When I woke up Saturday I realized it was the first day since Tuesday that I wouldn’t be going to see the nearly three-hour new James Bond movie “No Time to Die” again. I had seen it three times in the past three days, in three different theaters, in three different cities, and in two different states. (Stay tuned for a surprise fourth screening at the end of this story.)
For one of the viewings I walked two miles to the theater, and for the third viewing my wife and I drove four-hours round-trip just to see it.
And here’s the kicker, I didn’t even love the movie! It’s worth seeing, it’s just not one of the great Bond movies to me (click here for my full review of “No Time to Die”).
I didn’t love it after the first viewing at 7 p.m. on Wednesday Oct. 6…
Or the second viewing at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 7…
Or even after the third viewing at 10 a.m. Friday Oct. 8, although I did like it better after this one…
So, why did I do all this? It sounds like such a James Bond geek thing to do, but it was never intended to be this way.
Sure, I’m a big James Bond fan – I’ve seen each of the last 20 Bond movies in the theater since 1969, and in 2012 I saw “Skyfall” at an IMAX theater in South Korea on opening night there a week before it opened in the USA (had just landed in Seoul on a business trip and didn’t even get my luggage to my room; had the concierge get me a cab to rush me to the theater with a driver who spoke no English), and then went to see it again at The Grove in L.A. when I got home in order to compare the difference in theaters for my web site review of “Skyfall”
And sure, in 1964 my brothers and cousins all saw Mary Poppins together five times in a few days over the Christmas holidays in Galesburg, Illinois (well, I only saw it 4 1/2 times since I had to be rushed to the emergency room when my brother smashed the station wagon tailgate shut on my thumb as we were being let out on the street in front of the theater for viewing #5, but I got patched up and my Mom got me back in time to see the last hour of the movie again).
And, well, yes, I did see the unprecedented re-release of the 1930 Marx Brothers classic “Animal Crackers” eight times at movie theaters with my friends and even a date over several weeks in 1974, and that same year my friends and I went to see “Young Frankenstein” 11 times over a few weeks, but many of those were because Randy Reeves and I decided to perform scenes from it in drama class, and we needed to take notes on the dialogue (oh, those pre-Internet days).
But with those exceptions, I’m not one of those people who stands in line for hours at 2 a.m. to be the first in line to get a ticket, and it’s been 47 years since I saw the same movie at the theater more than twice!
Here’s how it happened this time:
When “No Time to Die” was first officially scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day 2020, I knew that this was the first James Bond movie to ever be shot using IMAX cameras (26% more image in the film frame in addition to being projected on a much larger screen than traditional theaters), so I sought out the biggest IMAX theater in the Midwest and found that the Iowa-based family-owned theater chain Fridley Theaters had recently spent $30 million to build one of the country’s largest IMAX theaters in the Des Moines suburb of Waukee called the Palms Theatres & IMAX with a screen seven stories tall (nearly 85-feet high x nearly 49-feet wide).
It is also one of the few IMAX theaters in the U.S. to feature reclining seats in its 316-seat IMAX auditorium. It would be a two-hour drive for us — do-able and worthwhile to see the first new James Bond movie in six years in this big new IMAX movie theater, for the fun of it and also for including in my online reviews and my James Bond 007 Movies Guide. Even though it would mean getting on the road at 7:30 a.m. for the two-hour drive, my wife Betty was quickly agree-able.
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I called the theater and learned that their first showing would be at 10 a.m. on the Friday the movie opened, Feb. 14, 2020. That, as we now know, was just a month before the US and most of the globe went on lockdown because of the pandemic.
I contacted a friend my Dad introduced us to when we were kids living in Philadelphia in the 1950s/early60s, Walt Tomenga, who I know to be a big James Bond fan and who lives in Iowa, not far from Des Moines. We made plans to meet at the theater with our wives for the movie and then have a nice lunch afterwards (we are nothing, if not supremely romantic).
Well, the first and most self-damaging delay pushed the movie back until April, a month after the lockdown, which meant that the movie was delayed again until November of 2020.
My agreeable and supportive wife Betty was good enough to sit through every previous James Bond movie on Blu-ray Disc with me every night in the month of July 2020 (26 movies) in anticipation of the release of the new one in November.
Alas, that date also had to be scrubbed, at which point I went to my local AMC theater, where the manager was kind enough to let me have one of their lobby posters since the word of November at the bottom would render it useless to them for its next scheduled date of April 2021.
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AMC theaters were already struggling financially even before the pandemic in the face of increasing competition from video streaming services, and had to close some theaters during the pandemic — sadly, our local AMC theater being one of them…
When that April 2021 date was also inevitably scrapped, the eventual final official release date of Oct. 8, 2021 was announced…
When that now-fifth release date was finally solidified, I called Walt to confirm our plans to meet at 10 a.m. that Friday morning. He told me he couldn’t believe it, but he and his wife Judy needed to be in Chicago by 7 p.m. that night for the start of a friend’s wedding weekend they couldn’t miss. He decided that they could still meet us for the movie and make the six-hour drive to Chicago by 7 p.m. if we ate lunch quickly, but when I told him the movie was nearly three-hours long – the longest Bond movie ever by 15-minutes, he said they’d have to bail out on our long-planned lunch in order to get on the road, but could still barely squeeze in the movie.
So, when the tickets went on sale in September, I bought four.
I was aware that it was likely that AMC theaters would be scheduling “early access” screenings of “No Time to Die” at 7 p.m. Thursday at their AMC-IMAX theaters prior to the official Friday release, as they often do for new releases, but figured if they did that, I could decide then if I wanted to also buy a ticket to see it at a different nearby AMC that is still in business.
But less than 24-hours after the Oct. 8 tickets went on sale, many other theater chains took the unprecedented step of selling tickets to “No Time for Die” starting the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 7. Uh-oh, now I’m in a quandry. The movie would have its world premiere on Sept. 28 in England and open in most countries in Europe and around the world Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. I would already be in danger of being unable to avoid spoilers and reviews way before I even had the chance to see it; did I want to risk hearing about it from media and friends in the US who could now see it the day before I had tickets?
The closest theater to me, the Alamo Cinema — walking distance of two-miles — had also shut down during the pandemic as their company went through bankruptcy protection. They had just re-opened two weeks earlier and they were showing “No Time to Die” at 4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7, with a special exclusive offer of a very cool-looking magazine custom-made for Alamo theater patrons (called BMD, Born.Movies.Die.) featuring the history of the Bond movie franchise. Plus, I rationalized, I’d be able to once again use the viewing at Alamo to compare to the way the movie looked in IMAX the next day.
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So, with Betty’s encouragement, I decided to go ahead and buy tickets for a second showing a day earlier, to which I would walk the four-mile round-trip and at which I could also pick up this special magazine. But what if, I asked Betty, the movie stunk? I’d have to drive with Betty two hours the next morning to sit through a nearly three-hour movie I didn’t like, and then drive two hours home. Oh well, it was worth the risk after six years waiting since the last new Bond movie. So, I bought that ticket as well.
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Well, wouldn’t you know it – within hours of making that purchase online, my friend in Oxnard, California, Danny Biederman, who is an even bigger Bond fan than I am, a collector and exhibitor of props from the movies and an author of a book about his collection and articles about Bond for Playboy and numerous other magazines and newspapers, let me know that he just purchased tickets to see “No Time to Die” for Wednesday night, Oct. 6 — turns out the AMC theaters reacted to the unexpected Thursday showings at other theaters by bumping up their usual Thursday night previews by a day to Wednesday night.
My reaction: Oy!
Betty’s reaction: “Well, you better get tickets to that showing so you can see it even a day sooner.” Betty is wonderful.
I had a pre-pandemic AMC gift card, so this ticket wouldn’t actually cost me anything.
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So, how did this all play out?
All the screenings went smoothly. While walking into the AMC-IMAX I was texting with Danny, whose screening would start a couple hours later. We traded photos from the lobbies of our theaters 1,500 miles apart…
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Danny at Woodland Hills AMC-IMAX…
As always, AMC has some fun trivia they call Noovies on the screen before the showtime, in this case with some of the cast of “No Time to Die.”
