By all accounts, the Faroe Islands are the perfect place to live. The air is clean, the population sparse and - judging by the local newspaper, in which the opening of the hotel is currently the main story - a peaceful and idyllic place. Anyone would be very happy to live in the Faroe Islands. Unless you've seen the latest release of the James Bond movie "Not Time To Die".
Although the movie "Not Time To Die" came out some time ago, and realistically everyone who planned to should have seen it by now, the ending of the movie is still a matter of collectively agreed secrecy. If you haven't seen the movie, stop reading now. Not that it matters, because some Faroese residents spoiled the ending in the most complicated way possible: they placed a tombstone on the spot where James Bond died. This is not a half-hearted effort. The grave is made of Faroese basalt, by the hands of a famous stonemason from the village of Skopun, and designed to resemble the tombstones of Agent 007's parents. The stone is engraved with the words that M read at the end of "No Time to Die": "The true function of man is to live, and not that it exists!".
You could argue that the Faroe Islands have the right to place James Bond's grave there because - well, at least on film - he died there. The climactic scene of No Time to Die, in which Bond is blown to smithereens by rockets, was filmed in the small village of Trollanes, which has a population of 26. True, the location was significantly altered in post-production, with all the cute cottages and lighthouses cleared in favor of a brutalist industrial poison farm, but it's still where he died. Then again, you can't help but feel that it undoes a lot of everyone's hard work. For months, all discussions about "No Time to Die" were accompanied by a panicked fear of spoiling the ending.
This did not happen with other films. There's no plaque in Philadelphia that says, "This is where the 'Sixth Sense' kid saw a dead person for the first time." There's no statue on the beach in New York that says "Planet of the Apes" was Earth all along. These things are kept in secrecy for a reason.
And is this the level of tourism that the Faroe Islands want? Near King's Cross in London there is a small attraction in honor of Harry Potter. On their way to work, people zigzag their way past crowds of scarf-wearing adults taking selfies while pretending to run through a wall. Now the Faroe Islands invite a similar type of tourist. People visit this part of the world for the peace, not to see grown men in tuxedos pretending to blow up.
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