YESTERDAY NEVER DIES

the obvious fact: that modern Western democracies are in reality national security states, surviving on a hidden network of surveillance operations and overseas espionage campaigns. MI6 saves itself only by positing a worse fate, another big brother.

And so again, we have a Bond pulsing on the momentum of his career, a Bond who cannot stop to question himself and is nothing more than an engine in endless motion.

He performs what can only be described as a “seduction-interrogation” on Monica Belluci, undressing her forcefully whilst hotly whispering questions about her dead husband, a man who met his fate at the hands of Bond’s own indiscriminate bloodlust. Killing the husband and seducing the widow whilst simultaneously siphoning information from her — supposedly all part of Bond’s patriarchal splendour, but from another angle: