Re: Universal Exports - The James Bond Thread

[lucy_who]

I love License to Kill, right up until the cliche ending where Pam falls for Bond. Yes, yes, I know its a Bond movie, he HAS to get the girl... but it really felt like they were doing something fresh and modern with the characters until WHAM! Suddenly its the 1960's again...

[Patrick]

There were clues that Pam was developing feelings for Bond within the story. There were no clues that Bond was developing feelings for her. That's what bothered me about the ending.

[Nick Barlow]

I'd give it a 3 or a 4 out of 5 depending on my mood at the time. lt's Dalton who makes it work for me, as you can believe he's the sort of Bond who can a) have close friends and b) be extremely monomaniacal in pursuing revenge for them. The others could all do a but not b, except for Craig, who could easily do the revenge, but it's hard to imagine having friends.

There are some bits where it really works, but then there are others where they're not quite sure what they're doing, and the Bond movie template starts to suck them back towards it.

[barnaby morbius]

i'm not a big fan of "licence to kill". it's not a bad movie but doesn't feel like a bond film. it reminds me of a bog standard late 80s action film- you could replace dalton with steven seagal and no-one would notice.

like the theme song though.

[Nick Barlow]

Back to the present day and this may be of interest:The Ten Biggest Things We Learned On The Skyfall Set. Vaguely spoilery, but no more than you'd get in the general pre-publicity for it.

[Patrick]

The Second Age of Bond has finished, with a total of ten films, and three actors playing the signature role (including one reprise of the part). Once again, I won’t be picking a best picture. That would impossible and a bit pointless. But, the closing of an Age of Bond is a time to reflect on what has happened in that age, and give out some credit where it’s due. Let’s start with a recap of each of the ten films during this age, and their ratings:

Live And Let Die: 2 out of 5 (“stacked” decks of tarot cards)
The Man With The Golden Gun: 5 out of 5 (sunken Queen Elizabeth cruise ships)
The Spy Who Loved Me: 3 out of 5 (man bites shark moments)
Moonraker: 1 out of 5 (centrifuges, and that’s because I couldn’t give it zero)
For Your Eyes Only: 5 out of 5 (ATAC location-confession parrots)
Octopussy: 3 out of 5 (stuffed goats head dinners)
Never Say Never Again: 4 out of 5 (lunches at M’s Club)
A View To A Kill: 2 out of 5 (deadly trips the car wash)
The Living Daylights: 5 out of 5 (fast moving cello cases)
License To Kill: 4 out of 5 (exploding alarm clocks, guaranteed never to wake anyone who uses it)

The Third Age of Bond awaits, and before we can get to it, we need to put closure on the decades of the 1970s and 80s. And that means some awards…

Best Bond Girl:
As was the case in the First Age of Bond, to be nominated in this category requires that the actress had a part where she was both an ally of Bond, and finished the movie with him. The nominees are: Jane Seymore as Solitaire in Live And Let Die; Britt Ekland as Miss Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun; Barbara Bach as Anya Amasova (Agent XXX) in The Spy Who Loved Me; Lois Chiles as Dr. Holly Goodhead in Moonraker; Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock in For Your Eyes Only; Maud Adams as Octopussy in Octopussy; Kim Bassinger as Domino Petachi in Never Say Never Again; Tanya Roberts as Stacy Sutton in A View To A Kill; Miriam D’abo as Kara Milovy in The Living Daylights; and Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier in License To Kill.

Among these nine nominees, I’m drawn to two, specifically because of the romance they had with Bond during the story. The first of these is Carole Bouquet, incredibly beautiful, talented, and deadly with a bolt gun. Melina Havelock’s live became embroiled with Bond when she set out on a quest to avenge the deaths of her parents at the hands of a hired assassin. Bond dissuaded her from this quest, and during their adventures, there was a palpable sense of genuine affection between them as they joined forces to deprive Kristatos of the ATAC.

The second was a Czech citizen during the last days of Eastern Block. Kara Milovy wormed her way into Bond’s heart. Some of that was down to the fact that he had to shoot her, and felt guilty over that. He also had to lie to her about his association with Koskov, and he felt guilty about that, too. But beyond the guilt, in Kara Milovy, Bond found a naïve, pretty woman who was in over her head in a scheme she knew nothing about. Koskov set her up to die at Bond’s hands, and when that failed, he betrayed her a second time. She had no recourse but to throw her lot in with Bond, even to the point of going into Xena Warrior Princess mode to storm a Soviet base in Afghanistan. And as their time together grew, you could see, so did their genuine fondness for one another.

My call for Best Bond Girl of the Second Age of Bond is Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock. To this day, I’m still bowled over by her looks and her talent. And it didn’t hurt that she was in one of the best scripted stories of the Second Age.



Best Villain:
Ten villains are on display for this Age. That’s an impressive number of foes for any hero to face down. So let’s get the nominees established: Yaphet Kotto as Dr. Kanaga/Mr. Big in Live And Let Die; Christopher Lee as Francisco Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun; Kurt Jurgens as Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me; Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax in Moonraker; Julian Glover as Kristastos in For Eyes Only; Louis Jordan as Kamal Khan in Octopussy; Klaus Maria Brandauer as Emilo Largo in Never Say Never Again; Christopher Walken as Max Zorin in A View To A Kill; Jeroen Krabbe as Gen. Georgi Koskov in The Living Daylights; and Robert Davi as Franz Sanchez in License To Kill. Now that’s a list!

So let’s go with a little process of elimination to whittle down this list. The two most clichéd and frankly boring of the villains on this list are Stromberg and Drax. Wearing a Nehru jacket and plotting the demise of human kind are only going to work, from a villainy standpoint, if there hadn’t been a character named Ernst Stavro Blofeld, preceding you. Stromberg and Drax, you are officially voted off the island.

Of the ones that are left, let’s take a look at what might have happened, had they not been thwarted. Franz Sanchez was a drug lord. If he’d succeeded, the late 80s would have seen yet another bump in cocaine distribution worldwide. I’m not defending the drug trade, but in the late 1980s, would the world have really noticed yet another bump in cocaine distribution? All Sanchez was doing was bringing a product to market for which there was an already well established demand. So his impact on future events, if he’d succeeded, is debatable. Similarly, Dr. Kanaga/Mr. Bigg was devoted to finding a way to spike demand of heroin. Another drug dealer, and again, it has to be asked, if he’d succeeded, would his plans have proven sustainable? And on the subject of heroin, we also have Georgi Koskov, duplicitously taking money from the Russians to buy heroin, profit from the sales, and get still deliver the Russians their order of ordinance. Even if he’d succeeded, it was only going to be a matter of time before someone- the Russians, the British or the Americans- brought him down.

Where there were once ten, there are now five.

Of those five, I’m again drawn to two. The first of these is Kristatos. We are initially led to believe he’s Bond’s ally, full of sophistication and experienced as a result of his time during the war as a resistance fighter. But as the events of For Your Eyes Only play out, little by little, that façade is broken. He isn’t Bond’s ally, he’s been setting Bond up at every turn for a nasty demise, and planting the seeds to make Colombo look like the guilty party. Kristatos is, in fact, working for the Russians, and his villainy contains within it a truly hideous streak of barbarity. It’s fitting that he didn’t meet his demise at the hands of either Bond or Melina, but his arch foe from a decades old feud- Colombo.

The second villain on my list is Francisco Scaramanga. Oh, what a well crafted villain he was! A circus freak with three nipples, a crack shot from an early age whose only faithful companion was a performing elephant, his entrance into Bond’s life and work had nothing to do with either Scaramanga or Bond. But once they had engaged into their battle, we got another nice reveal of his character- he’s a cheat at his own funhouse game to kill Bond. That makes him every bit as petty as Goldfinger (our First Age of Bond winner for best villain) and it is his own character flaw that drives the events of The Man With The Golden Gun forward.

Of these two, I have to side with Scaramanga as the best villain. I mean, there are simply loads of character rich stuff you can divine from his moments on the screen, and they all reveal a thoroughly repugnant reprobate as a character. This is exactly what you want in a villain who’s going to meet his end at Bond’s hands.


Best Henchman/Physical Villain:
Let me reiterate what I said with the awards for the First Age of Bond: the physical villain is the one who gets sent to do the jobs the main villain simply can’t get his hands dirty with- the killings and sabotage that have to be done in service to the plot, but which leave the main villain with plausible deniability if anything goes wrong. For this age of Bond, the nominees are: Hervé Villechaize as Nick Nack in The Man With The Golden Gun; Richard Kiel as Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (but not Moonraker, and that’s a very important distinction); Kabir Bedi as Gobinda in Octopussy; Grace Jones as Mayday in A View To A Kill; Andreas Wisniewski as Necros in The Living Daylights; and Benicio Del Toro as Dario in License To Kill.

Once again, this comes down to a choice of two, with an honorable mention coming in third. The honorable mention is Nick Nack. What a perfect choice of henchman for a villain who was, himself, a circus freak. He was more of a frustrating trickster than a villain, but his every appearance on screen was fun to watch.

No, the two who vie for Best Physical Villain are Jaws and Mayday. Jaws gets his nomination because when we are introduced to him on screen in The Spy Who Loved Me, he is simply a physically unstoppable force who just keeps popping up unexpectedly in the story, and he is seemingly immune to injury. His on screen moments in that first film carry with them an element of horror no other physical villain has matched. Mayday earns her nomination as a result of her almost feral need to best anyone she goes up against, and for her disturbing talent to strangle people from the back seat of a car. If Zorin was the mental freak as a result of East German experimentation, she was the physical freak. And she certainly looked like she was prepared to devour Bond during their one and only tryst.

But I’m going to award this category to what is probably the fan favorite: Jaws. And I’m doing that despite how I hated what happened to his character in Moonraker. I can’t blame any of the actors (or, indeed, the characters they played) for the illogical, plot-hole strewn mess that was Moonraker. No, I’m going off of what we saw of Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. Any henchman that can survive the explosion of his boss’ stronghold, kill a great white shark by biting it, and swim heaven only knows how many miles so as to live and fight another day, has true Best Physical Villain star qualities.


Best Ally:
This is a category that frequently includes the amiable rogues with whom Bond teams up. Their role is to be the person who assists Bond, grounds Bond when necessary, and who has no illusion that in teaming up with Bond, he’s working on the good guy’s side. The nominees are David Hedison as Felix Leiter in both Live And Let Die and License To Kill; Soon Taik Oh Lieutenant Hip in The Man With The Golden Gun; Topol as Colombo in For Your Eyes Only, and Art Malik as Kamran Shah in The Living Daylights.

Of these, the most charismatic on screen presence is the one I’m giving the award to: Colombo in For Your Eyes Only. Once it’s revealed he isn’t the enemy we’re initially misled into believing, his partnership with Bond feels genuine and friendly. And as I stated in my review, Columbo’s fondness for pistachios was a nice character trait that actually helped the plot.


Best Action Sequence:
Although the name of this category ought to make it self-explanatory, I’ll offer a brief summary anyway. The big action sequences are the set arrangements where an all consuming battle happens, a tipping point in the larger plot hangs on the outcome, and Bond front and center throughout it all. Although they frequently climax the film, that isn’t necessarily always the case.

The nominations for Best Action Sequence in the Second Age Of Bond are:

- Live & Let Die: Bond’s speed boat chase through the Louisiana bayous, where he not only has to contend with several of Kanaga’s henchmen in hot pursuit, but a rather territorial Sheriff as well. An unintentional speed boat record was actually set during the making of these scenes.

- The Spy Who Loved Me: Three submarines, and three submarine crews, have been captured by Stromberg’s ship, The Liparus. Two of those subs have been launched with crews loyal to Stromberg, and are about to fire nuclear missiles aimed at New York and Moscow, triggering a nuclear war. Bond has to not only lead an assault to capture the Liparus, but then decipher the system Stromberg has been using to control the subs so that they shoot each other, rather than their intended city targets.

- Moonraker: The battle to defeat Drax’s space station takes place not only on the station, but in space as well.

- Octopussy: Kamal Kahn’s stronghold is being attacked on two fronts- from below, by the ladies of Octopussy’s circus, and from above by Bond and Q. While the attack succeeds in dispatching many of Kahn’s men, Kahan himself, and his bodyguard Gobinda, escape with Octopussy as a hostage. Bond then has to carry on the fight hanging on to the outside of a plane in mid-flight to bring Kahn down.

- A View To A Kill: After Zorin’s plans to create an earthquake that will destroy Silicon Valley fail, he kidnaps Stacy and flies zeppelin over San Francisco, with Bond holding onto a mooring rope. Their final confrontation happens near the top of one of the two towers on the Golden Gate Bridge.

- License To Kill: Sanchez is fleeing the conflagration that used to be his “lab” with several tankers filled with cocaine-infused gasoline. Bond gives chase, overcoming un-cooperative big rig drivers, a stinger missile aimed at him, henchmen with assault rifles, a burning tanker he himself set on fire before finally getting to Sanchez.

This award is actually a relatively simple choice, both for the scale of the battle being waged and for the amazing set where the battle took place: the fight aboard Stromberg’s ship involves something like a hundred men firing weapons and setting off grenades. It was filled with action, gave us our first hint that Roger Moore could be a bit of a bad ass as Bond, and was easily the most convincing fight of that scale during the second age of Bond. And that Ken Adams’ set on which they filed it was so huge, a whole new sound stage had to be constructed to contain it.


Best Fight:

To distinguish it from the best action sequence, this is a mano-a-mano brawl between Bond and one of the bad guys. Now, think about this for a second- in seven films Roger Moore made as Bond, the only memorable fight sequence of his that stands out happens on the rooftop of a building in Cairo against one of Stromberg’s thugs. You may recall it as the “what a helpful chap” scene from The Spy Who Loved Me. In seven movies, that’s all. While Timothy Dalton was much more of a physical type, the only real fist throwing fights he was presented with were the fight with Necros hanging onto a cargo net as it dangled precariously out the back of a plane in The Living Daylights, and the brawl at the Barrelhead Bar in License To Kill.

I’m going to award this to the cargo net fight in The Living Daylights. Yes, it had the signature musical cue from the movie played over it as an attempt to heighten the tension, and I’m not generally a fan of that. But I let that complaint go for a simple reason: if they hadn’t done that, all you would have heard would be the rush of the wind. That complaint aside, it was a pretty good fight contested on a very awkward battleground where each fighter had to keep one hand on the netting. While it may have lacked some of the tension of Grant’s fight with Bond in From Russia With Love, I give it marks for being a creative take on how to stage a different kind of fight.


Best Spy Moment:
I’ll simply restate what I said when I introduced this category at the end of the First Age of Bond: For me, a “spy moment” happens when Bond engages in some true espionage to obtain some vital bit of information. This moment may or may not include the use of a gadget, but it invariably gets both Bond and the audience an important clue about the plot, and it does so without a lot of expositive dialogue. More than that, it’s done in a way only a spy could do.

My nominees for Best Spy Moment in the Second Age of Bond are:

- After hang-gliding into Solitaire’s home, Bond stacks her deck of tarot cards to convince her they are fated to become lovers, so that she’ll reveal what Kanaga’s big plan involves.

- After following a series of clues that took him from Beruit, back to London, and then to Macau to discover who Scaramanga is, Bond has his first meeting with Miss Anders and learns that Scaramanga “has an appointment” at the Bottoms Up Club. When it is Gibson, the solar energy expert, who is shot, rather than Bond, Bond learns Scaramanga has no contract on him, and that a far bigger game is being played.

-Bond and Amasova are in competition to acquire the microfilm showing how Stromberg is capable of intercepting a nuclear submarine, and the microfilm changes hands several times before Bond gets a chance to examine it using a nifty Q branch gadget. But he’s up against another spy, too, and forgets this when he’s overcome with one of her poison cigarettes.

-Teaming up with Colombo, Bond participates in a raid on Kristatos’ Albanian docks and discovers not only one of the mines used to bring down the ship where the ATAC was being used, but Locke, as well, confirming that Kristatos was in league with the Russians.

-A miniature microphone, placed in a Faberge egg, allows Bond to overhear enough of Kahn’s and Orlov’s plans to know that something big is going to happen at Karl Marxstadt, East Germany, which happens to be the last stop Octopussy’s circus will perform at before crossing over the border to perform at a US Air Force Base in West Germany.

-In an effort to convince Koskov and Whittaker that the British have bought Koskov’s story that General Pushkin has gone mad, Bond and Pushkin stage an elaborate assassination attempt so that Koskov and Whittaker will feel free to make their next move.

There’s a couple of good scenes on that list, but I’m going to give this one to Bond and Pushkin cooperating on faking Pushkin’s assassination. I like this scene because it plays very well into the general theme of misdirection within the movie, and because it showed there was a gathering of international forces against both Koskov and Whittaker. Remember, just after Bond makes good his escape from the conference where dozens of witnesses apparently see him shoot and kill Pushkin, he meets up with Felix Leiter.



Best Death Scene:
Ah, the ubiquitous death scene for the bad guy- you know, even before the open credits, that some bad guys are going to shed their mortal coils at Bonds hands, and it’s always the point at which you know Bond has, indeed, triumphed. So, the nominees for the Second Age of Bond are: Kanaga’s inflation and subsequent explosion from the inside out after having a gas bullet forced down his throat; Stromberg being shot from under his own massive dining table, using the very same long rifle of the gun he was aiming at Bond; The spacing of Hugo Drax; Locke’s Mercedes being kicked off a cliff; Max Zorin’s fall from the Golden Gate Bridge; Necros “getting the boot”; and the use of Felix and Della’s faulty lighter gift to torch Sanchez.

In the end of a Bond villain, I want something memorable and something unusual. Which is why I’m selecting Kanaga’s death scene. Bond and Solitaire have been caught and tied to a crane that’s about to lower them into a pool with some hungry sharks. While Kanaga’s back is turned for a moment, Bond uses the magnet in his watch to attract his exploding gas bullet, then turns his watch into a buzz saw to cut his ropes. The ensuing fight between him and Kanaga, once he’s swung to freedom, ends up in the pool where Bond is able to force the bullet into Kanaga’s mouth. Moments later, Kanaga expands like a balloon and pops. Not a nice way to go, when you think about it.


Best Line:
It is hard to top a Sean Connery one liner for how effective they can be. When Fatima Blush’s bomb explodes in Bond’s hotel room, Bond, in the throws of love-making, calms his lover down by telling her “It looks like we made the right decision- your place or mine?”


Best Script:
No, Moonraker will not be making a miraculous recovery and winning this category. The three movies nominated for this age of Bond are The Man With The Golden Gun, For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights. And for how well structured the overall story was, and how nicely it developed its funhouse theme, I have to give the best script award to The Man With The Golden Gun.


Best Set Design:
Now in this category, Moonraker actually gets a nod. The best set design of the Second Age of Bond for its sheer imagination and difference to anything else is Ken Adams’ best and last contribution to the franchise: the set of Hugo Drax’s space station. It did have a very futurist feel to it, and it couldn’t have been an easy set to design because there are virtually no angles to it. Everything is essentially one continuous curve.


Best Score:[b]
Ten theme songs opened Bond movies in this Age, and those ten are as different as the movies to which they were attached. Only one of them has proven to have real staying power, even being remade in the 90s. It is a staple of classic rock stations all over America, and is easily one of the most recognizable tunes to come out of Bond in the Second Age. I’m speaking of Paul McCartney and Wings signing “Live And Let Die.” Think about it- with the possible exception of “Nobody Does It Better,” can you think of another song that’s proven to be as timeless from these ten films?


[b]Most “Iconic” Bond Film:
“Most Iconic” does not necessarily mean best. It means the film with the signature elements of a Bond adventure that highlight the fact that this is a sort of heighted reality. The Bond films perhaps even embody a bit of a fantasy woven into the narrative of an espionage genre. If this Age of Bond is characterized by something in the formula that wasn’t there in the First Age, it was extraordinary cinematography and beautiful locations where the stories were set, characters who could easily be larger than life, an huge set pieces.

While this movie isn’t my particular favorite of the Age, the one that combined all these elements, and in some ways raised the bar for the movies that would follow, is They Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was certainly larger than life, and remains to this day one of the most iconic physical villains of the franchise. The location shooting, particularly the pursuit of Bond and Amasova in the Lotus Esprit were gorgeous to behold, and a car that can become a submarine is pure heightened reality. When people think of 1970 and 1980s James Bond, this is usually one of the first films that comes to mind.

[Lee Carey]

Have to disagree with you about best set design, Patrick. For me it's the sub hanger in The Spy Who Loved Me, primarily because...

...And that Ken Adams’ set on which they filed it was so huge, a whole new sound stage had to be constructed to contain it.

Not only that, but the design of the set, it's size and the sheer amount of reflective surfaces gave Ken Adams and the films cinematographer such a headache to light and shoot that they went to the studio next door to call in a favour from a little known director making a small horror film from a little known author with whom Adams had worked on a small comedy a few years before. So, completely unofficially, and unbeknownst to Spy's producers, Adams asked for advice from Stanley Kubrick, who interrupted his work on The Shinning and visited the set and helped set up the lighting for a Bond film!

That and having a secret agent called Triple X marks The Spy Who Loves Me as the best Moore film.

[Patrick]

I thought about the sub-hanger set, Lee, and it came in second place. The reason I went with the space station set is that not only was it a fantastic design, it was without question the set where Mr. Adams was allowed to use his "circles = death" metaphor to really reach a creative highpoint.

[Patrick]

You’ll have to pardon the overlong pre-amble this time around. You see, we have a six year gap - the longest in the franchise’s history - that needs to be discussed before we can get into the seventeenth film introduced into the canon. A great many things happened in those six years.

Let’s begin with the production itself. Following on from License To Kill, one of the poorest performing Bond films in terms of box-office sales, Eon Productions went into script development for its next James Bond film, going so far as to produce generic marketing materials for the 1990 Cannes Film Festival under the generic title “Bond 17”. It was to have gone into production with a planned release date of 1991, and a detailed 17-page plot synopsis was drafted which even included bringing in the Walt Disney Imagineering team to design high-tech robots central to the early versions of that draft. All might have gone to plan, but a legal problem arose around that time.

In 1990, Metro-Goldwin Meyer/United Artists (more commonly known as MGM/UA) was sold to Pathé Communications, a company owned by Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti. MGM/UA was the financier and distributer of all the Bond films since For Your Eyes Only, after United Artists merged with MGM in 1981. Now, you’ll recall that the previous gap in movies, in the 1970s, had been caused by the financial problems of Harry Saltzman, and a legal entanglement over the ownership of the rights to the Bond franchise. Once that was resolved, DanJaq, the Swiss based corporation now solely under the control of Albert Broccoli, owned the rights to the franchise, and granted Broccoli’s EON Productions the rights to make the films. But DanJaq also controlled the rights to the back catalogue of Bond films, including where these films could be licensed for viewing. Enter Pathé Communications, who now found themselves owning MGM/UA’s vaults, where all of original prints of the Bond films are stored. And Pathé decided they were going to take advantage of this and show the films on television in several countries without having obtained DanJaq’s approval first. DanJaq sued Pathé, and a six year legal battle ensued.

These legal struggles resulted in several postponements of what would have been Timothy Dalton’s third film in the franchise. Each time a postponement was announced, the time frame for production of Bond 17 was pushed back another year. In an interview in 1993, Mr. Dalton indicated that Michael France was writing the script, and production was expected to begin in early 1994. It never happened, and in April, 1994, Mr. Dalton resigned from the role to pursue other projects.

But another problem also confronted the franchise. Shortly before the release of License To Kill, Mr. Broccoli had celebrated his 80th birthday. As the decade of the 1990s moved forward, Mr. Broccoli’s health began to deteriorate, so much so that he was unable to participate in the making of the seventeenth Bond film, and was honorably credited as a production advisor. Instead, the Executive Producer roles went to Barbara Broccoli, his daughter, and Michael G. Wilson, his adopted son. Mr. Broccoli was always a fervent family man, and his children were heavily involved in the Bond films for many years. Mr. Wilson, in fact, was credited as co-producer on the last three films. As a result, the transition in duties was handled rather deftly. But it was a transition, and in some ways, it mirrored the transition Bond, as a character, was about to undergo.

In the wider world beyond the legal battles of DanJaq and Pathé, other things were changing as we entered the final decade of the Twentieth Century. Four months after the release of License To Kill, the Berlin Wall fell, and where there had been two Germanys since the end of World War II, there was now one. Like stacked dominos, the countries of Eastern Europe fell in rapid succession, as they rejected communism and their roles as satellite states of the Soviet Union. And then, in the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union, itself, collapsed. The Cold War, a 70 year long competition between two superpowers, was at an end. One newspaper rather boldly described it as “The End Of History.”

With the Soviet influence waning, new threats would soon emerge. In 1991, an international coalition of armed forces had to go into Kuwait to repel the advances of Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. As Yugoslavia collapsed, ethnic tensions which had been suppressed while the country was an Eastern Block satellite were again unleashed, and a war in Europe’s back yard resulted. Even within what had been the Soviet Union, break-away republics were announcing their autonomy as independent nations.

But not everything happening in the 1990s was bad news. The first Gulf War presented an opportunity for a 24 hour news television channel to show its value as an information source, world-wide. Cell phones, which heretofore had resembled bricks, became smaller, lighter and more commonplace. Technology went digital- it was no longer just music which could be stored on a four and a half inch disc. And the internet became a household world.

Yes, that six year gap in Bond films represented a significant time of change in world events. We had, in fact, entered an entirely new paradigm. And as was the case when a new generation came of age in the 1960s, the question which confronted the Bond franchise was renewed: is Bond still relevant as a character? The Cold War which had spawned him, as a literary character, was now over. In film, Bond had shown he could adapt to the audience of a new generation, but this was bigger. Circumstances had now changed, and there was no way the character of Bond could deny that. Was Bond, in this new paradigm, best left as a relic of the past? And that’s before we get to the little problem of finding someone to even play the character. Welcome to the Third Age of Bond.

GoldenEye
UK Release: November 24, 1995
US Release: November 17, 1995


“Beg your pardon. Forgot to knock.”

With any new actor playing Bond, it’s become tradition to tease the audience for a bit before we actually see his face. In the pre-credit sequence, we see the footsteps of someone running across the top of a dam. We see his hands as he secures a bungee rope to the railing on top of the dam. We see him from overhead as he’s preparing to jump. And then we see him in a continuous long shot on his descent, before he is occluded by silhouette. The message here: James Bond has lost none of his physicality.

Pierce Brosnan had been on EON’s radar for more than a decade, having made a favorable impression when he visited his wife on the set of For Your Eyes Only. In fact, he was the odds on favorite to replace Roger Moore when the time came, but his contractual commitments to the television show Remington Steele prevented that. When he finally landed the role, strangely, there was something of a reaction as to how credible he’d be playing an English spy, given that he’s Irish. I say strangely, because if how “English” the actor is becomes the metric being employed, why did no one seem to object to Mr. Connery (a Scotsman), Mr. Dalton (who has Welch roots) or Mr. Lazenby (an Australian) in the role? So what do we make of this new, fifth Bond?

First impressions, from the pre-credit sequence, this is a physical Bond. But he’s also a Bond who has a sense of humor. He isn’t inwardly drawn to a brooding extent the way Mr. Dalton portrayed him. He seems to occupy a space somewhere between Mr. Connery’s harder edged masculinity and Mr. Moore’s gentleman playboy. Mr. Brosnan, himself, indicated that his approach to the role was to find out what made Bond tick, as a character, and to do that, he needed to peel back the layers of the onion. And as the film progresses, what we find is a character who can be ruthless, brutal and resourceful, but can balance that by being charming, witty and urbane. None of those characteristics are over-done. Again, I come back to the idea that Mr. Brosnan is something of a synthesis between Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and that’s actually a tougher act to pull off than you might think- too much of one or the other, and you risk being branded a clone of the actors who came before you.


There’s a telling scene between Bond and M at the start of the second act. Bond enquires if the analysts who ruled out General Ouromov as a threat were same ones who thought the GoldenEye weapon couldn’t possibly exist: a direct challenge to the analyst side of intelligence gathering from which this new M came. M’s next question, and Bond’s response, verifies the low esteem in which Bond holds the desk-bound side of the espionage game. There’s also a subtext in this dialogue that these objections are heightened by the fact that the new M is a woman. That’s when M pounces, calling Bond a misogynistic dinosaur, and a relic of the cold war. Part of that is a way of the film openly dealing with the question of Bond’s relevance in this post-cold war reality. But another part of that is M establishing her spot on the pecking order at MI-6. Mr. Brosnon’s reactions are quite telling. His face reveals very little, his only response is “point taken.” But his eyes are speaking volumes. He quietly provoked a reaction in M, and took his cues as to how to deal with the fact that this womanizing spy’s new boss is a woman from how uncompromising and unequivocal her response was. So we have a new quality in Bond to consider- he can be subtle, too. He tested her mettle, found it to be made of pretty stern stuff, and decided she’d be okay as M after all.



As an action figure, Mr. Brosnan’s Bond doesn’t disappoint. He bungee jumps several hundred feet from the top of a dam, rides a motorcycle off a cliff to catch a crashing plane, fights off two people in the sauna of his hotel, fights his way out of a Russian jail (and destroys a fair portion of St. Petersburg in the process), and has a brutal fight with Trevelyan. He also knows how to use sex to get what he wants. He seduces the psychiatrist sent to evaluate him. He flirts with Xenia, first in a motorsports challenge, then at the casino. And when he learns that he’s going to have to take Natalya with him, as the only other computer programmer who can disarm the GoldenEye, he uses it as a reason to have some recreational love-making. Finally, there’s a return of that omnipresent awareness of every situation that was such a hallmark of the Connery years- he notices the fake license plate on Xenia’s Ferrari, he notes the Tiger helicopter in the harbor, and correctly deduces that’s Xenia’s target, he observes Natalya’s watch has stopped, and concludes she was the lone survivor of Severnaya. All told, this Bond is pretty good.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“The very words I live by.”

Let’s jump right into plot and theme this time around. New writer Michael France was recruited for this story, and his plot very quickly gets right to the question everyone going to see this movie had: in a world with no Soviet Union, what relevance does Bond have anymore? The answer is that while there may be no Soviet Union, there’s a legacy of the cold war that hasn’t yet been dealt with. Instead of a Communist regime, there are organized Russian crime syndicates perfectly capable of wielding the tools of that legacy. Case in point: the GoldenEye weapons. There’s a strain of thought that say this plot device was actually just an idea borrowed from Diamonds Are Forever. While I can understand that point of view, I disagree in that it’s too easy an explanation. The GoldenEye weapons were purpose built to be part of a space-based arsenal. Space-based weapons were very much an idea that came about in the last days of the cold war. Anyone remember Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative? And these weapons didn’t use diamonds to create some sort of laser, they fired an electromagnetic pulse, a far more sinister kind of ordinance. It doesn’t kill, it creates havoc by neutralizing anything with an electronic circuit. Everything from computers to cell phones, traffic signals to water and sewer plants, would be rendered in operable. You instantly consign any area subject to the EMP effect to a level of technology last seen in the seventeenth century. Experimenting with an EMP, an effect triggered by a nuclear explosion, is very much an idea of cold war origin.



You also had the Tiger helicopter, a military vehicle purpose built to withstand an EMP detonation. Again, a concept which had its origins during the cold war. Remember the Soviet’s attempts to get a pipeline into Zorin’s factory, where EMP-proof computer chips were being made in A View To A Kill?

Take these elements, and polish them up in a presentation that features personal computers and characters communicating via the internet, live satellite imagery and communications relayed by very large ground-based aerial dishes, and you get Bond for the 90s. Yes, governments may change, but the desire of some to do harm to others never goes out of style. That’s why the world needs Bond.



This story required Bond to travel to Russia for the first time in the franchise’s history (unless you count a Siberian beach in AVTAK.) It’s a Russia that’s rebuilding after the fall, where everyone is concerned with hard currency and paying for things in dollars rather than rubles. It’s a Russia where shifting alliances and corruption have replaced a top-down repression of the people. No scene better typifies this than the jail scene where Defense Minister Mishkin inquires of Bond, “by what means shall we execute you”? Bond’s response is another character subtlety: “What, no small talk? No chit chat? That’s the trouble with the world today. No one takes the time to do a really sinister interrogation anymore. It’s a lost art.” But Mishkin gets his questions answered, only to have Ouromov storm into the jail cell moments later and challenge him. “Do you even know who the enemy is anymore?” Ouromov asks, a question as much about life in post-Soviet Russia as it is a direct challenge to Mishkin’s civilian authority.



But where this film truly excels is in its theme. The pre-credits sequence set this up when we are led to believe that 006, Alec Trevelyan, is shot by General Ouromov. In fact, Trevelyan was working with Ouromov, so his death was staged. Trevelyan betrayed England, MI-6 and Bond. Betrayal is our theme.



Trevelyan is a Lienz Kossack, a fact Bond learns from Zukovsky. This is a group that worked for the Nazis against the Russians in the second world war. After the war, they surrendered to the British, who sent them back to Stalin, where they were promptly shot. Trevelyan wants to settle the score over that betrayal. Indeed, the very meeting where Bond learns this happens because he’s appealing to Zukovsky for help in finding the traitors that destroyed Severnaya.

Boris, the computer programmer who plays games with Natalya’s computer while hacking into the CIA’s database, betrays everyone at Severnaya by secretly being part of Ouromov’s plan to hijack the GoldenEye. He then compounds that by betraying Natalya a second time, once she gets to St. Petersburg.



When Bond isn’t given the proper password from Wade, he engages in a form of betrayal, slams a car door on him, points his Walther PPK at him, and demands to be shown the Rose. Bond also betrays Natalya’s confidence by calling Trevelyan’s bluff: “Kill her. She means nothing to me.” And then betrays his own words when he shoots Ouromov first.

In the middle of love-making, Xenia betrays the Admiral with whom she’s having a romp. She then attempts to do the same thing to Bond in the sauna of his hotel. Ouromov first lies to, and then betrays, Defense Minister Mishkin, killing him in the very cell where he’s been interrogating Bond. Even the name of Trevelyan’s organized crime enterprise- the Janus syndicate- is reference to the Roman god of two faces. Someone who is two-faced is skilled in the act of betrayal.

Nicely layered bits that inform the plot well. And this is before we get to one of the best car chase scenes ever in Bond movie- Bond driving a Russian tank through the streets of St. Petersburg, destroying everything in his path with ease.

“Half of everything is luck, James.”
“And the other half?”
“Fate.”



Actor Sean Bean was already known in the UK for playing Richard Sharpe, a maverick soldier in the British army in a series of made for television movies set during the Napoleonic wars. Outside the UK, audiences had been introduced to him playing Sean Miller, an obsessed IRA terrorist who targets CIA agent Jack Ryan and his family in the 1992 movie Patriot Games. Here, he plays our main villain, Alec Trevelyan, formerly agent 006. In a way, that history makes him one of the most formidable foes Bond has had to face because he knows MI-6, operationally. He also knows Bond, personally, and has even worked with him on missions in the past.

As intriguing as the idea of a rogue agent to serve as not only foe, but foil for Bond may be, let’s do a little character analysis. We know that, like Bond, Trevelyan was an orphan. That’s how MI-6 recruits its agents, since not having family is considered an asset. We also know that the reason he became an orphan was that his father, unable to live with the guilt of having survived Stalin’s slaughter of the Lienz Kossacks, killed his wife before committing suicide. MI-6’s mistake was in assuming Alec was too young at the time to remember this. Now we get into some conjecture. Presumably, he was recruited by MI-6 at an early age. We don’t know if he served any time in the military, as Bond had, but he was apparently successful enough as a spy to earn Double-O status. Now consider, he’s working for a government he has a serious grudge against- he blames the British for betraying the Kossacks, an act that ultimately had personal ramifications for him and his life. But he apparently suppressed this and simply did his job.

There apparently was a ‘last straw’ moment for him at some point, though. Consider this line: “Did you ever ask why? Why we toppled all those dictators, undermined all those regimes, only to come home: ‘Well done, good job, but sorry, old boy, everything you risked your life and limb for has changed.’” Something must have happened to him on one of his missions that left him feeling that the work he was doing was pointless. And he’s doing it for a government he hates. What does he do? Apparently, strike a bargain with one of that government’s foes, in this case, Col. Ouromov of the Soviet army. He fakes his own death, and sets up shop as an organized crime boss behind the iron curtain. From the on screen text immediately following the opening credits, the movie takes place nine years after the events of the pre-credit sequence. That means the incident where he staged his death happened in 1987, and he spent four years in the Soviet Union before it collapsed, building his crime syndicate and corrupting certain sectors of the Soviet military.



Like you’d expect from someone who had been a Double-O, he is witty, refined and quite capable. And he knows Bond quite well, calling him “her majesty’s loyal terrier,” and “last defender of the so-called faith.” He knows how Bond operates as well, to such an extent that he knows the right buttons to push. During a riveting scene in spooky yard littered with the relics of old Soviet statuary, Trevelyan shocks Bond by revealing himself as the head of Janus, and offers this line: “I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect.” Talk about making things personal!

But he shares some character traits with foes who have come before. He indicates that he considered offering Bond a position within Janus, just as Dr. No had considered offering Bond a job with SPECTRE, but knew Bond well enough to know he’d never accept. And he has a plan that’s somewhat reminiscent of Goldfinger’s Operation Grand Slam. The target of the second GoldenEye weapon is London, right after he’s used Boris to hack into every bank and government office computer to loot them. The GoldenEye will send southern Britain back into medieval times, and erase any record of the transactions at the same time.

Does he have a character flaw? Certainly. He’s competitive with Bond. Too competitive. He has a compulsive need to prove he’s better than Bond, better, in fact, than all of MI-6. And he becomes sloppy as a result. In Alec Trevelyan, you have a well crafted portrait of a personal foe, and Sean Bean pulled that off with aplomb.

“Oh, stop it both of you! Stop it! You’re like boys with toys.”

Before being cast as Natalya Simonova, Isabella Scorupco was something of a teen idol in Sweden. She’s actually Polish by birth, and speaks four languages fluently. The character of Natalya was written to further the line of strong, capable female characters to team up with, and to some extent, challenge Bond. She’s a computer programmer working at a secret Russian ground station from which the GoldenEye weapons are controlled. And it seems her computer skills are being underestimated by her superiors. While she’s not classically beautiful in the same way Carole Bouquet was, she’s certainly not unattractive.



She’s no damsel in distress, either. She survived the attack on Severnaya by out-thinking Xenia, and then having to be resourceful when the satellite dish collapsed. She knows how to be imperious with the salesman in the IBM office to gain access to a computer, and is smart enough to know how to use one of Boris’ “spikes” against him to determine where he’s hiding out. And she gets some great lines of dialogue, noting with disapproval that combining Bond with any form of transportation is a recipe for disaster.



Ms. Scorupco did a very nice turn in the part as the Bond girl. She was enthusiastic about the role and certainly made a nice pairing with Mr. Brosnan. My only complaint about the performance was her Russian accent- I didn’t find it as convincing as Famke Janssen’s or Gottfried John’s. In fact, at some points, it became a little distracting.

“Once again, the pleasure was all yours."

If you think about the 16 Bond films that preceded GoldenEye, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that there haven’t been a whole lot of females in villainous roles. In fact, that’s not necessary true. To start the third age of Bond, let’s recall some of the femme fatales Bond has faced down before: Col. Rosa Klebb (FRWL), Fiona Volpe (Thunderball), Helga Brandt (YOLT), Frau Irma Bunt (OHMSS), Naomi, the helicopter pilot (TSWLM), Fatima Blush (NSNA), and Mayday (AVTAK). It’s not a long list, granted, but it is an impressive one. Our latest lady to join these ranks is Ms. Xenia Onatopp, and may I just say what a pleasure it is to have a female role in Bond movie with a double-entrendre name again.

Amsterdam native Famke Janssen is a model turned actress who gets to layer on the villainy as Xenia, and she holds sway in her every scene. Prior to appearing in GoldenEye, her acting credits weren’t large, but she landed a guest role in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1992 and hasn’t looked back. I don’t know if it was a conscious choice of Ms. Janssen’s, but Xenia is played as being quite tactile- look at how she plays with the cigar as she describes to Bond how she likes her martinis.



So what do we know about Ms. Onatopp? Well, let’s start at the top. She is a native of Georgia and trained as a fighter pilot with the KGB. Her piloting skills were apparently quite sought after following the collapse of the Soviet Union by Janus. But somewhere along the line she developed a most curious fetish: she becomes sexually aroused inflicting or receiving pain. Think sadism meets nymphomania. Does she get excited at the prospect of pain because it makes her feel alive? One could certainly conclude that, because she does other dangerous things as well. She engages Bond in a rather dangerous road race, her Ferrari against his Aston Martin. She plays high stakes baccarat. She repels from helicopters. She enjoys train derailments. That may also explain why she’s so tactile- she thrives on her senses.

And on the tactile front, she has one additional party piece- the ability to crush people with her thighs. As weapons go, that’s a pretty intimate one.



It has to be said that Ms. Janssen was absolutely superb in the role. The scenes where she’s experiencing an orgasm while firing an AK47 into the crowd of workers at Severnaya could have been overdone, but actually achieved a comedic effect. She also layered in some touches of subtlety: look at her reaction as Bond tells her the license plates for that year start with the letter L. Perfectly pitched surprise and irritation at being exposed as fallible. And with apologies to Ms. Scorupco, Famke was the better looking woman in this film.

“If you think for one second that I don’t have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong.”

Bernard Lee had defined the character of M for two decades as both Bond’s spymaster and father figure. His M was intellectual, laconic and commanding. After Mr. Lee’s passing, the character of M was portrayed in five movies by Robert Brown, who always seemed to lack some of the sense of presence that Mr. Lee had. But we’re now in the 1990s, and Britain’s very real Security Service, MI-5, was at the time headed by a lady, Ms. Stella Rimington. So it was now time for MI-6 to go that direction as well.



Enter Dame Judi Dench, an actress with an extensive list of performance credits on stage, television and film. She has worked in everything from Shakespearian drama to television comedy. If there’s anyone who can step into a role Bernard Lee made famous, it was certainly Ms. Dench. Who else could you possibly have been cast that could credibly boss Bond around?

