No Time To Live Twice

I saw No Time To Die for the third time today - Odeon again - and about the third time is when I stop just wallowing in a new Bond film and start actually processing it.  There were a bunch of things I noticed this time I hadn't seen before - though I kept forgetting to look at Nomi's name on Q's readout; does she have a surname or what? - but I also dwelled on all the bits of it that were taken from the novel of You Only Live Twice.  

As I wrote in this piece back in 2017 (wow, No Time To Die has taken forever to reach the screen, hasn't it?) You Only Live Twice is a pretty odd novel, preoccupied with death and decay and with a massive wodge of travelogue in the middle as 007 works his way through Japan.  Much of it is unlikely to ever make it to the screen, unless they can work out a way to get Bond spitting beer onto a cow's back into an action sequence, but there's still enough there to get picked over, and that's what No Time To Die does.  Here's the moments that I can think of.

• Bond is no longer 007, but is given a new number (in the book he becomes 7777, while when he first returns to MI6 and the Double O's in the film Nomi is still 007 and we're not told what number he becomes)
• The Bond Girl has James Bond's baby (within the story in the film, after it in the novel; the Raymond Benson story Blast from the Past posits that his name is James Suzuki and he's murdered by Irma Bunt.  Like a lot of Raymond Benson's writing, it is terrible).
• The villain's headquarters is on a remote island near Japan.
• The villain has a poisonous garden full of plants that can kill (this feature was particularly exciting to see onscreen, though I wish they could've found room for the piranha pool as well).
• When Bond throttles Blofeld, he hisses "Die, Blofeld, die!", although unlike in the book he doesn't strangle him to death.
• M repeats Mary Goodnight's epitaph for Bond - "I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them; I shall use my time."
• Is it stretching things to say that Safin's secret trapdoor exit is reminiscent of the oubliette in Blofeld's castle?

And then there's the ending.  I've made peace with No Time To Die's controversial finish by telling myself they're doing You Only Live Twice and the next book will start like The Man With The Golden Gun.  In the novel, Bond is hit by a bit of debris as he escapes Blofeld's exploding castle and it gives him amnesia.  Kissy Suzuki convinces him he is her husband, and they live happily together for a few months, until he sees the word Vladivostok on a bit of newspaper they use for loo roll and it rings a bell.  The novel ends on a cliffhanger with Bond heading off to Russia to find out more about himself.  At the start of the next novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, we learn he was picked up by the Russians and brainwashed into being their agent.  They send him back to London with a gas gun to murder M.

Here's how you can get out of No Time To Die's ending and into Bond 26.  One of those two ships that are headed for the island finds a battered, barely clinging to life, brain damaged Bond.  They take him away with them to Russia or wherever (the film is careful not to tell us where those two ships are actually coming from; they could be from Russia, or perhaps North Korea, or perhaps Quantum is back).  There's your pre-titles.  He's rebuilt - lots of plastic surgery, cough cough - under the title sequence (a la Die Another Day) then he arrives at MI6 and tries to kill M.  Deprogramme him (Sir James Molony!) then send 007 off to get revenge on the people who tried to turn him against Queen and Country.  This also means that he can either (a) forget all about Madeline and Mathilde because of the brain damage or (b) live with the eternal pain of never being able to see them because of the nanobots.  I'd prefer (a). 

They probably won't do any of that.  They'll probably just start all over again.  But until I see Bond 26, this is the story I've written in my head to stop me getting very annoyed indeed by the end of No Time To Die.  And I'm putting it down on the internet so when Bond is hanging out in a brothel in Sav'la'Mar with a possibly homosexual assassin and a girl with a pet bird you'll all know I was right.