WARNING: The following contains spoilers for No Time to Die, in theaters now.
A Bond film is only as good as its villain. Daniel Craig's final entry in the Bond series, No Time to Die, sees Rami Malek's maniacal Safin stepping up to the challenge of menacing James Bond, MI6 and the entire world. The stakes are the highest Craig's Bond -- and perhaps any iteration of Bond -- has ever faced, with the safety of everyone in the world jeopardized by a bioweapon Safin is mass manufacturing. It's a return to the sci-fi trappings of many of the pre-Casino Royale Bond films in a way befitting Bond in the age of the MCU.
In fact, No Time to Die retreads cinematic territory previously explored by Marvel Studios in 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In that film, the world was at the mercy of Hydra, the sinister organization originally encountered by Chris Evans' Captain America back in World War II in Captain America: The First Avenger. While fights for the fate of the planet are common fare for the likes of Bond and the Avengers, the similarities between Safin's and Hydra's plans go a little further.
Codenamed Heracles, the bioweapon at the heart of Safin's sinister plot in No Time to Die was originally developed on M's orders as a way of eradicating collateral damage from MI6 assignments. Heracles is a swarm of nanobots, which can be programmed with target DNA, infecting and killing the chosen target on contact. Heracles can come into contact with anyone other than their designated target harmlessly but effectively turns them into a carrier, making their touch deadly to the target, or anyone sharing their DNA. The film shows the weapon's deadly effects spreading between family members on contact, but it's explained that it could be refined to target anyone from a specific individual to entire ethnicities.
Safin's plan involves releasing Heracles globally, having programmed it to wipe out anyone he deems a threat -- including entire security services. It means millions could be killed without even knowing the death blow is coming. There are more than a few echoes of the global threat that is wielded by Hydra in Marvel's take on the espionage genre, The Winter Soldier. The Captain America sequel saw Hydra unearthed after years in the shadows, having hidden within various governments and institutions, including S.H.I.E.L.D. From their position within S.H.I.E.L.D., they planned to weaponize Project Insight -- a fleet of heavily armed Helicarriers connected to a global surveillance satellite network -- to eradicate potential threats to Hydra.
Just as No Time to Die's Heracles was developed by the head of MI6 and intended to help their agents ensure global security, Project Insight was created by Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. to protect the world. Both weapons fall into the wrong hands and, with Project Insight's Helicarriers able to shoot down a target from sub-orbital flight, both weapons hold the terrifying potential to strike down millions of pre-selected targets before the victims even see the attack coming. As Bond tells Safin, unleashing Heracles puts "the whole world on a battlefield. Nobody gets a chance." Or, as Cap tells Fury of Project Insight, either well-intentioned technology would effectively result in "holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection."
In many ways, Heracles kicks things up a notch from Hydra's plan. Hydra relied on a satellite network and an entire fleet of Helicarriers. While the arsenal at their disposal was impressive, the Helicarriers were vulnerable to infiltration and sabotage, a weakness exploited by Captain America to destroy the fleet. While Bond manages to stop Safin's plan by destroying the entire facility where Heracles is being manufactured, had it ever got out, there would have been no stopping it. As Q points out, Heracles is "eternal." Once someone is infected with nanobots, there's no way of getting rid of them. Safin perfected Hydra's dream weapon, an unstoppable wave of destruction, weaponizing all humanity and cementing Safin's place in cinema's hall of infamy.
To see Safin put his master plan into action, see No Time to Die in theaters now.