But there is an important distinction between Ms. Dench’s M and Mr. Lee’s. When Ian Fleming wrote the novels, as much as he may have wanted to be Bond himself, he actually saw himself as more like the character M. Running spy operations was, after all, what Mr. Fleming did during World War II, doing his best to confound the Germans. He therefore crafted M as someone who had, very likely, been a spy previously before getting kicked upstairs. This reflected itself in Mr. Lee’s portrayal, as he very clearly understood the need for, and risks inherent in, field operations for his Double-O’s.

Ms. Dench’s M, by contrast, was not a former field operative. She came from the dreary, analytical side of intelligence gathering, where data comes in and gets interpreted. Intercepted communiqués, hacked computers, satellite photographs, all the sort of pieces of information that can be assembled without putting an agent at personal risk go through the intelligence side of the spy business and they attempt to build it into a complete picture. People in the analytical side of things, as a result, don’t get their hands dirty.



This, obviously, doesn’t sit well with Bond. She has Bond evaluated by a staff psychologist, something Bond probably felt a little indignant about. She’s got a reputation within the Double-O section as the “evil queen of numbers.” And there’s a subtext that she’s just recently been appointed to the position. So she has to establish herself as Bond’s boss every bit as much as Mr. Brosnan has to establish himself as Bond. The good news is that since this is Judi Dench, she handles it quite deftly, and certainly gets her point across: don’t underestimate me as a woman, and as an intelligence analyst.

She comes across a bit harsh on Bond during their brief scenes together at the start of the second act because she has to make that impression. She knows exactly what she’s dealing with in Bond, and makes a point of countering his criticisms of her with some equally true observations about 007. But she does respect his talents, and in films to come in this third age, demonstrates that a bit more willingly.

One final note about Ms. Dench’s M – in fact, it’s a little secret – her character actually has a name: Barbara Mawdsley. Now you know what the M stands for.

“In London, April’s a spring month.”
“Oh yeah, and what are you, the weatherman? I mean, for crying out loud, another stiff-ass Brit with your secret codes and your passwords. One of these days, you guys are going to learn just to drop it.”



Returning to the Bond franchise after nine years, and this time not portraying a soldier for hire, is Joe Don Baker. He’s portraying CIA agent Jack Wade, which means Felix Leiter apparently wasn’t available. Or perhaps Felix retired after recovering from his shark fight in the last film.

Mr. Wade will also appear in the next film, but because his part in that film is so much smaller, it seems more appropriate we discuss him here. He is gruff, surly and colorful in his language. He has apparently been married at least three times. And the overall impression of him you get, as he batters the engine of his car with a sledgehammer, is someone who is world-weary. Indeed, the only thing that seems to inspire any sort of feeling is his gardening.



His role in this movie isn’t large, and usually there to provide a critical bit of information Bond needs to formulate a plan. He’s also there to add some levity to the film, and while that’s fine, it makes his character somewhat boorish.

“What is it with you and moving vehicles?”
After a six year hiatus in production, it’s probably not a surprise that John Glen wasn’t available to direct. A newcomer to the franchise was hired to do that, Martin Campbell. And as I said earlier, scriptwriting duties went to a new writer, Michael France. And I have to say the production looks marvelous. The film very nicely captures the glamour of Monte Carlo, the grim urban look of St. Petersburg, and the color and spectacle of the Caribbean.




There are two aspects of the production that deserve to be highlighted. The first is the car chase in St. Petersburg, if a tank pursuing a GAZ-3201 Volga qualifies as a chase. Some of that was filmed in St. Petersburg, but the majority of it was done at Leavesden studios in London. Regardless, I have to say the finished product makes quite an impact as the tank barrels through buildings, knocks cars into canals, smashes through trucks and carries statues on its back. I think that may rank as one of the most destructive car chases Bond has been involved with, and it was certainly compelling, visually. And it apparently took some four weeks to film.



The second is even better. It’s the fight scene between Trevelyan and Bond to climax the movie. The last time we had a fight scene this well choreographed was probably the duel between Bond and Grant in FRWL. And in keeping with how the production had a goal of getting back to some Bondian basics, they used the same formula of not playing music over it. All you heard, in addition to the grunts and shouts of the actors were the ambient sounds of chains clattering against walls and the grinding of gears as the aerial dish attempted to align itself with the GoldenEye. And it was very realistic, with both Messrs. Bean and Brosnan really going at it. There’s an intense frenetic energy in this final battle that simply does not let up, even when they cut away to show a scene of Boris frantically trying to get his signals to reach GoldenEye, or Natalya hijacking a helicopter. You genuinely do not know how this fight is going to end well for Bond.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t point out that this film, to date, made the most extensive use of models ever in a Bond film.

“Yes! I am in-wince-e-ble!”



A word about the stunning opening titles sequence. On just about every previous Bond film, designer Maurice Binder had created the opening titles. Sadly, he had passed away by the time this film went into production, so the baton to make a strong visual impression as the opening credits played was passed to Daniel Kleinman, and he had an advantage Mr. Binder never did: the ability to completely digitize the sequence in a computer. He also delivered something of a pictorial allegory of the movie itself. I have to say the opening credits of GoldenEye rank as one of my all time favorites in the Bond franchise. But not everyone agrees with me. Apparently, the communist party of several countries outside of Russia objected to imagery of women in bikinis swinging sledgehammers and chipping away at statues of Stalin and Lenin, even threatening to boycott the movie.

The Third Age of Bond, all told, successfully established the character of Bond for a new paradigm. It was impressive visually, Mr. Brosnan gave a fine performance, and you had one of the most personal villains Bond has ever had to face in Alec Trevelyan. But even more than that, the shining gem of this movie for her delicious villainy is Famke Janssen. Which is why I am giving an unreserved five turns in a Ferrari Spider G355 on a gravel surface out of a possible five.

James Bond will return in “Tomorrow Never Dies.”

[stanmore]

Yay! A Patrick 007 review in which I can agree with every word!

(And bonus points for not mentioning the pre-titles sequence being nonsense when put into context of the rest of the story...)

[Zoltar]

Your Bond reviews tend to be detailed, but quite a lot of work seems to have gone into that one. Nicely done.

I'd give it the same score, one of my faves.

[Patrick]

Stanmore and Zoltar,
Thank you very much for your positive comments. Yes, a lot of reasearch went into the six year gap. I had to do that. Bond has always been a product of his times. The times changed a great deal between 1989 and 1995. Don't worry, the next installment isn't far away. I have a certain Eocene cracking the whip on a potential book idea about these reviews. Nothing motivates a writer like a deadline.

[Nick Barlow]

Agree with that - sometimes it's hard to remember how fresh GoldenEye seemed when it led to the Moore-esque pointless excess and ridiculous plots of the rest of the Brosnan era.

Oh, and there's now a Skyfall trailer if anyone's interested...

[Patrick]

Ooo! The new Skyfall trailer. I've been waiting to see this since I first heard about it. I love the word association game: "Murder?" "Employment."

[Patrick]

There were three treaties, the most recent of which dated from 1898, which stated the terms under which Britain held Hong Kong as a territory. The terms of the treaty specified a 99 year lease, and on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China. The writers for Bond’s eighteenth movie apparently decided to use the historic occasion to create a story about a looming war between China and Britain. And in so doing, they would initiate the tendency of the writers in this Third Age of Bond to recycle bits of story lines used previously within the franchise.

I can’t say I’m entirely on board with that decision. There’s a truism when it comes to professions like writing: creativity is the art of concealing your sources.

Tomorrow Never Dies
UK Release: December 12, 1997
US Release: December 19, 1997



[Paris slaps Bond]
“Was it something I said?”
“How about the words ‘I’ll be right back.’”

Let’s take it as a given that with Pierce Brosnan, you’re going to have a degree of physicality on display. Perhaps not as much as you got with Mr. Connery or Mr. Dalton, but certainly enough to tick the necessary boxes for an action-adventure espionage yarn. He does a fair amount of running around in Carver’s newspaper offices, renders unconscious half a dozen of Carver’s goons in a soundproof recording studio, performs a high altitude/low opening parachute jump into the South China Sea before scuba diving to the wreck of a British ship, jumps off a building, goes racing around Saigon on a motorcycle while handcuffed to someone, and has to fight off Carver’s henchman.



