Re: Universal Exports - The James Bond Thread

[Nick Barlow]

Agree with the comments about TND - for me, it and TWINE suffer from villains who go to ridiculously elaborate lengths to achieve some quite mundane outcomes. And Carver looks quite mundane compared to Murdoch in the real world.

Nice stunts, shame about the plot.

[Patrick]

The thing about TWINE is that, while Elektra's plot is a bit involved, you can believe it more readily than you can Carver's. Part of that is down to the fact that once again, we have left over Soviet materials getting snatched up by villains (a very real world problem), and part of that is down to the motivation of villain. Elektra wants to become her own OPEC. Carver just wants a larger audience.

[Patrick]

We have arrived at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, we’ve arrived at the end of the millennium. And while all of us were obsessing about the potential for computer codes the world over not to be able to recognize the date change on January 1, 2000, and thus experience civilization plunged back to the middle ages, the makers of the Bond franchise had latched onto an idea for a story that came about from an episode of the news program Nightline. In 1997, a vast new find in oil had been discovered around the Caspian Sea, and the wealth this find had created was transforming several former Soviet states into prosperous nations. It was also resulting in a competition between several oil barons to be the first to build a pipeline to get this oil onto the world market.

But 1999 was also the thirtieth anniversary of a most unusual Bond film. And as they’d done with Tomorrow Never Dies, the film makers opted to note that anniversary with an homage to something that had come before, even borrowing the title from a scene in that earlier movie.

The World Is Not Enough
UK Release: November 22, 1999
US Release: November 19, 1999


“Can’t you just say ‘hello,’ like a normal person?”

In his third expedition as Bond, Pierce Brosnan appears more relaxed in the role, even to the point of being able to joke a bit more about the situations around him, such as how he knows what Q’s reaction will be to having his gadget laden car sliced in half. He continues to very skillfully navigate the narrow space between Sean Connery’s sophisticated brute in a fine suit, and Roger Moore’s unserious playboy with the arsenal of bon mots. And his physicality is again on display- in the pre-credits sequence alone (the single longest pre-credits sequence in the franchise’s history, at approximately 14 minutes), he manages to repel down the side of building using the cord from some window blinds, engage in a power boat chase on the Thames, and do a freefall from a hot air balloon onto the newly completed Millennium Dome.



He is also a bit more subdued in this film, likely a result of the fact that the tone of this film was a bit more scaled back from the frenzy of TND. And I don’t mean subdued in the sense that his performance lacked energy, merely that it was more measured. We’ve already established in this Third Age of Bond that 007 can apply subtlety to gauge the reaction it gets, he can ruthless when he needs to be, that there are certain aspects of his job that he doesn’t like, and conversely, several aspects he enjoys immensely. So, as we reveal yet more layers of the onion, what did we learn from TWINE?



For starters, that he isn’t completely infallible. He thinks he’s found, in Electra King, exactly the same sort of woman he’d found (and married) in Traci. He becomes protective of her, not just in a body-guard type of relationship. He allows himself to develop feelings for her. And to merely get to the point where he can be her protector, he’s prepared to cheat in his medical examination with Dr. Molly Warmflash (heck of a name, there) to be provided a clean bill of health, even though his shoulder clearly isn’t mended. And he did this on the strength of watching videos of Elektra, following her release. When he discovers that Renard isn’t coming after Elektra, that he’s somehow in league with her, his sympathetic feelings lead him to a false conclusion: she’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, a form of paradoxical psychological relationship in which captors develop positive feelings for their abductors, sometimes even to the point of defending them. He maintains that belief even after M is kidnapped, and only has his eyes opened when Elektra explains her full intentions, and that it was all her idea from the start. Renard didn’t turn her, she turned him. And Bond misjudged the situation all along.



TND established the fact that Bond could show reluctance towards certain aspects of his work, and the other side of that is expressed in TWINE: Bond finds the idea of killing Elektra distasteful, but after she’s kidnapped his boss, and threatened to irradiate 8 million people in Istanbul, he shows no compunction at the task when he’s pushed. This is definitely a more character driven Bond this time around, and Mr. Brosnan made full use of that in his performance.

“I could have given you the world.”



Just how psychologically damaged is Elektra King, and when did that damage start? The clues provided indicate it began long before she was kidnapped by Renard. The subtext is that her father, Sir Robert King, hadn’t actually made the oil company that was now building pipeline through some of the most dangerous areas of Azerbaijan and Turkey; he had married into the family, and inherited it when his father-in-law passed away without leaving a male heir. Elektra apparently sees that oil as hers, by virtue of her birth, and her father as something of a British interloper. In that sense, she’s very well named, since her classical Greek namesake had real enmity for her stepfather, and plotted to kill him.

All would probably have continued likely with something of a strained relationship between herself and Sir Robert had it not been for her kidnapping. Renard himself said it to M: “when I found her, she was promise itself.” What an odd thing to say. He didn’t say, “she was innocence itself,” he made a reference to innocence’s opposite: experience. She saw the kidnapping as an opportunity, and that’s a pretty twisted conclusion to arrive at for someone who’s suffered the trauma of being taken captive. So her damage/enmity with her father began long before the kidnapping, and she effectively used the kidnapping as a means to put a plan of action against her father into effect.



Couple all this with her obvious vanity, and her manipulation of circumstances to lure M out of Britain so she’d be in a position to kidnap Bond’s boss, and you have something of a high functioning sociopath. All that, and she was able to fool Bond time and again. Bond thought he’d found Traci again, instead, he’d found Blofeld.



All of this makes the character of Elektra King as layered and flawed as some of the best villains in the Bond canon. In the end, it was her own vanity that caused her to underestimate Bond. And her character works because it completely blows the expectations for a Bond girl out of the water. We’ve never had a Bond girl as the principal villain of the piece. And this one appears to have a fixation with ice cubes.

Experienced French actress Sophie Marceau clearly relished this role, and played it with just the right nuance to fool everyone, until it was time to drop the pretense. And then she demonstrated just how ruthless she could be, shooting Zukovsky through his nephew’s Captain’s hat. Although she has a fairly extensive list of credits to her name, the one which most audiences will know her for prior to TWINE was as the unrequited Princess Isabelle in Braveheart.

“Construction isn’t my specialty.”
“Quite the opposite, in fact.”



This movie is working at a theme involving first impressions being wrong. I’ve already gone about Bond misjudging Elektra. We also have a known terrorist who, by all rights, ought to be dead from a bullet inside his head. Elektra shows up ostensibly to play a game of cards in Zukovsky’s casino, and this turns out to have been a payoff to bring a Russian sub, captained by Zukovsky’s nephew, to Elektra’s castle in Istanbul. When the sub arrives, the crew think they’re being wined and dined, when in fact they’re being poisoned. The three million pounds Bond retrieves from the Swiss bankers is actually a carefully constructed bomb, and it takes the rightful owner of that money to set it off. At first glance, it appears Elektra’s pipeline is under frequent attack by her competitors who want to shut the pipeline down, until it’s revealed that Elektra herself has been organizing the attacks in order to lure MI-6, and specifically M, into a trap. Bond gets in on this wrong first impressions game by allowing the bomb affixed to the pipeline car to detonate, letting everyone think they’ve just witnessed 007’s death.

But theme aside, we also have the second edition of The Recycling Game at play. Here are a few of the relevant plot points:

- An emotionally scarred woman, prone to taking dangerous risks, that Bond feels protective over.
- Bond and the woman are caught in an avalanche.
- Earlobes being cut off.
- In a skiing incident, one of the bad guys appears to take a fall off a cliff.
- The woman’s father operates a construction company.
- Bond’s family motto is revealed.

The correct answer, of course, is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But unlike what they did in Tomorrow Never Dies, the writers this time (Neil Purvis & Robert Wade), apparently aware of what went wrong in the previous movie, crafted a tale which gave us Bond’s first ever female villain, but also a villain we initially think is a victim recovering from the trauma of being kidnapped, and her father’s recent death. It’s a clever way to playing against expectations, even if some of the plot points from a movie thirty years previous get re-used.



They’ve also solved the problem of an overly convoluted and ridiculous plot by shrinking the scale and making the interactions between the characters more intimate. It succeeds on this level because the story itself allows for more character driven scenes, in between the action pieces. That’s not to say it’s perfect. There are two characters in this story that are simply awful tacked on additions (more on them in a bit), and the idea that M could be so easily manipulated to go to Istanbul is a bit hard to accept.

There aren’t any particular plot holes, besides the M-goes-to-Istanbul question. In fact, the only complaint, plot-wise, I can find about this movie is that it loses a certain amount of its energy after Bond kills Elektra. That only leaves Renard to be dealt with, and aboard the cramped quarters of the stolen Russian sub, as it goes off-kilter in angle, the architecture of that scene became a little difficult to follow. It’s also a bit over-long in execution.



We’re doing much better at this point than we did in TND. And we’re still dealing with the post-Cold War theme of the Soviet Union’s legacy of dangerous weapons and how well the new Russian regime can keep them out of the wrong hands- a very topical issue in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“A man tires of being executed.”



Viktor Zokas, nicknamed “Renard,” (French for “the fox”) is the man we initially think is exacting revenge for the bullet put in his head. He’s killed Sir Robert King using a bomb delivered to the man by MI-6. And it appears, initially, his next target is to be his own kidnap victim. After all, it was as a direct result of kidnapping her that one of M’s double-ohs fired the gun that put the bullet in his head. A bullet that’s ultimately going to kill him. It turns out that Renard is actually Elektra’s henchman, doing the dirty work for her.

Ordinarily, that kind of reveal would make Renard less interesting. But the presence of the bullet in his head, killing off nerve endings so that he feels no pain, and can push himself further and harder until the bullet finally reaches the center of his brain and turns it off, makes him dangerous. He has nothing to lose, which is why he’s agreed to go on this suicide mission for the woman who turned him. And, at least in this film, we get an explanation for a character who cannot feel pain. That explanation is not as farfetched as you might think.



Robert Carlyle burst into the public eye with two films in 1997 that showed not only his dramatic range, but his comedic instincts as well: Trainspotting and The Full Monty. Here, he plays a terrorist who’s actually fallen in love with his own kidnap victim. Watch the dynamic between Carlyle and Marceau in the bedroom scene at her Istanbul stronghold. He actually expresses some tenderness for her, which she barely acknowledges at first, until he puts his hand through a glass table. Only then, when Elektra pulls shards of glass out of his hand, does she seem interested in him again. She thrives on his inability to be hurt.

