(original art elements by Mayank Kumarr)

Hello There!

I’m going to tell you a story. A story of a faneditor who was folding laundry one weekend afternoon, with James Bond in the background. A classic story, one many are familiar with; it’s how most of my first viewings of Roger Moore’s entire era were done, in fact. But it wasn’t a James Bond movie, it was a YouTube essay ABOUT a James Bond movie. No Time to Die, specifically: the explosive sendoff to the Daniel Craig era, and direct sequel to Spectre, of which this editor had created an Alternate Cut months before.

And while this editor was tidily packing the drawer with neatly rolled up socks, ideas were sparking; editorial answers to the questions the essayist was posing. Scenes being reconstituted into shapes that might make the bow-tied young man in the video nod and go “Well played, clerk.”  And the next thing he knew, he had flopped onto the couch with No Time to Die blaring, and the notes app was getting filled, the movie getting paused and rewound, like he still didn’t have vacuuming to do, and there was all the time in the world…

The above IS a true story. I wasn’t planning on doing No Time to Die, I was honestly just…fine with its grandiosity/largesse, considering its being EON’s final creative statement on the character. Sure, I agreed with folks saying it probably didn’t need to be 2hrs 43min, (!!) but: it wasn’t as tonally confused, or as somnambulisticc, or as yellow as Spectre, so hey!

And then Calvin Dyson, the bow-tied young YouTuber getting blackout schnockered on contriva-tinis in the background, broke through my shirt-folding zen with things that made that runtime seem… real unnecessary, actually! And after a focused rewatch for the first time in a long time, I found myself agreeing with a ton of his solid takes, (but do not look up my guy’s all-time Bond rankings tho, whew!), and now I was very much watching No Time from a POV firmly embedded in my Alternate Cut of Spectre. Which now, clearly, needs a partner.

So here we are! No Time To Die (Alternate Cut) - a leaner, meaner (almost 20min shorter!) telling of the story, with a little less narrative tail-chasing and a LOT more pep in its step on the way to a (still) explosive(ly) grand(iose) finale for Craig’s tenure as 007.

WHAT HASN’T CHANGED:

Bond still dies. This was a big-ol-hairy deal on release; I believe a lot of prior edits to this film were centered on undoing it. But like I said in the essay-thingy for the Spectre Alt Cut (Hey, what do we call these things we write to go along with our edits, btw? Do they have a name besides “self-indulgent sales-pitch readers are skimming to find the cutlist?”) -  with EON relinquishing the character to MGM/Amazon, there’s a very clear demarcation point between eras, and it just makes sense to let their big swings stand as-is

Bond is still a (smartass) dad. A notable amount of the theatrical version is dedicated to this plotline being (artificially) turned into a mystery element. But it also just gives up on that mystery arbitrarily, so this Alternate Cut makes a few trims to simply… not raise the spectre (pun intended!) of Mathilde’s parentage in the first place. And the way looser vibe Bond’s got here? That ALL stays. I don’t know if the breezy smartassed back ‘n’ forths between Bond/his team/Blofeld are Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s doing, or if it’s just Craig coming in hot off Knives Out, both at the same time, or what… but I think it works like gangbusters so I didn’t try messing with any of that, tonally (although, again - a lot of this movie’s dialog scenes got touched in one way or another).

WHAT HAS CHANGED:

Safin is no longer Young Madeleine’s savior. In fact, the whole pre-titles sequence omits the mini-horror movie, which is instead heavily truncated & transformed into an actual flashback in her office, framed via the story she tells on the train in Spectre. (The Gunbarrel now irises open on the car leaving the tunnel at Matera, Italy; almost as if Bond & Swann drove straight here from Spectre’s ending - and makes for a nice bookend to the film’s final shot) Safin’s fixation on her is now vaguely creepy/familial, but most importantly - the contrivance where adult Swann doesn’t remember his California Raisin-ass face the SECOND she saw it is now gone! He’s just a vengeful, pop-eyed, slow-talking weirdo, who knows he can leverage her for exactly what he wants; which is more than enough for a Bond villain, really.