But remember what Mr. Brosnan said going into the production of GoldenEye? He wanted to peel back the layers of the onion concerning the character of Bond, and find out what makes him tick. Here, we get to see two sides of Bond. The first is reluctance. As soon as Elliot Carver’s name crops up as a possible suspect, Bond knows that it portends a meeting with a former paramour of his. More than that, it means his return into her life is almost certainly going to put her in jeopardy. He is clearly reluctant to do this, until M orders him to “pump” Mrs. Carver for information. When she shows up in his hotel room (not altogether a surprise), he is again reluctant to pick up where their relationship left off, even attempting to thwart, albeit half-heartedly, her advances. Is this why Bond’s string of dalliances apparently shows no signs that a woman gets a second chance with him? He knows he puts them in danger? Even as she departs, giving Bond the secret way into Carver’s building, Bond is almost begging her not to do this. This is a very different side of Bond. We’ve seen him be protective before, but we’ve not seen him actively try to turn a woman (or the information she offers) away.



The second is a curious one- true enjoyment. Shortly after the inevitable happens, and Paris is found dead in Bond’s hotel room, he has to affect an escape with the GPS encoder he took from Carver’s headquarters. He uses one of Q’s gadgets to this – a phone that can act as a remote control for his BMW. He jumps through a window into the back seat, and proceeds to engage in one of the most unusual car chase scenes ever put on film. Watch his face. At several points, he’s almost gleeful as he unloads the arsenal of devices his 750li comes equipped with to confound Carver’s goon squad. I say this is rather curious, because he’s just come from a confrontation with “the doctor” who killed Paris. It’s almost as though, with Paris dead, a weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

So, if we’re building something of a personality gestalt on Bond in this Third Age, we’ve now learned that he can be ruthless, he can be subtle, he can show reluctance towards certain aspects of his work, and he can, alternatively, really get a kick out of certain aspects of his work. We’ll see where this takes us in future films.

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”



Elliot Carver serves the role of villain in this story. He is a self-made media mogul, apparently worth billions. He is egotistical, clearly loves the sound of his own voice, demanding, unforgiving of mistakes, and prone to flying into a rage when things don’t go exactly to plan. In other words, he is Ted Turner, the creator of CNN, taken only a few steps further. Now, while it’s true that having someone who represents the media is a new kind of villain for Bond, the first problem that crops up in this film is just exactly what Carver is after: broadcast rights in China.

For all his quoting of William Randolf Hurst, and his plans to slime the president and release bug-ridden software (although, what a media company is doing releasing computer software is a bit perplexing), his sole motivation is to be king of the hill when it comes to the delivery of news, worldwide. And to ensure that happens, he’s prepared to do more than merely report the news, he’s going to invent it. He’s going to start a war between Britain and China. And here, the ugly visage of implausibility rises up to haunt this film.



Ah, but we’re not done, at least character-wise. How, you ask, does he plan to get these nations to go to war in the same year that Britain has returned Hong Kong to China? By an overly-complicated bit of satellite misdirection of a British naval vessel, a stealth boat undetectable to radar, and a jagged-tooth sea-vac. The face of implausibility is now frowning. And that’s before we get to his sartorial tastes: Nehru suits in black or dark grey.

Jonathan Pryce portrays Carver as a frenetic megalomaniac. The problem is he is simply miscast in this role. This is the same Jonathan Pryce who innocently made himself an enemy of the state in “Brazil,” attempting to track down a bug in the psychotically bureaucratic system. The same Jonathan Pryce who, to American audiences, shot suction darts at Lexus automobiles in television commercials throughout the 90s. Rather than coming across as menacing, he appears merely to be a hot-headed tyrant.



Consider this scene, as an example: Bond, having just dealt with several of Carver’s German thugs in the sound studio, pulls the plug on Carver’s inaugural broadcast of his new channel, CMGN. The lights go out in the main broadcast studio, on Carver. When it’s explained to him that no one knows exactly how they were taken off the air, he snaps at the woman- his PR hostess for the event- “YOU’RE FIRED! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!” And he does this on stage in front of a live audience. He doesn’t inspire trepidation in the audience that his nefarious scheme might actually succeed, he just reminds you of the worst boss you’ve ever had.

“They’ll print anything these days.”


As long as the specter of implausibility is hanging around, this is as good a time as any to get into a discussion on plot. I’d say theme, too, but this film doesn’t have one. I’ve decided to create a little game out of it this time around. I’m going to give you some of the relevant plot points of this film, and I want you, dear reader, to see if these items, taken as a whole, remind you of anything that’s come before in the Bond franchise. We’ll call it “The Recycling Game.” Here we go:

- The villain’s ability to draw naval vessels off course.
- The manipulation of two powerful nations to the brink of war.
- A megalomaniac villain who dresses in Nehru suits.
- A physical villain who is apparently impervious to pain.
- Bond gets to drive a completely impossible car.
- The villain’s super-secret boat, from which said war will be initiated.
- Bond must team up with the (female) agent of an enemy nation’s secret service.
- The propensity of said (female) agent to get herself caught by the villain on several occasions.

If you said The Spy Who Loved Me, congratulations! You have won the first round of “The Recycling Game.” If you didn’t, don’t worry, there are still two more chances in this particular Age of Bond where you can participate.

The problem with recycling these plot points but dressing them differently is that they don’t fool audiences. This has come before, and even if some audience members don’t pick up on all of these clues, they will pick up on enough of them to know that this isn’t an absolutely new idea. Worse, it represents lazy writing. It’s almost an admission that the writers didn’t have an original idea for a story, so they thought they’d re-write one that got made twenty years earlier.



Now, even if you’re okay with that, as a method of delivering a script, the problem then becomes the implausibility of certain elements of the story, itself. First problem: a ship possessing military-grade stealth technology isn’t exactly something you can go to a coastal boat-builder and order. An item like that is something governments, particularly intelligence services, are going to want to make sure they know who is attempting to acquire. Between the British and the Americans, did no one know Elliot Carver had come into possession of such a ship? Did no one think to find out why Elliot Carver, a private citizen with a media empire, felt he needed a ship invisible to radar?

Second problem: the HMS Devonshire is apparently slowly brought off course by a satellite based misdirection of its on-board GPS locator. And the implication, at least visually on the screen, is that it was Carver’s CMGN satellite that managed this, at the command of Mr. Gupta. Sadly, this rather convenient explanation for making a naval vessel think it’s 70 miles from where it actually is overlooks the fact that ships still use navigational charts to plot their course. Someone on board would have known if they were off course long before the Chinese Migs began overflying them.



But the biggest problem with this plot is the very thing Carver described as the most important part of any story: the why of it. Carver wants the rights to broadcast CMGN in China, and to get them, he’s going to strike a deal with a General in the Chinese army, manipulate the circumstances to start a shooting war in the South China Sea, and fire a missile at Beijing. It isn’t even for ratings, it’s to increase the possible size of the audience that might watch his network. And as illogical as that sounds, it pales in comparison to the implausibility of the notion that no one in any intelligence service the world over had even the slightest inkling that Carver was doing more than launching a new cable channel. I’m sorry, that just beggars belief. This is the same man who’s blackmailing the president with an incriminating video tape, who ruined the reputation of a British cattle baron, who boasts openly about toppling governments with a single broadcast, and he hasn’t risen to the level of warranting at least a little attention from intelligence agencies of those with whom he’s confounded in the past?



Again, this comes back to is lazy writing. What these implausible plot holes tell you is that the production this time around was so focused on creating a visual feast for the eyes that they glossed over some pretty important points in the script. And it’s a shame, because the idea of Bond going up against a media tycoon could have been a really interesting concept to explore.

“Don’t get any ideas, Mr. Bond.”



Michelle Yeoh is actually Malaysian by birth, and was fluent in Malay and English before studying Chinese. She actually briefly learned ballet at the Royal Academy in London before turning her interests to modeling, after a fashion, and won beauty pageants in Malaysia and Australia. Then she began doing work making television commercials with Jackie Chan, before graduating to movies. It was during this period of her career that she convinced Mr. Chan to let her do some stunt work, and this put her in the perfect position to be cast as Wai Lin.

Now, there can be no doubt that in playing an agent of the Chinese People’s External Security Force, she was absolutely marvelous in her fight scenes. And she does have some on-screen chemistry with Mr. Brosnan. But there are a couple of aspects to her character that appear to be inconsistencies. First, how is it that both Bond and Wai Lin break into Carver’s headquarters in Hamburg, but its only Bond the security guards go after, even though a woman in a red leather catsuit is walking sideways down a pillar? Okay, we can probably chalk that up to the security guards simply being sexist.



But the second is more difficult to reconcile. By the time Bond and Wai Lin manage to get to Carver’s stealth boat, we’ve already had ample evidence of just how good she is in a fight. So how is it that she manages to get herself caught, twice, by Carver’s henchmen? The obvious answer is that she needed to be caught twice, in order to raise the stakes for Bond, and that it didn’t happen more organically out of the plot itself is more evidence of lazy writing.

