With the recent arrival of No Time To Die on the big screen, it’s time to turn to the villain of the piece, Lyutsifer Safin, to discuss what he wanted to achieve and his motives in the film. It’s a slightly convoluted back story and character progression, but hopefully by the end you’ll have a good idea about what his deal was.
Obviously, it’s impossible to lay this all out without going into the details of the plot for the film, so if you’re reading this before seeing Bond 25 then you might want to think twice. We’ll be discussing the character’s full reveal, how he links in with the overall story arc and what his intentions might be right the way up until the end. This can all be boiled down to three main motives, which we’ll take you through below.
AdvertisementIf we’re being brutally honest, you probably shouldn’t expect it all to make perfect sense, because the reality is that when you break it all down, it seems a bit over-the-top. However, that’s kind of the truth behind the actions of most criminals, so we’re not going to be too tough on the story writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga about it.
That being said, Lyutsifer Safin is a villain cut from the cloth of the mad men that want to inflict pain on the world in retaliation for the pain they themselves have experienced. At the same time, he’s convinced that his actions will make the world a better place, so if you’re looking for the most recent blockbuster comparison, then you might want to turn to Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.
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Motive 1 – Revenge!
The No Time To Die villain’s character development starts with the simple act of revenge that he inflicts upon the Swann family in the pre-credits sequence. Madeleine Swann’s father was Mr. White from the previous films, who lead Quantum, a subsidiary group of SPECTRE, and was ultimately killed on the orders of Blofeld in the film SPECTRE for his failures. Lyutsifer Safin’s entire family were killed by White when he was a boy, so he went to his house in Norway with the intention of returning the favour.
As you will have seen in the film, he only finds Madeleine and her mother with the latter being killed and the young Swann ultimately being rescued by Safin after trading shots. We’ll get onto why he decided not to kill her in the next section, but the general gist is that he’s out for revenge and a portion of that is directed at Madeleine due to her family connection.
AdvertisementHowever, things go further than that, because Mr. White was in the employment of SPECTRE through Quantum, which ipso facto results in Lyutsifer Safin wanting revenge against SPECTRE. That’s why he killed every member of the organization at Blofeld’s birthday party and why he sets things up for Madeleine Swann to take the nano bot DNA-matched killer serum to infect Ernst Stavro Blofeld in his hilarious conveyor belt cage in Belmarsh Prison.
He also wants to eradicate anyone that might be somehow affiliated to the underworld operations of the world, which is why he then sets up the mass production of the serum on the contested island between Russia and Japan. Essentially, anyone even remotely linked to the death of his family, no matter how distant, was to be killed if Safin had gotten away with things.
Motive 2 – Love?
Faced with the easy kill of Madeleine Swann under the ice, something makes Safin decide to save her. His later monologues imply that something connected them from that point onward and in his chat with James he reveals that they’re the same. That they both love Madeleine. He also tells Swann that he remembers the eyes that looked back at him from under the ice and that he finds her attractive when he visits her office to get her to kill Blofeld.
From this point of view, his intentions seem to be the swift destruction of his wider list of enemies, and then to settle down at his “poison garden” with Miss Swann, with or without her daughter. It’s a twisted plot to say the least, but that’s the long and short of it.
Motive 3 – Warped idealism?!?
The overall idea of this motive is that Lyutsifer Safin seems to think that his nano-bot army can somehow make the world a better place. Obviously, this is from a very warped and troubled perspective, but the thinking seems to be that he plans to use the serum to rid the world of anyone that he thinks is a bit of a git following the tendrils of the SPECTRE rabbit warren.
The problem is that the solution would also impact the extended family of anyone targeted, but this is clearly acceptable collateral damage in the mind of Lyutsifer Safin. The Bond 25 villain considers this to be a small price to pay for the greater good of his “tidier” methods.
No Time To Die villain: Lyutsifer Safin unanswered questions
You may well still be a little confused about some of Lyutsifer Safin’s actions in No Time To Die, even with the rundown of his motives above. The biggest of these is why he didn’t also kill James at Blofeld’s Cuban birthday bash, which would have been a little revenge on Swann, taking out his biggest “love” rival and also ridding himself of the most significant potential thorn in his side.
AdvertisementThe only answer we can suggest is that it comes down to his overriding revenge motive, which leans heavily on SPECTRE as its target. By killing all members of the organisation and sparing James, he was able to deliver the best revenge stroke to the ultimate leader, Blofeld, who was watching proceedings the entire time through the weird eye camera he had.
The other question that springs to mind in terms of Safin’s motivations is why he so easily let the leverage of Mathilde go towards the end. Looking back, it still doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but maybe he was so focused on the global revenge thing that everything else was of secondary importance by this stage.
Yes, he kidnapped Madeleine and her daughter with the intention of a messed up life together on the island, but when faced with losing his ultimate act of revenge, he dropped them in a heart beat. It makes a bit of a mockery of the extraordinary efforts he goes to in order to secure the two of them, but hey, we didn’t write the script.
If you have any more questions about Safin, you can drop us a comment over on Twitter. You can also check out our movie news section to keep tabs on the latest upcoming films, or visit the Bond movie website at https://www.007.com/.
