Welcome to another edition of Predicting the Plot wherein I try my best to guess how an upcoming movie is going to play out from start to finish with as many details as I can possibly give, based entirely on the previews and lead-up material I've seen.
I might be dead wrong. I may get some things right. In any way, I encourage you to give your predictions just the same in the comments below.
For this edition, I'll be tackling my fan theory of what we're in store for with the latest James Bond film, No Time to Die.
NOTE: It's important to state that this is not what I would do for the film, but what I think they've done in making the movie. I likely would have gone with some entirely different plot points, if not a wholly different film in general.
To my despair, I don't think this movie starts with a traditional gun barrel. For the fourth out of five films, I think they're going to talk themselves out of it by saying James Bond's retired and there's no logical means of showing the gun barrel without being deceptive, blah blah blah. I really hope we don't see Lashana Lynch's Nomi in the gun barrel just because she's 007 now.
Our opening sequence will probably be just of the villains doing something dastardly. They kill some scientists or whatever. Then, Nomi is there to look into it and she manages to get some sort of clue that will help drive the plot, but she's unsuccessful in stopping the villains from executing part of their plan.
Cue titles and main theme.
Let's check up on where Bond is. He's with Madeleine Swann in Jamaica. They've settled down five years or so ago after Spectre and they're madly in love, but possibly, Bond is a little bored. He misses the life of being a 00 agent, but he knows what he's doing now is safer. There's some sort of hint that there's something else going on in their lives, but we're not told what. This will be massively important later.
Based on the clues, MI6 finds out that the person behind all this madness is Safin, and that he has ties to SPECTRE. Since nobody knows that organization as well as Bond, they reach out to him to try to get his thoughts on helping out. He's hesitant, back-and-forth about it, until Madeleine hears that it has to do with Safin. She reacts stunned and basically tells James that he needs to do this because if Safin is involved, it can't be good. Mysteriously, we don't know why she's all upset, and she refuses to say why. This drives a wedge between the two that will get deeper as the film goes on.
The bulk of the film is trying to figure out more information on Safin's plan, which will eventually be revealed as some sort of biological warfare. Plot elements along the way that are interwoven with that are:
- Madeleine helped Safin study the rare plants or procedures or whatever that led to him being able to create this biological weapon. That's what she's ashamed of. Bond is upset with her and how she could do something so bad, even though she didn't really know at the time what she was doing.
- Safin's project started as an operation under SPECTRE. Ernst Stavro Blofeld knows this and that's why Bond has to speak to him in Hannibal Lecter mode to get information. Blofeld's probably barely in the movie.
- Bond continually butts heads with Nomi because she's his replacement and he doesn't respect her yet. In typical fashion, being afraid of writing a compelling character that has nuance, she'll fall victim to the trope of "utterly perfect and annoyingly snarky at the main character to prove that she's a super strong independent woman who is better at him at everything he's ever done, follows the rules just like M wants, has a great relationship with Q and Moneypenny and Tanner, and they're all just super fond of her because she's not as insufferable as Bond." The audience will be basically told to like her, but if anyone comes out of the movie thinking she was a Mary Sue, they'll be called sexist and/or racist, instead of just preferring when characters have depth and aren't perfect.
- Paloma is just an agent who Felix Leiter knows and recommends because Bond and company need to check stuff out in the area she's his best contact for. She's probably in a handful of scenes and I'd imagine she might be killed as the sacrificial lamb for one part of this, or she helps them with something and then promptly tells them this isn't her mission and they leave and don't see her for the rest of the film.
- No idea about Logan Ash. I don't trust that he's not a villain, though. If he's framed as a hero, he'll be a double agent. It's not going to be Nomi.
Throughout the bulk of the story, they're going to realize that Safin's plan is to release this biological weapon to thin out the population and pull a Karl Stromberg / Hugo Drax style "save the world by getting rid of humans except for the chosen ones I've handpicked" setup. That's why Bond says in the trailer that if they don't do whatever dangerous mission it is, there will be no one left to save.
Why is Bond so adamantly trying to save the world, other than because he's a good guy and a hero? Because he has a secret that we've been alluding to the whole film that we still haven't revealed yet.
At the end of the movie, Nomi is incapacitated. She's not killed, but she's put out of commission, maybe by means of an injury, maybe she's tasked with guarding something or doing another objective, but she's not doing the main "kill Safin and directly stop the madman" part of the mission. She's working with Q and them, I guess. I don't know. The point is, this isn't Nomi's win, as Bond is the main character and he still should be the main hero, too.
Madeleine may very well die. These films in the Craig era love the tragedy angle. There's a solid chance Bond himself dies, too, or instead of Madeleine. However, as much as I think there's going to be a push to kill off Bond so Nomi can be 007 going forward and they'll try to make at least one movie focused entirely on her, if not just as an experiment where they act like it's a "buffer" before recasting a new James Bond, but to make it seem like they're appealing to the woke audience and undoing all the sexism of the series, blah blah, I do ultimately think they'll be smart enough not to actually kill off James Bond.
What I do think, however, is that we're getting a reveal that Bond has gone back into retirement in Jamaica because of that mysterious secret that they've teased the whole film. And here's where the big twist comes in.
Whether Madeleine is alive or not, Bond has chosen to go back into retirement because of the real Bond girl in the film—not Madeleine, not Paloma, not Nomi, not Moneypenny...but HIS DAUGHTER.
That's right. I'm predicting an Iron Man mixed with Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother scenario here. They'll make it so how in Skyfall, the main "Bond girl" was essentially M and the love was more of a mother/son relationship, while this one is more of a father/daughter love and she's the girl he ends up with at the finale, just playing with her and her toys or something. Rather than killing off the character or having him go into a retirement for a romantic love interest, wherein we know he wouldn't be comfortable just being a normal guy, he's found the emotional depth to be a father and that's the responsible thing to do, to keep her out of the life of the spy game and all.
That's what I'm expecting to happen, but what do you think?
Give your predictions and thoughts on my guesses in the comments below!