“I’m looking for a submarine. It’s big and black, and the driver is a very good friend of mine."



Although we met Valentin Dimitrovitch Zukovsky in GoldenEye, his appearance in that movie was so brief, that this film seems like a better place to profile him. Zukovsky is a character very easy to understand: he used to be KGB before the Soviet Union collapsed, and from that, we can deduce that he probably lived pretty well behind the iron curtain. After the fall, he decided to get with the times and attempt to capitalize (pun intended) on the free market economy. When we first meet him, he’s running something of a seedy nightclub in St. Petersburg. Now, he’s apparently advanced himself to own a casino conveniently near some of the newly discovered oil fields, and he’s expanded into making his own brand of caviar. The consistency in all this: Zukovsky has a streak of greed in him. But his greed isn’t such that he rises to the level of a threat for Bond.

He is one of those amiable rogues Bond gets to team up with, more in this film than he did in GoldenEye. Zukovsky is a rogue- make no mistake. His legitimate businesses (the casino, the caviar factory) mask the fact that he is still into organized crime, and is not above using his casino to arrange a payoff. Most of this movie, he’s used largely as a comedic foil to ponder about the destruction that always seems to follow Bond around. But that takes nothing away from Robbie Coaltrane’s comedic timing.



There is one scene that underscores the relationship between Zukovsky and Bond: it’s the one where he appears to shoot Bond with his dying breath, and in fact frees him so Bond can get Elektra for him. A glance passes between the two characters, as Bond is still trapped in Elektra’s spine-breaking machine: a look of professional respect. Nice touch, that. I suppose they had to write Zukovsky out, since he was about to spend the next decade as Hagrid.

“You want to put that in English, for those of us who don’t speak spy.”



Rapper ‘Goldie’ plays Bullion, Zukovsky’s duplicitous henchman in a performance as forgettable as Goldie himself. His sole reason for being in this movie is to plant a bomb on Zukovsky as soon as he gets too close to the truth. He is a character who simply cannot be taken seriously, with those gold teeth, absurd gold-encrusted shirt and his walk. That’s definitely not an actor’s walk. He is a completely ridiculous addition to this story, and that’s a shame, because on balance, more things were going right for TWINE than wrong. Ah, but it gets worse.



Once it’s revealed that Elektra is the villain, Bond needs a replacement Bond girl. The story indicated she was to be “brainy” and “athletic.” Sadly, the actress they found to fill this role, a nuclear physicist named Dr. Christmas Jones, assigned to dismantle left-over Soviet nuclear missiles, was Denise Richards. Ms. Richards might be called “brainy” if the comparison is to single celled organisms. And she might be called “athletic” if the comparison is to the average street lamp. She might even be called an actress if the comparison is to an old growth redwood tree. None of those terms, however, apply to her performance here. This is a miscasting that almost makes Tonya Roberts in AVTAK look reasonable in comparison. Her comedic timing, delivering lines like “isn’t it time you unwrapped your present,” is simply pitiful to listen to. She has this almost constant expression of complete vapidity on her face- not a good sign for a nuclear physicist.

Sorry, but both of these characters truly hurt this film, almost to the point of being deal breakers.

“Why am I suddenly worried I’m not carrying enough insurance?”



Producer Michael G. Wilson described the director, Michael Apted, as a “performance director,” and he needed to be in order to make the relationships between Bond, Elektra and Renard work. He took his time with those scenes, but that didn’t prevent him from having some fairly significant action sequences, too. The pre-credits sequence was discussed earlier. But we also returned to Bond on form skiing, for some excellent cinematography in a race against some parahawk snowmobiles. And the helicopter-mounted cutting device systematically destroying Zukovsky’s caviar factory was done quite nicely, too. In fact, the only part of this film that became a problem were the scenes in the Russian sub. When you tilt the set 90-degrees, so that the walls become the floor and the ceiling, it makes reading the layout of the scene, particularly around the nuclear reactor, a bit difficult to follow.

It should be noted that other than some establishing shots, none of this movie was actually filmed in either Istanbul or Azerbaijan, mainly owing to a terrorist bombing that had taken place in Istanbul not long before principal photography was to begin on TWINE.



Prior to the movie’s release, there was a rumor that this film, being the last Bond movie of the century, would feature some previous actors from the Bond films. And, after a fashion, it did. On the wall behind M’s desk at MI-6’s Scottish headquarters was a picture of Bernard Lee. In the warehouse the Russians had converted into a listening post in Istanbul, there were several pin-ups on one wall. Those pin-ups were pictures of former Bond girls, most notably Famke Janssen (the largest of the pictures.)

“Right, pay attention Bond. I’ve always tried to teach you two things. First: never let them see you bleed.”
“And the second?”
“Always have an escape plan.”



No commentary on TWINE would be complete with mentioning the dedication that came at the end credits of the DVD releases on this film. Shortly after the movie premiered in theaters, Desmond Llewelyn was tragically killed in an automobile accident. He had given interviews at the premiere of the movie that he was looking forward to appearing in the next movie. Since taking on the role of Q in 1963’s From Russia With Love, he appeared in 16 different Bond movies. His role of frequently puncturing Bond’s irreverence while proudly demonstrating the capabilities of his gadgets was largely defined in Goldfinger (1964), and since then, the visit to the Q-branch offices became a staple of the Bond film formula. He is, of course, greatly missed.

Final word on the subject, this film had several things going right for it, not least of which were some complex villains that were given proper motivations, and the time and space to truly reveal them to us. It also had two very bad things working against it, and frankly, the film would have been improved without them: the characters Bullion and Christmas Jones. The writing this time around was cleverer and the reduced scale of the story allowed it feel more grounded in reality. Sadly, in no reality can anyone possibly accept Goldie and Denise Richards as actors. Weighed against each other, that makes The World Is Not Enough an average film, which is why it gets three tins of “Zukovsky’s Finest” caviar out of a possible five.

James Bond will return in “Die Another Day.”

[Patrick]

Wow, no reaction to TWINE at all? I mean, normally I'll at least get someone disagreeing with me.

[Nick Barlow]

Was a long holiday weekend over here, so that might be why people weren't online as much!

I actually saw some of TWINE the other week. I can't put my finger on it, but it just didn't work for me. Maybe it's Denise Richards, maybe it's me thinking 'why go to all the trouble of nuking Istanbul when bribery's proven to be just as effective?' or maybe it's just that it feels like they're already coasting and just churning it out.

Thinking about it, I think the Brosnan films suffer a lot in comparison to Casino Royale. The earlier films feel like they're from a different era in film-making, while these are close enough to the Bourne films and Casino Royale to make them feel somewhat out of synch with their times. Or perhaps it's the knowledge that it's all leading up to Die Another Day that retroactively taints them.

[Patrick]

Taken as a stand alone feature, TWINE is okay plot wise. It has two characters that are essentially useless to the plot, and the actors hired to play these characters are dreadful. That's what it suffers from in my analysis.

I always try not to do a review thinking forward to the movie that's about to come, but I can appreciate your sentiments about DAD, Nick. I'll have my review for that posted before the week is up, and then we'll do some awards for the Third Age of Bond before we go all Time Lord and jump another four years to Casino Royale.

[Patrick]

Bond has now officially entered the 21st Century. A year got skipped in the normal pattern of Bond films being released in odd-numbered years. Which is perfectly easy to explain: 2002 marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Dr. No. That made 2002 an event year for the Bond franchise. So was the additional year worth the wait? Alas, no.

Welcome to the point where the wheels officially came off, and the Third Age of Bond drew to a woeful close.

Die Another Day
UK Release: November 18, 2002
US Release: November 22, 2002


“Oh, I know all about you. Sex for dinner, death for breakfast.”

Mr. Brosnan’s original contract to play Bond included three films, with an option for a fourth. So in this, his fourth adventure as the world famous gentlemen spy, he still has all his usual traits of subtlety, ruthlessness, and even fallibility. And certainly, his physicality is pushed to the forefront as well.

But there’s a problem inherent in the presentation this time around. So unhinged is this film that the writers have made the same mistake that was made in both You Only Live Twice and Moonraker: Bond got turned into a super-hero. This is a Bond film, not a marvel comics story. Case in point: just exactly where did Bond learn the technique to reduce his heart beat to the point of tachycardia? And then be able to bring himself out of it, come back to consciousness, and raise his heart rate from 34 beats per minute to 70 in less than four seconds? I’m sorry, I don’t think North Korean prison guards taught him that, and if MI-6 had taught it to him, you’d think they’d be wise to the trick when he used it against them.



Time and again, Bond seems to get super-hero powers at exactly the right time: he creates a make-shift parasail and glides over ice-berg filled waters as a tsunami inundates the bay behind him. He’s given an invisible car (more on that later.) He can run faster than a plane on take-off. He’s got a magic ring. Why not just throw in the bat-signal, too?

And all of this is such a waste, because the film starts with such a promising first act that leaves you thinking Bond is really going to be pushed, thematically and literally, into places he’s never been before. By the end of the pre-credits scene, we’re left thinking he’s accomplished his mission, but he gets caught, and as the opening credits play themselves out, we see Bond subjected to torture at the hands of the North Koreans. The opening credits end, and a ragged, shaggy bearded Bond is revealed to have spent more than a year as a captured spy. In short order, he gets exchanged for a North Korean spy, drugged, burned by his own MI-6 because they think they can no longer trust him, and he’s forced to go rogue. And just when you think this premise holds some promise, the super-hero mythos crops its head up again: Bond, after losing heaven knows how many pounds as a result of his 14 months in a North Korean prison, and after having been pumped with heaven only knows how many drugs by MI-6, jumps off a boat in Hong Kong harbor, swims to shore, and then walks through the streets of Hong Kong to check into a five star hotel. There’s heightened reality, and then there’s unreality. And this film seems intent to cross the barrier that separates them without hesitation.



Now, given what he had to work with, Mr. Brosnan’s performance is certainly as good as it was in TWINE. In fact, he’s one of the few things about this film that makes it even watchable. But he deserved a better swan song than this.

“You have no idea how much Icarus is about to change your world.”


We’ll get to the other characters momentarily. Let’s spend some time on plot and theme, first. We have Iceland, diamonds, Miranda Frost, Col. Moon/Graves and cold water surfing. All metaphors for either ice or death. We have Zao (a reference to Zao Jun, the stove master or kitchen god in China), a giant heat beam from space, exploding land mines and Icarus (from classical mythology, a reference to the boy who used his new wings to fly too close to the sun.) All references for heat or life. Even the graphics in the opening credits, featuring women made of ice and fire, support this. The theme, therefore, is fire and ice, right? Wrong. Those are mere motifs, embroidery around the edges of the plot. Rather than a theme, we are again barraged with references to the movie the writers either took their inspiration from, or were consciously attempting to retell. Time to play the third, and final, edition of the The Recycling Game:

- A villain who physically changes his appearance using a medical procedure.
- The villain impersonates a wealthy self-made businessman.
- Bond is initially brought into the story to halt a diamond smuggling ring.
- Bond impersonates a diamond smuggler, himself.
- The stolen diamonds are used to become part of a space- based weapon that fires a powerful “beam” of light.
- The world super-powers being brought to their knees by said space-based weapon.
- Bond is dropped from an airplane to have his final confrontation with the villain.

This one, I’m sure everyone got: Diamonds Are Forever. This is truly becoming tedious, because the references are so obvious. Messrs. Purvis and Wade got away with this in TWINE, because the references were more of an homage. Here, they’re basically re-making a thirty-one year old movie, sans Blofeld. You’d almost think that had the Third Age of Bond not ended here, the next film would have featured someone walking on the backs of crocodiles.

In terms of an evaluation of the plot, the problem with Die Another Day is that it’s essentially two movies. The first act, while it may have a few wobbles to it, has a reasonably good set up: Bond is betrayed, spends 14 months as a captured spy in a country not known for respecting the Geneva Conventions, and is forced to go rogue to determine who set him up. The only clue he has is the spy he was exchanged for, and the trail takes him to Cuba. But this set up is completely wasted as we enter the second act.



From the point we realize that the “clinic” at Los Organos is a hospital that specializes in gene-washing, a procedure that can re-write someone’s DNA to give them a completely new identity, we’re into our first ludicrous premise. And as this film moves on, ludicrous premise gets piled upon ludicrous premise. We have an American NSA agent who dives, backward, of a cliff several hundred feet up from the ocean, and Cuban guards who don’t fire at the boat that pulls her out of the water. We then introduced to Gustav Graves, instant self-made billionaire who, curiously, only seemed to have come on everyone’s radar screen just a little over a year ago, as he parachutes to his audience with the Queen. One big sword fight later, and Bond is both invited to an event in Iceland, and allowed back into MI-6. We have an Ice Palace that defies all rules of physics, located next to a greenhouse dome and a diamond mine. We have Icarus, a solar reflector that doubles as a space-based blow torch. We have an Iron-Man suit for the villain, an MI-6 Agent whose longstanding involvement with Graves should have raised suspicions.



Oh, and did I mention we have a car that turn itself invisible? “Tiny cameras on each side,” Q tells Bond, “transmit what they see onto a light-emitting polymer on the opposite side.” So why, then, when Bond remote starts the Aston Martin, backs it up, and fiddles to find the door handle, does his image not get projected onto the far side of the car? They just violated their own rules. And doesn’t it strike you that this adaptive camouflage system has some awfully convenient re-boot capabilities. Zao tracks him with heat sensors, disables the invisibility device, engages in a bit of road rage race with Bond, then chases him into the rapidly melting Ice Palace just in time for the device to reboot. Hey, Zao, did you forget you have heat sensors, and you’re in place made of ice?

It’s almost as if this film is reveling in its plot holes, celebrating a blatant rip-off of a previously used story line, and gleeful about its presentation of all the characters as either super heroes or super villains. This is simply indefensible.

“We only met briefly, but you left a lasting impression. You see, when your intervention forced me to present the world with a new face, I chose to model the disgusting Gustav Graves on you. I paid attention to details - that unjustifiable swagger, the crass quips, the self-defence mechanism concealing such inadequacy...”


We have two actors playing the main villain. And they are supposed to be the same person. Will Yun Lee plays Col. Moon, a hot-headed, egotistical show off. A hypocrite who expresses his disdain for western free market economics, while his soldiers polish his collection of supercars. His appearance in this film is extremely brief- he doesn’t make it beyond the opening credits. But that’s enough to establish that he’s engaged in a diamonds-for-arms scheme that has brought Bond to North Korea. And consistent with is disregard for the west, the diamonds he’s acquiring are UN embargoed conflict diamonds. Bond, of course, is there to put a halt to the trade, but the bigger question is what has Moon been using the diamonds for?

Mr. Lee certainly did a credible job in the role. In fact, it’s difficult to find any flaws in his performance because it is so brief.



Then we come to Toby Stephens, playing Gustav Graves, who is, in fact, the post gene-washing Col. Moon. We can deduce that after somehow surviving going over that waterfall on a hovercraft, he made his way to the “beauty parlor” at Los Organos, Cuba, where his ethnicity was changed from Asian to Caucasian. He then “discovered” a diamond mine in Iceland (a fake, it was a cover to hide the fact he was holding a stash of conflict diamonds), invented his own back story and set about playing the part of millionaire playboy.

So, the North Korean communist Colonel becomes the daredevil self made tycoon. And spends a year mocking the west by… living to excess, himself? That’s either a bit of cognitive dissonance or he never was the communist he claimed to be. Really, who was the real man, Moon or Graves?

Of course, the problem with the character is that even though he’s still a hot-headed, egotistical show off, with a touch more arrogance, he is every bit the super villain to Bond’s super hero. His ultimate aim for Icarus is to unite the two Koreas under rule from the north, and to do this, he’s prepared to transform himself again, this time into an evil Iron Man.

Sadly, the problem here isn’t the performance of Mr. Stephens, it’s the character, itself, so logically conflicted and set on a completely implausible goal.


“NSA. Hello, we’re on the same side.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re after the same thing.”
“Sure it does. World peace, unconditional love and our little friend with the expensive acne.”


It’s hard to dislike Halle Berry in anything she does. Including here, as NSA agent Giacinta Johnson, aka Jinx. The idea was obviously that she was to a be a female Bond, resourceful, ruthless, athletic, and as enthusiastic about sex as Bond. While Ms. Berry doesn’t fit the profile of a traditional, buxom Bond girl with long flowing hair, she holds her own in every scene and even manages to land a few well chosen one-liners. Indeed, there was talk after this movie that Jinx might be the main character in a spinoff film.

Of the American actresses who have played Bond girls- Jill St. John, Lois Chiles, Tonya Roberts and Denise Richards, Ms. Berry is easily the most talented of this group, and was certainly given the most to do in the story line. And she carried her role quite well. In fact, if there’s anything to complain about in her performance it’s that it tended, at times, to go a bit over the top. But in a movie where just about everything went over the top, her performance was hardly this film’s biggest issue.

“Ha! I can read your every move!"
“Read this… bitch!”


No disrespect to Rosamond Pike, but the character of Miranda Frost is another illogical addition to this film. Okay, we are told that she won the gold medal in fencing at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, by default (the original winner was found to have been using performance enhancing drugs.) She works for MI-6, and is a field agent of some sort, since she’s apparently been planted within Graves’ organization. As her cover within Graves’ organization, she is his publicist, a role you generally don’t just get handed. Which means she must have been working within Graves’ company for some time, probably right about the time emerged from the “beauty parlor” with a new face. Now, I realize she was a double agent, actually on Graves side (she was the one who betrayed Bond), but if she was working for Graves for almost a year without uncovering anything, wouldn’t M have become the slightest bit suspicious?

For that matter, when Bond gets his back door key into MI-6, and tells her Graves appears to be involved in the same case that got him caught in the first place, M is initially reluctant to believe it. Really? Then why send Frost to infiltrate Graves’ organization at all?

No, I’m sorry, the whole point of this character was simply to give the super villain a “super moll,” specifically one who could engage in a wicked knife fight with Jinx to climax the movie. Again, what a waste of a character. Other than her dubious gold medal, and her reluctance to form relationships with anyone “within the community,” what do we really know about her?

“I’ve missed your sparkling personality.”
[Delivers a swift fist to Bond’s stomach.] How’s that strike you for a punch line?”


Then we come to Zao. Here’s my problem with this character: if the intention was to create an evil version of James Bond, sorry, but it’s been done before, and it’s been done better. And Zao was no Alec Trevelyan. He is, in fact, devoid of personality. I’ll put part of that down to problems in the script, but Rick Yune has to take some of the blame for that. Time and again, whenever Zao and Bond have a confrontation, Mr. Yune just never seems to be able to deliver something above the mere words on a printed page of dialogue. His character simply isn’t interesting, and diamond encrusted scars for make-up don’t just automatically create a memorable character. If Rosamond Pike and Toby Stephens could at least find something inherent in their characters to pull out of a dismal script, and deliver it in their performances, why couldn’t Mr. Yune?

“You know, you’re cleverer than you look.”
“Still, better than looking cleverer than you are.”

Director Lee Tamahori certainly has experience in making action films, and you certainly can’t claim that this film doesn’t flow. But he isn’t perfect. For one thing, I don’t find him very good at filming car chase scenes. He does two in this film. The first involves three hovercrafts in the Korean DMZ, two of which are identical, and, save for Bond, all of them feature people on board wearing exactly the same uniform. So what does he do? Make it almost completely impossible to follow the action by doing rapid cross cuts interspersed with wide angle shots. Until the point in that chase where it’s only Bond and Moon on the one hovercraft, I honestly have a difficult time following the chase logically.



He does the same thing again in the chase involving Bond’s Aston Martin and Zao’s Jaguar on the surface of a frozen lake. Once you overlook the fact that neither of these cars would actually be any good on ice, in the real world, what you get is spectacle. Rather than concentrating on a wider angle to allow you see the chase itself, he seems intent on concentrating on details, giving you close ups of Bond or Zao pushing a button, weaponry being fired from cars, a quick cut to show Bond pushing the ejection seat button so his Aston flips itself back over, another quick cut to Zao’s Jaguar swinging wide, and your back to details. It’s as though he thinks that throwing everything at you at once will leave you mesmerized by the sequence. It doesn’t. All it did was succeed in making it impossible to actually figure out what was going on in the chase itself.

He also has this odd tendency of changing the camera’s speed, creating a sort of juttering movement. I suppose if he wants to put a signature stamp on a film, that’s one way to do it, but it would be more palatable, in movie terms, if he used it more consistently. Sometimes he does it for establishing shots, like at the ice palace. Sometimes he does it to exit a scene. Sometimes he simply does it as a character is walking across a room. Rather than being artistic, it simply becomes annoying. Why couldn’t he just take a page out of John Glen’s book, and used a startled pigeon?



There is one scene, however, where his playing with the camera’s speed actually yielded some dividends. In filming the sword fight between Graves and Bond, he actually slowed down the camera’s frame speed, so that the finished product, when played at a normal speed, gave you a much greater intensity in the fight than there actually was when it was being filmed. And it doesn’t disappoint. I think that sword fight ranks right up there with Bond’s tussle with Grant in Front Russia With Love, although it doesn’t quite surpass it. Sadly, Tamahori couldn’t help but put a musical score over that. That fight would have been even better if the only sounds you heard were the clangs of the metal blades, the shattering of glass cases, the grunts of the actors, and the expressions of surprise from the other patrons in the club.



Die Another Day also marked the point where the use of computer generated graphics, or CGI, simply became unhinged. Jinx’s jump off the cliff, the Icarus beam, the missile fired at Icarus, Bond parasailing over a glacier strewn bay, the helicopter’s fall from after leaving the plane, and the plane’s final disintegration are all examples of scenes where you know they enhanced it with CGI, and because you know, it diminishes the final result. They even have Bond taking part in a video game simulation- a scene tacked into the movie simply as a set up for the joke with Moneypenny at the end of the film.

Let me reiterate the point: there’s heightened reality, and there’s unreality. And the overuse of CGI in this movie is yet another example of where this film defiantly crosses that line.

“I’m still not sure how good you are.”
“I am so good.”
“Especially when you’re bad.”



As was the case in Moonraker, I’m actually relieved to have reached this part of the review. Because it means that I no longer have to voluntarily watch this movie again. This film fails on so many levels that whatever bright spots it has are simply eclipsed in the final analysis. Bond is not a super hero. His foes are not members of the Legion of Doom. We have a plot stolen from Diamonds Are Forever, and mangled in the remaking with plot holes that resemble yawning chasms of illogicality. They even succeeded in making M, and MI-6, look like fools. It is a film where the excesses of the Moore era actually got ratcheted up, and leaves you scratching your head that someone actually thought this was a good idea.

So, the third age of Bond, after starting out on such a high note with GoldenEye, comes to an ignominious end. What a way for the franchise to celebrate its 40th birthday. It truly gives me no pleasure to rip a Bond film. I have been a fan of this franchise since the first time I saw a heavily edited cut of Dr. No as an ABC Sunday Night movie of the week at the age of 8. But to anything other than acknowledge that this was truly the low point for the Third Age of Bond would be dishonest. Die Another Day gets one land mine out of a possible five.

James Bond will return in “Casino Royale,” as the Fourth Age of Bond begins.

[Nick Barlow]

Let’s spend some time on plot and theme
Why? The writers never did!

Ba-doom-tish.

Entirely agree with that review, though I notice you didn't mention Madonna, either for her wooden acting or rather poor theme tune. It starts off with an interesting premise of Bond being forced to go rogue to find out who burned him, but then tosses that out of the window in favour of a plot that can only be made sense of by continually introducing a series of magic gadgets.

It makes think there should be a Bond version of Occam's Razor - science fictional gadgets should not multiply without reason. You can get away with having one piece of seemingly impossible technology (the Goldeneye, for instance) as then the effects and existence of that drive the plot, but here each new invention just makes the plot even more ridiculous. You're right in saying it feels more like a bad superhero film than a Bond one, as it has a lot of the logical flaws of bad comics.

[barnaby morbius]

you're quite right about the fight sequence-over the top yet excellent fun. other than that it's terrible. awful theme song as well.

[Patrick]

Wow, not many fans of the theme song. Or Madonna's cameo, for that matter.

On the cameo, her appearance in the movie was so brief, I didn't think it was worth mentioning. Besides, Madonna's cameo was hardly the worst thing going in this movie.

As for the theme song, I actually did not dislike it. Not quite an endorsement, but after the God-awful "Tomorrow Never Dies" sung be she who cannot sing, and a slow and plodding "The World Is Not Enough" by garbage, I found this song to be a bit of an improvement. And the visuals being shown during the opening credits were a first for the franchise, in that we got to see what was happening to Bond.

[stanmore]

Can't fault either of those reviews, either. Christ, the Brosnan canon relies so much on Goldeneye - your recycling segment shows how few new ideas had in the late 90s. All eras that weren't brutally cut short became tired, but for Brosnan to manage it after one film was quite an achievement.

[The Co=Ordinator]

Wow, no reaction to TWINE at all? I mean, normally I'll at least get someone disagreeing with me.

I mostly agree with your reviews Fast Liver.

The World IsNot Enough rates 3/5 for me. I give Die Another Day 2/5, but only because of Halle Berry.

[Patrick]

I cannot bring myself to give DAD more than a 1/5, despite Ms. Berry.