Well, we can’t blame Ms. Yeoh for poor writing. Her performance was certainly spirited, and on the attributes side, she is unquestionably beautiful.

“This job of yours… it’s murder on relationships."



So brief was Paris Carver’s appearance in this film, that she didn’t even get a wardrobe change. In fact, her only purpose in this film is to deliver the information Bond needs to get into Carver’s headquarters and find the GPS encoder. And yet, from her short re-entrance into Bond’s life, and her apparent eagerness to get back into his bed, we can deduce that she isn’t particularly happy in her marriage to Elliot Carver. If Carver is as bad a husband as he is a boss, you can hardly blame her for that, but it’s still a little surprising just how willing she was to betray Carver, even over Bond’s attempts to turn her away. She either doesn’t realize she’s in danger by renewing her dalliance with 007, or she doesn’t care. And whatever the correct answer is, it speaks volumes for where her character is nine years after her first encounter with Bond.

Actress Teri Hatcher plays Paris Carver as the more elegant of the two females in this film, mainly given that she has Mr. Carver’s money to spend on clothes. Although she’d had roles as one-off characters in television shows dating back to the early 1980s, her first big acting break came playing one of the titular characters in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman.” That show had just finished a four year run on television, and she was off to make Tomorrow Never Dies. And according to interviews she gave in the DVD extras, it was mainly at the insistence of her husband that she took the part, as he wanted to be able to boast he was married to a Bond girl.

On the acting front, there isn’t really a whole lot to find fault with in her performance, because it is so brief. But one comes away from the film feeling like her character was completely wasted because the appearance was so brief.

“I owe you an unpleasant death, Mr. Bond.”

Given that Tomorrow Never Dies is a re-hashing of The Spy Who Loved Me, Mr. Stamper is this film’s version of Jaws, sans the metal teeth. He is relentless, apparently impervious to pain or injury, on the tall side, just to make him look imposing, and not the brightest bulb in the pack. The difference is Mr. Stamper is packaged up to look a bit like an Aryan Youth promotional poster, which, unfortunately means he also gets to speak.



This is not to criticize Götz Otto’s performance as an actor. It’s just that the character of Mr. Stamper was such a cliché it was, at times, painful to watch. Did the writers simply run out of ideas after creating Xenia Onatopp last time? I mean, if Elliot Carver is everyone’s worst boss, Mr. Stamper was the neighborhood bully writ large.

“I am a professor of forensic medicine. Believe me, Mr. Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart and still create ze proper effect.”

One of the only places where this film does actually stand up well is in the cinematography. This film is, truly, a visual feast, from the high tech party at Carver’s headquarters with the laser light show going on throughout the room, to how they staged the gun-fight at the terrorist bazaar in the pre-credits sequence. And if this film was going to be a re-cycled version of TSWLM, the fight aboard Elliot’s stealth boat to climax the movie was as intense an action sequence as the storming of the command center aboard the Lipaurus.



And dressed as it was, you had a very nice contrast half way through the film between the modern, obsessively clean Germany and the more organic, earthy feel of Southeast Asia. Two scenes that effectively demonstrate this contrast are both of the significant chase scenes. In one, Bond is operating big, powerful BMW 7-series from a remote control built into his cell phone from the back seat of the German luxo-barge, and the entire scene takes place within the well organized interior of a parking structure. Everything we see from start to finish is sleek, efficient and neat- from the henchmen’s attempts to stop Bond’s car, to Bond’s car throwing out gadget after gadget to thwart them.




In the other, Bond has to hastily steal a bike (another BMW product on display), and ride handcuffed to Wai Lin through the confused and crowded streets of Saigon. The scene is a frenzy of chaos as Bond and bad guys (driving Land Rovers) have to negotiate back alleys with all kinds of debris, makeshift market places, warehouse docks loaded with packaged fireworks, and the teeming throngs of people throughout. Bond even rides around on the rooftop of several buildings, get caught by clotheslines and hanging laundry. And no review of this movie would be complete without giving high praise for the motorcycle jump that highlights this particular chase. The use of green screen CGI to put that whole scene together was astonishing and completely convincing.

“Warning! Unsafe driving will void warranty!”



One of the worst aspects of this film, at least for me, was opening title song. It was as uninteresting as it was lame. The song, “Tomorrow Never Dies” ranks as one of the worst compositions to open a Bond film in the history of the franchise. And that’s before I get the chanteuse who performed it. I have yet to hear a song by Cheryl Crow that didn’t induce in me a painful reaction in my lower spine that compelled me to want to get up and run from the room. That gravel quality to her voice, the lack of any sense of rhythm, and a vocal range roughly the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner, all combine to make this an opening theme song that, for the first time since I’d started going to see Bond movies in theaters, had me second guessing if I’d done the right thing in plunking my money on a ticket.

This, unfortunately, leaves only the visual feast of this film as its only redeeming feature. Elliot Carver was a two dimensional villain, his henchman was even worse. The plot not only stretched plausibility beyond its snapping point, it wasn’t even an entirely original idea. I’m afraid even a reasonably good performance by Mr. Brosnan can’t even save this film. Tomorrow Never Dies was just not a worthy follow up to GoldenEye, which is why it gets two chakra torture devices out of a possible five.

James Bond will return in “The World Is Not Enough.”

[stanmore]

I agree with all of this again! I get a hattrick of agreeing with Patrick if he thinks that TWINE is alright...

I remember Goldeneye being the most important thing in the world in the playground when I was ten. Tomorrow Never Dies was just another film.

[Patrick]

We shall see, Stanmore. I'm hoping to get TWINE up before next weekend is up.

[The Co=Ordinator]

The Third Age of Bond, all told, successfully established the character of Bond for a new paradigm. It was impressive visually, Mr. Brosnan gave a fine performance, and you had one of the most personal villains Bond has ever had to face in Alec Trevelyan. But even more than that, the shining gem of this movie for her delicious villainy is Famke Janssen. Which is why I am giving an unreserved five turns in a Ferrari Spider G355 on a gravel surface out of a possible five.

I agree wholeheartedly. Goldeneye is a tremendous movie, one of the very best Bonds and I also give it 5/5.

[The Co=Ordinator]

This, unfortunately, leaves only the visual feast of this film as its only redeeming feature. Elliot Carver was a two dimensional villain, his henchman was even worse. The plot not only stretched plausibility beyond its snapping point, it wasn’t even an entirely original idea. I’m afraid even a reasonably good performance by Mr. Brosnan can’t even save this film. Tomorrow Never Dies was just not a worthy follow up to GoldenEye, which is why it gets two chakra torture devices out of a possible five.

Once again I agree with both your analysis and rating Fast Liver.

So many things wrong with this movie. To name but a few:
The miscasting of Pryce (an actor I have huge respect for) and Hatcher (am I right in thinking her part was cut because she was such a cow?)
The fall out between director and cast.
The script.
The theme music.
Even the title - it should have been left as Tomorrow Never Lies.

The one saving grace for me is the late Vincent Schiavelli's cameo as Dr. Kauffman. Now that is awesome, 10/10.



It's 653 km from Stuttgart to Hamburg. That must be some shot!

[Patrick]

Must be some gun.

Glad you enjoyed both, C=O. I'm hopeful that I'll finish up all four of the remaining movies before the end of June. It seems a certain Eocene of our mutual acquaintance thinks I should compile all my reviews into a book, so that it can be released in e-book form just in time for the UK release of Skyfall.

[barnaby morbius]

i think you're about right on TND- i got the impression that there was a better film struggling to get out. brosnan does a decent job, though.

i'm no fan of sheryl crow either but sadly, worse was to c ome...

[The Co=Ordinator]

It seems a certain Eocene of our mutual acquaintance thinks I should compile all my reviews into a book, so that it can be released in e-book form just in time for the UK release of Skyfall.

Blue Hour Publishing is seemingly going from strength to strength!

[Patrick]

Blue Hour Publishing is seemingly going from strength to strength!

You are too kind, C=O. Thank you.

Now, pay no attention to this post beyond my gratitude for C=O. I'm trying to advance this thread to the next page, because I've already posted too many pictures here. Bogs down the active RAM when loading the page. Stay with us... normal service will be resumed with my review of TWINE shortly.

[Patrick]

Think of this post as Bond, having just crashed a hang-glider in the Amazonian jungle, finding a succession of beautiful women who tempt him forward to a fatal rock.

Just more filler before the real story re-commences.

[Patrick]

Think of this post as Bond, stepping upstairs at Piz Gloria, and finding a bevy of beautiful women. Some of whom seem intent in writing their room numbers on his thy in lipstick.

Being Bond must be a real chore. A chore one rises to meet, with hardness.

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