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And I just have to say that it was especially gratifying to see these four words at the very end of the credits of the movie, as it has always been at the very end of every James Bond movie, James Bond Will Return.
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Danny and I connected again via text after the movie and both had the same initial reaction while I was now worried about having a ticket to sit through it again in 18-hours.
The next day I woke up debating whether to bother going to the Alamo screening, but decided to because I wanted the exercise walking there, because I wanted to compare the difference in the type of theater and sound system to IMAX, and mostly because I wanted to pick up the special magazine. Well, I got two out of three — Alamo did not have the magazines. Apparently the offer on the web site was supposed to be pulled long ago when they were closed during bankruptcy protection because the publisher of the magazines also went out of business during the pandemic.
I also found the No Time to Die score on my free Pandora music app, so I listened to the entire impressive Hans Zimmer score while walking the 45-minutes to the Alamo, which features poignant strains of orchestral versions of Louis Armstrong’s Bond song We Have all the Time in the World, as well as the Grammy-winning No Time to Die theme by Billie Eilish, and that all gave me something else to listen more closely to in this second viewing of the movie.
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The Alamo always has fun stuff in the lobby, and their pre-movie on-screen entertainment is always fun and irreverent, and this time also included Bond trivia.
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So, I guess it was at least worth my trouble to go to the Alamo to get my refund for the magazine, and I actually didn’t find it a struggle to sit through the movie again, even though my feelings didn’t change one way or the other.
So, now I faced a two-hour drive 12-hours later to see it yet again Friday morning – would I struggle not to fall asleep while sitting between Betty and my friend Walt and his wife, all of whom were seeing it for the first time? I wore the shirt that Walt had made for me two years ago after I took him with me to meet the members of the Ian Fleming Foundation in Illinois to see their enormous collection of dozens of Bond vehicles actually used in the movies (they are now on exhibit at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles).
Right away it was fun meeting up with Walt again on Friday and seeing this giant theater.
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Exploring the theater lobby and signage was also fun, as were the clever and elaborate many special 007-related menu items at their indoor/outdoor Rick’s Café Americaine…
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Walt and Judy lowered their recliners as soon as the credits started and bolted out of the theater in order to get on the road, but we called them on our two-hour drive home to let them know the James Bond Will Return was there again at the end of the credits and to discuss all the unexpected elements of the movie with them as they were on their six-hour drive.
I’m not sure why, but I enjoyed the movie much more this third time in 63 hours than I enjoyed it the first two. In fact, I even got emotional at the end for the first time. Maybe by this third viewing I subconsciously let go of my preconceived six years of expectations about what a 007 movie should be and how the Bond characters should be portrayed and just enjoyed it for the story that’s there for the characters as presented, even though that makes it all less of a “James Bond movie” to me and therefore less special and unique. And I believe the theater made a big difference – the tremendous visual scope and especially the IMAX sound system in this theater that delivered the powerful swells of music cues during the poignant moments so clearly. And maybe even seeing it with longtime friends and especially having Betty with me helped me appreciate the whole experience more.
In any case, just as I was re-adjusting to having 24-hour periods during which I was not spending three hours (or five or eight) involved with seeing “No Time to Die,” I found out several days later that “No Time to Die” is also the first Bond movie to be converted to 3D, so guess what that meant?
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Yep, I was off to a fourth viewing in a fourth different theater in eight days, a Regal cinema with just one presentation in the RealD 3D process on Thursday, Oct. 14, and, by chance, once again my friend Danny was attending another viewing of “No Time to Die” simultaneously 1,500 miles away in California, though he was at a standard 2D theater.
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I’d been hoping for nearly 20 years since the resurgence of mainstream films in 3D to see a Bond movie get the 3D treatment in theaters. Finally, here it was. Would it live up to expectations?
To my surprise and delight, it exceeded them, instantly. I felt I was being propelled through the opening gun barrel to the tops of the trees in the Norway snow. (My full 3D review here.)
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As I left, I thought this must surely be my final viewing. But at this point I have learned to never say never again.
By Scott Hettrick