![]() The film is completely devoid of colour, which is such a shame after Skyfall, maybe the best-looking film in the entire franchise. This wouldn’t much of a problem if every location had a different style but they use the exact same colour-grading filter for the scenes set in Tangier, whereas every location in No Time to Die looks and feels unique. It begins in Mexico City and has that washed-out yellow tint to everything that Breaking Bad used so prominently. Which you prefer comes down to personal taste and, while both are effective, I love the sillier side of Bond.Īfter seeing how visually bright, vivid, and exotic No Time to Die looks, revisiting Spectre was literally a dull affair. It’s big and knowingly silly compared to Spectre’s self-seriousness. No Time to Die instead has the meeting be a vibrant birthday party, with dancing, Blofeld watching over everyone with a robotic eye, and a ludicrous trap for Bond involving killer nanobots, before evolving into a spectacular action sequence. It’s actually one of my favourite scenes of the film because it successfully hits the tone it’s striving for it’s an unsettling journey into the lion’s den. Spectre has a very quiet scene in an old, majestic building, with lots of serious low talking, faces in shadow, and a scary atmosphere. There’s one in each film and they couldn’t be more different. The perfect encapsulation of the differences between the two films are their approaches to SPECTRE meetings. Spectre does intimate dialogue scenes very well, of which there are far too many, but less so the bigger scenes. Considering it begins with such a dynamic action beat involving a helicopter, it ends with an incredibly lame one. The climax is Bond running through an empty building before shooting at a fleeing helicopter with a handgun. Instead of No Time to Die’s visceral action, which still leaves room for character, there’s just a large explosion and quick, boring gunplay where Bond employs an aim-bot while his rivals can’t hit a thing. ![]() It begins big but the last hour feels incredibly small in scale. It may be the longer film but No Time to Die moves at such a pace that Spectre feels sluggish by comparison. The scale of Spectre fluctuates while No Time to Die is as big as it can be in every way possible. The fight on the train is good as a one-on-one battle but that’s the last decent action scene with over an hour left of the film. The car chase is just two cars driving like a commercial, with a gag about the car’s ammunition not being loaded feeling like a cheap way to avoid it becoming a ‘silly’ action scene. Compared to the more recent entry, Spectre almost feels ashamed of the larger, sillier elements of the franchise, keeping most action beats smaller and contained, the pre-credits sequence being one of only two big spectacles, the plane chase being the other. No Time to Die also uses the ‘oner’ technique for an action sequence, which shows just how the two films differ. It doesn’t top the pre-credits teaser of Craig’s final film but it almost feels wrong to compare them considering No Time to Die’s is almost a whole act unto itself. I do really enjoy the opening sequence of Spectre, with a long single shot beginning a sequence that ends in a fight aboard a helicopter in Mexico City. ![]() Spectre treats itself very seriously while No Time to Die often feels like a loving throwback to the sheer ridiculousness of Bond films of the past, doing everything with a permanent Lucille Bluth wink to the audience. ![]() The whole film has this confidence that begins to feel like arrogance when it starts to fall apart around the 90-minute mark. This idea is a key theme of the film, returning in multiple ways, but like a lot of John Logan-scripted franchise movies, such as Star Trek: Nemesis and Alien: Covenant, it deals heavily in themes but then ends up having nothing to say about them. Spectre begins with an opening chyron stating “The dead are alive” and this really captures the empty pretentiousness of the film. I’ve always enjoyed Spectre but it’s a film with several major flaws, and, because No Time to Die is tied to the previous film so intensely, I thought it may be worth a revisit to see if the latest, and superior, Bond film either improves Spectre or further highlights its issues. In a way, No Time to Die is a direct sequel to Spectre, but the two films ultimately offer vastly different approaches to the style, storytelling, and tone of a James Bond film. Daniel Craig’s James Bond films may form a single connected story arc but the transitions between films are rarely smooth.
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