It’s a LOT more straightforward as a story. Bond stories typically aren’t so complicated that you need the basic concepts of the plot repeated four or five times! Certainly not this one, but this one does it constantly. There’s 4-5 different, labored speeches about what Heracles is, how it works, and what it was intended to do - including one from Safin in the last 20 minutes. There’s the weird “is Mathilde Bond’s kid” thing that not only doesn’t go anywhere, but also makes MI6 look foolish: Moneypenny reports they’ve been monitoring Dr. Swann’s spot, but they somehow didn’t notice a slinky-smacking, crepe-crushing 5 year-old girl living with her?

The theatrical climax has the weird “potential buyers on boats” ticking clock on top of the missile ticking clock and the poison “ticking clock.” There’s even a weird bit in the pre-titles where Spectre has a sheep-barn on speed-dial? All that stuff is gone now, plus some more pacing/performance punch-ups via trimming off a LOT of conversational dead-weight throughout the film! Bonus: The loss of the last Heracles explanation leads to Bond vs Safin in the Poison Garden playing out a little differently, and hopefully more dramatically. Speaking of added drama…

The title song got a remix, and the end titles got replaced.  I always thought it was a waste EON asked Billie Eilish and Finneas to do a song, and then suffocated the drums and the bass with a pillow, as if to make it pair better with Sam Smith’s flatlined, drum-free drone of a Spectre title song (Spectre Alt Cut, of course, puts Radiohead in its riiiiight plaaaaace). And then I learned that every time they perform it live, there’s not only a healthy bassline there, but they have a dude literally beating hell out of the drums! So I took audio from their Oscars performance, pieces of the Japanese import single’s instrumental track, and the film version, and blended them. For the end titles, I removed Louis Armstrong’s vocal version from On Her Majesty’s, and replaced it with a 1988 instrumental re-recording of the track for a John Barry retrospective album, which then fades into a specially-edited for these credits version of the No Time to Die suite found on Hans Zimmer’s “The World of Hans Zimmer” album.

This isn’t a massive overhaul of the film’s core storyline, nor am I trying to significantly rewrite it in the edit: No Time to Die (Alternate Cut) is an attempt to find the more streamlined version of that movie inside this theatrical release. It’s still going way operatic and grandiose for its final 15min; but with so many scenes trimmed and tightened up for pace and performance (This alt cut is 3min shorter than Spectre’s theatrical cut, and 18min shorter than what was in theaters!), and so many circular/go-nowhere subplots being deleted and/or trimmed down severely; the hope is that those big moments are no longer seen as self-indulgent & slow, but instead a li’l more finely calibrated to land the punches they’re throwing. Especially in juxtaposition to the (mostly!) untouched action and comedy beats - with a couple extra comedy moments newly introduced through a judicious cut or two.

If you would like to check it out yourself, feel free to SEND ME A DM here, or SEND AN EMAIL to straightcutsnochaser at gmail. PLEASE DO NOT JUST REQUEST A LINK BELOW. It’s not just a bigger chance I won’t see the request in the comments, but it’s also just straight up against the rules here! Any suggestions, comments, critiques, questions - whatever you got, I’m all ears!

NO TIME TO DIE (ALTERNATE CUT)
2hrs, 25min. 2.40:1 AR (1920x800), 23.976fps, Dolby Digital 5.1, Burnt-in French subtitles, soft English subtitles.

CHAPTERS

1. Gunbarrel - The Past is Not Dead
2. Letting Go is Hard
3. Main Titles
4. Stealing Obruchev
5. Hello, Felix
6. Disarming Young Woman
7. Three Weeks Training
8. Happy Birthday
9. Goodbye, Felix
10. I’ve Come Back to Play
11. Memory Box
12. License Reinstated
13. Losing Control
14. A Thousand Reasons
15. A Little Adventure
16. It’s Just a Number
17. My Father’s Garden
18. The Farm and the Factory
19. Do You Know What Time it Is?
20. All the Time in the World
21. To James - End Credits

Edit is now available! OP’s been edited.

Any questions you got, as per usual, fire away, I’m all ears and happy to hear whatever you got!

Just like with Spectre, count me in!