Art of the Title - NO TIME TO DIE
James Bond films love a stylized theme song, where instrumentals and lyrics and colours and symbols tell the audience about the film’s plot, theme, and character arcs.
More than any Bond film, No Time To Die‘s credits look backwards, using iconography, themes, and characters from Craig's entire run. It examines the professional legacy of the 007 moniker, Bond’s personal mark on the world through his lover and child, and cultural changes the films (and world) went through in the 15 years and five films Bond was embodied by Craig.
No Time To Die’s stunning opening credits (designed by eight-time veteran Daniel Kleinman) foreshadow betrayal, reemergence of past lovers and/or villains, death metaphorical and literal. As Billie Eilish's ethereal voice sings of mortality and fallibility, images unfold in bold greens, reds, and blues: guns and cars which look sometimes like Bond’s signature weapons and other times like toys; bodies in stark silhouette and the flesh; symbols of time from clock gears to hourglasses.
The sequence starts with a train pulling out of the station left to right, which in Western cinematic language reads as ‘into the future.’
The coloured dots that collect to obscure the train station (photo 1, below) reference the Bond franchise's first-ever opening credits from Dr. No (photo 2, below).
Thus the theme song begins by looking both forward and backward at the same time.
Kaleidoscoping shapes resolve into a woman trapped in the ice. This references the film's opening scene of a young Madeleine Swann, but also No Time To Die‘s theme of characters trapped metaphorically (in the past by lovers and betrayal) and literally (by enemy agents and in a sinking ship).
The film’s climax involves both kinds of trap, when Blofeld and Safin capture Swann and Bond in a room and on an island, psychically enmeshing them in PTSD and terror of losing loved ones.
The woman’s silhouetted image grows smaller until the ice block is incorporated into the shape of a trident. While a trident has many meanings and significances, it’s often a symbol of sea god Poseidon; water is significant not only in the frozen opener but the finale where Bond is surrounded by vast sea on a small island.
Subsequent closeups on a trident-holding soldier statue show a growing white spread of what looks like ice crystals, multiplying how contagion and Safin’s nanobots would.
As song lyrics announce, "the blood you bleed is just the blood you owe," the blue closeups bloom with red across the soldier’s cheek, then the shield in a Union Jack pattern; a reminder bloodshed is significant in both Bond’s personal history and the country he serves.
The shield topples towards the camera and 'wipes' everything to black, transitioning to the next scene in a technique which will repeat through the sequence.
The next shot begins zooming towards clockwork machinery, still mostly blue with stark red lines akin to clock hands or gunsight lasers. As they move, their tips are revealed as playing card heart symbols, which had a central role in Craig’s Bond debut Casino Royale.
On two of the heart shapes appear a white figure and a black figure. These other two colours of playing cards could signify black-and-white morality and Bond’s guilty conscience, but also are the colours of a swan, as in Madeline Swann.
The white figure reaches out a hand, but their respective hearts are moving away from each other, the way Bond and Swann come ever-so-close to being together several times but never manage.
In one of many moments which has heavy import on rewatch, Jeffrey Wright’s name appears as the camera drifts downward into depths and fades to black, foreshadowing how the boat Leiter is on will kill him.
As Eilish sings, "I’ve fallen for a lie," we follow a bullet-riddled car — as in No Time to Die’s opening chase scene — through murky depths and the centre of a clock face with no hands, symbolically striking themes of time/lessness and power/lessness. As the car crashes into a sandy ocean floor, the colour transitions from blue to golds and yellows, growing lighter to reveal the previous soldier statue, now prone and half-buried in the sands of time.
The camera pulls back to show the black Bond silhouette walk past the car, the trident, and a new, third symbol: a handgun. A pendulum — part of an old-fashioned clock, but also itself a weapon —swings through the scene, barely missing Bond. As Eilish sings, "fool me once, fool me twice," the pendulum swings a second time and hits the sand, dissolving everything into sand which begins to fall through an hourglass, which itself is tumbling downward.
The camera retreats to show the hourglass falling through a spiral of handguns firing in rhythm, bullet trails creating thin lines of a double-helix. This is more than clever patterns: it brings back the theme of medical warfare, DNA changes, and nanobots, all of which are crucial to the plot of Bond's eventual demise.
Everything to this point has been fairly abstract; even 3D images look more like toys or statues than realistic items. Now, as DNA helixes spiral and violins sing, the camera follows bullet shells ejected from firing handguns as for a brief moment, the trails trace a lifelike image against the green background.
The face reveals itself for a moment to be Bond, then dissolves; the next sequence of lines forms into Madeleine Swann from Spectre, then as Eilish sings "faces from my past return," the lines form a momentary glimpse of Vesper Lynd.
The sequence has many indicators of Lynd: underwater sinking vistas are reminiscent of her death at the end of Casino Royale; the figures tragically missing connection could have been Bond and Vesper as well as Bond and Swann; but this is the first explicit image of Bond's lover-turned-betrayer. Lynd’s face dissipates as quickly as it appears, but her memory colours the rest of the sequence the way she haunts Bond’s psyche through No Time to Die.
Lines and dots converge as the camera zooms in through another blackout transition to what looks like marble, moves like fabric, then crystallises into a body on which cherry blossoms are projected. More intimate closeups of body parts follow – fingers, stomach, thighs, the small of a back – the body moving and flexing as red dots and blooming cherry blossoms multiply across the screen. Some of the twining cherry blossoms look like a double helix again; taken together, the flowers and red dots insinuate beauty and growth as well as blood and death, all of which indicate change and the passing of time.
The mini-sequence finishes on a marble face which could be the soldier statue from before. Cracks in the face indicate age and ravages of time; through those cracks grow plants that sprout red, heart-shaped flowers, as the camera again fades to black.
The next sequence fades in on a small army of Safin’s white masks, each of which has a 'body' made of vines, twigs, and blooming red flowers — a forest of spectres. The bright white masks shatter into bright orange plumes stark against the green background, colours indicating something unnatural and poisonous.
The camera zooms through a mask-mouth and comes abruptly to a white gun made of material similar to the masks, held by a black marble Bond statue against a red background. The gun shatters, as does the statue hand, revealing blue powder similarly to how the masks revealed orange, signifying what breaks Bond and his nemesis may be similar.
The blue powder takes over the screen, transitioning back to the underwater scene and a rising orange dot which looks like the sun, as well as the film's final explosion which consumes the island and Bond.
As the orange dot ascends, a gun buried in the ocean floor fires, its bullet shattering the image into kaleidoscoping blue and orange shapes. The refracted image mirrors the credit sequence’s initial image: everything eventually comes full circle.
Just as the initial dots and movement transitioned from the train station scene which preceded the credits, this final image turns into city lights and black mirrored walls and transitions directly into the establishing shot for the next scene. The opening seamlessly integrates itself into the film, a fantasy sequence that links directly to hard reality . . . and begins Bond's last mission.