The Sense of an Ending

Dr Neil Archer considers the latest Bond and Marvel outings, and asks: Is there ever a good time to end it all?

Of all the thunderous and wondrous twists and turns in No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s definitively final outing as James Bond, the film leaves its cutest, and possibly most predictable one, to the end. No, not [multiple spoiler alerts] that end. I mean the Very End, as in, of the credits; the moment when everything is undeniably done and dusted.

I caught the film, finally, in London’s Leicester Square this weekend, and of the four of us remaining when the lights came up – yes, I counted them – I’m sure we all stuck around in expectation of the same thing. And there, as the final strains of Hans Zimmer’s score played out, it was. Four words (one for each of us):

James Bond Will Return.

How lucky we felt to witness this final piece of cinematic sleight-of-hand! But why were we the only ones? Credit sequences, especially since Star Wars ushered in the era of placing them at the end of the film, are a legitimate part of the movie. That’s why composers write end-credit music, or great designers convert credits into pop-art films in their own right. Why, then, are they seemingly so toxic that they send an audience scurrying away from a theatre they’ve chosen, in the first place, to spend their time in, out into the real world from which they entered the cinema to escape?

This is nothing new, of course, but it strikes me as especially apt in the age of streaming, and of ubiquitous content, where credit sequences (the sublime ones for Disney/Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian aside) are treated like a necessary evil, existing only to be skipped or squeezed in service of the next episode or recommendation. I even noticed my local Vue cinema, a few years back, upping the lights the moment the credit sequence began, practically pushing us out of the seats we’ve paid to occupy for the full duration of the film. Will we one day have to upgrade our tickets, just for the pleasure of seeing the screening to its actual end?

Marvel Studios, at least, want you to stay. Whatever you think of their ‘Cinematic Universe’, Marvel’s now thirteen-year series has made sticking around to the (sort-of) end part of its now seasonal ritual, its little teaser scenes an essential part of the experience for fans and the casual viewer alike. Marvel encourages us never to go until it’s over – all good, of course, though in the case of Marvel movies… it’s never over.

Which leads me to a second kind of ending.

The irony of No Time to Die’s teaser ending is that [more spoiler alerts] it’s a film that is all about bringing things to a natural and inevitable close. Yet at the same time, the film wants to have its Martini and drink it too, reassuring us that Bond, like Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, will forever be there when we need him. Which is also, in its way, a shame.

The idea that nothing ever finishes has become an axiom of modern franchise cinema, in which ‘endings’ are merely stages in a new ‘phase’ of narrative or content development. Marvel characters, for example, can be retired (Hawkeye) or even killed off (Black Widow), only for them to appear again in spin-offs or prequels. No one ever really dies, and even if they do, we can always rely on a parallel universe to bring them back. Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One in Doctor Strange knows all about the latter, but she’s also wise enough to remind Benedict Cumberbatch that ‘death gives life its meaning’. Not that it’s an idea Marvel put into practice very often.

Avengers: Endgame was (more or less) the exception to the rule, which is also why it’s one of the MCU’s richest and, yes, more emotionally rewarding films. But Iron Man was barely floated out in his coffin before it started all over again. Looking at the frostily apathetic responses to Chloe Zhao’s much-anticipated Eternals, I might not be the only one experiencing series fatigue. But is that such a surprise? When nothing ever ends, and when everything becomes part of a never-ending cycle, you no longer have a story. You have a soap opera.

James Bond Will Return. As much as those four words conjured a frisson of nostalgic pleasure in this viewer, did I in fact wait till the very end of No Time to Die only to see something, in truth, I didn’t really want to see? Or then again, am I just kidding myself? Is it the case that, when 007 does return, I’ll be down the front once more?

Maybe. Probably. But this time, I really can wait. After all: I would hate to spoil the ending.

NEIL ARCHER WILL RETURN