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Totally. It becomes a matter of semantics at the end of the day. For me, I'd say his decision to do that is him going rogue, and then M retroactively agrees to it after the fact.
But of course, it doesn't really matter.
It just got me thinking due to those thinking that Bond goes rogue in every one of his films. Skyfall is the closest to him not going rogue. I feel that his true rogue film was Spectre. All things considered since he never gets a mission from M.
I didn't realize Craig was that old.
Skyfall has him leaving the service and living by the sea assumed dead, not wanting to be a double-0 anymore. I'd say that's pretty none-traditional, even if you might not call it 'rogue'.
Actually, No Time To Die also has him left the service and living by the sea assumed dead, not wanting to be a double-0 anymore.
I suppose the 'retired Bond by the sea' Bond is the new 'gets his mission from M' Bond.
Brave new world.
No, only Dick Clark could be that old. Didn't you know that Dick Clark portrayed 007 before Ian Fleming had even created him? (The Worlds of IF.....)
If you personally cannot accept the ending of NTTD, then sure - you have choices. You can keep Spectre OR Skyfall as the "final" farewell to this particular Bond. And watch them in whichever order you prefer. It's our own personal Bond fantasy world anyway, isn't? It is. We can take what we want from the novels and also from the films. Have at it. No rules say you can't. B-)
Well said, and very true : )
I think we all do that with movies, in a sense. We have our favorites, and those films that we simply don’t like to rewatch. Never thought about this...but I could view Spectre as the third film, and Skyfall as the Craig finale. Nice call!
It was an awesome moment I thought. Everything back in place and the 'Bond begins' thing all wrapped up. It felt like the series could go anywhere from there.
I actually wouldn't have minded the Craig era ending with either SF or SP. But SF worked best, ending with him wanting to get back to the 'assignments he enjoyed, the dangerous ones'.
Skyfall ending was perfect.
Spectre ending was okay.
No Time to Die ending - well...
No, I view it as a film that, at the end, places all the classic elements in the right place and teases a future of Bond that was completely fumbled by Spectre (and by extension, NTTD).
The Craig era should have been a trilogy for a lot of people I think.
The second reason is because it's actually a rather cynical ending. Hell, I'd go as far as to say SF is a cynical film (I don't mean this in a bad way, far from it). By the end, Bond has essentially failed his mission - he failed to prevent the list from being leaked, he failed to protect M, and he even failed to protect the closest thing he ever had to a home. Throughout the film Bond is depicted as an ageing 00, working for an ageing Secret Service, blindly loyal to his country although conflicted over whether he even wants to remain in his profession protecting it. He ultimately always returns, seemingly because of that loyalty, but more likely because he's drawn to the danger of it all and can't really do anything else with his life. There's a strange cyclical quality to it too - we are now in an MI6 which resembles the sets of the early Bond movies, M has now been replaced, and even after this traumatic, deeply personal assignment, Bond just returns like nothing ever happened.
It's a great ending and a very interesting Bond film, but ultimately I think Craig's era needed something more satisfying and less open ended. So, for all SP's faults, it at least felt like a chapter had been closed with Spectre, Bond as a character etc. Hell, I'd say the same about NTTD too. SF just wasn't an ending in the same way, and if anything feels more like it's setting the Craig era up for a continuation, which I think was always the intention.
Given Craig is my favourite Bond I'm glad he came back, even if I'm the biggest fan of the choices made in SP and NTTD
Instead of story logic, however, the producers wanted a big, emotional send-off for Dench, because big soap opera emotions are what the Craigverse was about, at the expense of everything else. As soon as an actor wanted to leave a role or when the filmmakers couldn't find any further use for a character, they killed them off. Mathis was the first example of this and it continued through NTTD.
But something like OHMSS. Now *that* would have been a suitable last Bond film.
But from my other view (that I've chose to listen), No, because, it felt like his era was unfinished,
If the film ended with Judi Dench dying, of course as fans, we want to know what will happen next right?
Similar to how OHMSS ended or Casino Royale with some important characters dying at the end, we want to see what will happen next, because it ends on a cliffhanger.
If the film ended with what we've got, have Bond return to back to basics missions, ("with a pleasure", of course) I'd like to see him doing it, how Craig's Bond will work under a new M, because Craig doesn't have standard missions like those Bonds who came before him, so it would be interesting to give him at least one.
But the problem was they didn't went that way, it's supposed to be back to basics mission like in the Classic films, but no, instead it went deeper with these personal angles and more worse with family connections (Brofeld for example).
SPECTRE would have been a good send off to Craig's Bond, but because of everything happened in the film (Brofeld, Madeleine Swann, Max Denbigh, the plot), I don't want it to be his last.
I want Craig's Bond to have a film like in the classic era, fun adventure, back to basics mission, but still grounded (Like The Spy Who Loved Me or Licence To Kill), then have it as his final film and I would be satisfied, of course have his Bond Girl to be matured, I really like Monica Bellucci, but she's wasted, she could have been Craig's last Bond Girl, at least in the very end, Bond was matured enough to pick a woman the same age as him (who's also matured), he's evolved, gone is the man who shags women younger than him, compare it to Connery and Jill St. John (DAF) or Moore and Tanya Roberts (AVTAK).
Then reboot the series with the new actor.
If we got 3 good films after Skyfall, we would've said "Skyfall wasn't the end; it was just the middle of the lifespan".
It really did seem like Skyfall was intended to be a new beginning by rebuilding MI6, adding Q and Moneypenney.
But instead, Spectre bombed, Craig went on a 4-year hiatus and then 2 years of Covid. All of this is unlucky, but nobody in 2012 would've anticipated this.
Skyfall is about justifying Bond's existence. If M needed to die as a comeuppance for nearly getting Bond killed (not to mention all the other agents), then they should've saved that premise for another a movie, not an anniversary celebration. If Bond had saved his adoptive parents at Skyfall, and Dench's M had retired in disgrace because of her actions, it would have been enough, and the final scene would have made total sense. New M is in, Bond's existence is justified, and everyone's prepared for the next assignment.
After seeing No Time to Die, I'm glad it wasn't.
After seeing Skyfall I was ready for a standard mission and "classic Bond", but Bond having secrets, there being a traitor in MI6 and Bond/M being frosty with each other wasn't what I had in mind.
I enjoyed Spectre but like NTTD it wasn't what I was hoping for
Quite a few on here have said that they were pleased that the 'great reset' happened at the end of Skyfall, and we were all set to go off on a stand-alone adventure. Then when SP came out, it was a bit deflating when it continued going the soap opera/rogue Bond route. I remember when he asked Q to 'make me disappear' I was like, 'oh, not again!'.
SF smartly shows why the world needs 007, and Craig excels as a Bond who is bruised and battered. But who can still save the day. It's a film I find is overpraised in many ways.
But as an anniversary film SF works just fine.
The ending however is like phase two of the Craig era.
If this was Craigs last film, then the final lines of SF wouldn't have worked at all.