as if he couldn't just leave the doors closed and try again later.
The fact that such small tweaks could have made James Bond's death less stupid suggests possible script meddling: "We need a more light-hearted scene near the end. Wouldn't it be funny if James pressed all the buttons in the missile launch room ha ha." "Oh, we've decided that James should die in the end, so can you come up with a reason to make him stay on the island until it explodes." I say this because an early decision would influence the surrounding script so it would feel sensible in context; a late change is unlikely to involve significant rewriting, so you get shoe-horned moments that don't make sense with all of the lead-up. But this is just arm-chair speculation.
I was going to recommend it to my mother and now I won't /10
Edit: I wanted to see Q's boyfriend :(
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