Just come back from a screening. Most people seem to at least think the film was good, I thought it was terrible. Not because it was 'woke', because it wasn't (unless you're really determined to overreact to meaningless, throwaway details), but because everything after Cuba is suffocated in exposition, characters displaying the emotional maturity of teenagers, melodrama instead of character work (nobody has anything approaching a personality and are defined solely by the nonsense which happens to them, rather than who they are as people), and both a villain and scheme which are afterthoughts at best, and largely uninspired action. The first third(ish) of the movie is fantastic: it moves at a nice pace, characters have tangible personalities and friendships and distinct relationships and there appears to be a genuine attempt to tell a story rather than just string action sequences together. Everything after that is just interminable, though.
Bond movies have had exposition scenes before, of course, and scenes where the plot stops for Bond and his leading lady to have a romantic stroll or develop their chemistry, yet none of those latter grace notes are here, it's just ram-packed with explanation and babbling over procedure and minutiae (the London scenes especially are more like a boring TV procedural than a movie) rather than the plot being moved forward by character action and showing-not-telling. It references past movies and some of Fleming's most potent unused ideas without understanding why those things were the way they were, and consequently gets them completely wrong: a bit like when Zack Snyder thought replicating the frames of the Watchmen comic would produce as good a film as the original was in its format. Instead, because he didn't understand why Alan Moore et al. made the choices they did, drew the pictures like they did, or wrote the interactions as they did, everytime Snyder had to fill in the gaps he ended up severing the core mechanics holding the whole thing together. NTTD thinks it is a clever inversion of a previous beloved Bond film, yet doesn't understand why that film was the way it was, and not inverted in the first place. As a movie in its own right, it has about half-an-hour (perhaps three-quarters) of brilliant stuff at the start - Ana de Armas is an absolute joy in her ten minutes - then completely sinks. As a Bond movie... well, frankly, it barely felt like a Bond movie at all, because it has no understanding of who Bond is either as a character or an icon in pop culture. All the twists exist simply for the sake of being twists and the 'revisionism' is, for the most part, similarly misguided: the gunbarrel sequence, for one, is completely messed up (they've put a cut/edit into it!) for no comprehensible justification: even a previous change which went wrong, like Die Another Day's CGI bullet, seemed to have a purpose behind it, mistaken thought it was. Here, it's just changing something beloved for the sake of it, or referencing something beloved to cover up the new material's lack of integrity. Even beyond that, outside that opening act it was just incredibly tedious. I'm seeing it again with a friend tomorrow, so perhaps going in without expectations will help soften my reaction, but as of now it's right at the bottom of the rankings for me, with clear space between it and previous nadir, SPECTRE.