So, some 3rd Age of Bond Awards to hand out, and then we're on to the 4th Age, and "Bond Year One."

[Aspadistra]

Wow, no reaction to TWINE at all? I mean, normally I'll at least get someone disagreeing with me.

I just read and learn.

[Patrick]

We’ve arrived at the end of the Third Age of Bond. A propitious moment which again allows us to hand out some award due in the age. This was a short age, only four films and seven years in total. In keeping with tradition, there won’t be a best picture award. To repeat what’s been said before, these films are all so different in theme and story, that a best film award simply isn’t fair the franchise. However, we do have our standard slate of awards for a variety of candidates. But since we’re dealing with the rather short Third Age, the competition is naturally a bit smaller. Let’s refresh everyone’s memory on the ratings of the four films that marked this age:
GoldenEye: 5 out of 5 (turns in a Ferrari Spider F355 on a gravel surface.)
Tomorrow Never Dies: 2 out of 5 (chakra torture devices)
The World Is Not Enough: 3 out of 5 (tins of “Zukovsky’s Finest” caviar)
Die Another Day: 1 out of 5 (land mines)

Before we can commence the fourth age of Bond, we need to wrap the third age up, and hand out some awards. So, let’s get on with it.

Best Bond Girl:
Let’s be consistent with the first Two Ages of Bond: 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: Isabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova for GoldenEye; Michelle Yeoh as Agent Wai Lin for Tomorrow Never Dies; Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones for The World Is Not Enough; and Halle Berry as Giacinta “Jinx” Johnson for Die Another Day.

All of these nominees are strong women who made significant contributions to their stories. But I’m going to make what will probably be a controversial call on this one: Jinx. She is every bit as capable as Bond, beautiful, and quite enthusiastic to seduce to Bond. In her contributions to the story, she was involved with were arguably the most significant of any Bond Girl in this age. And she’s got an Academy Award, which speaks to Halle Berry’s talent.


Best Villain:
Our list of villains for the Third Age of Bond includes the following: Sean Bean as Alec Trevelan in GoldenEye; Jonathan Price as Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies; Sophie Marceau as Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough; and Toby Stephens as Gustav Graves in Die Another Day.

Holy crap! A woman on the list of best villains? That’s never happened before. And while she certainly makes an engaging villain, I’m going with the ultimate evil Bond: Alec Trevelyan. No villain before understood Bond the way the old 006 did, before he went bad. No villain could hit Bond in such a personal way. And Sean Bean was just so relentless about how he went about not only his goal, but how he pushed Bond’s buttons.


Best Henchman/Physical Villain:
By now, I’m sure the term “physical villain” needs no introduction. But I’ll offer it anyway: this category is for the main villain’s ally, the one that gets their hands dirty with the necessary killings, the acts of sabotage and assisting in carrying out the main bad guy’s plan. They also provide a secondary target for Bond to have to contend with throughout the story. In this, the Third Age of Bond, the nominees are: Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye; Gotz Otto as Mr. Stamper in Tomorrow Never Dies; Robert Carlyle as Renard in The World Is Not Enough; Rosamond Pike as Miranda Frost in Die Another Day; and Rick Yune as Zao in Die Another Day.

As far as henchmen (or women) go, there is a very clear winner in this category: Xenia Onatopp. She didn’t just carry out the hard tasks, she relished in her villainy. Pain, whether inflicting it or being on the receiving end of it, was a sexual turn-on for her, which made her great fun to watch. She was a qualified pilot from before the days when the Soviet Union fell, which gave her a set of skills prized by her employer at the Janus syndicate. And we haven’t had a name for a female character with such a great double entrendre subtext in a Bond movie for a very long time.



Best Ally:
As much as Bond is surrounded by villains and henchmen, he also needs his allies. And because we’re dealing with the creation of Ian Fleming, those allies take the form of amiable rogues who have common purpose with Bond against the villain. They perform a much different task than the Bond girls. They are there to frequently deliver some important bit of information that Bond doesn’t have, sometimes offer Bond a different perspective on the situation and, when necessary, ground Bond to the realities of the situation. The nominees are Joe Don Baker as CIA Agent Jack Wade in both GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies; and Robbie Coltrane as Valentin Dimitrovitch Zukovsky in both GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough. (Sorry, we can’t list Halle Berry here, as she won the best Bond Girl category.)

Because we only have two nominees in this category this time around, you could imagine that a simple coin flip might address this. But I’m interested in character. In Jack Wade, we have a world-weary, jaded career intelligence officer. So involved with his work was he that he burned through three marriages. And his only real interest seems to be gardening. My problem with the character is that more often than not, he was portrayed as something of a buffoon- particularly in his brief scenes in TND.

By contrast, with Zukovsky, we have a former KGB officer who’s decided to become a capitalist, after a fashion. When we first meet him, he’s an organized crime boss running a trashy nightclub with bad singers in St. Petersburg. Four years later, he’s moved south, to the Caspian Sea, where he now operates a casino and a caviar factory. You like to see characters improving their circumstances over the years. But even in his appearance in TWINE, it’s clear his business interests aren’t entirely legitimate. He’s not above using his casino as a place to receive a one million dollar payoff to use his influence with a family member (who happens to be the Captain of a Russian nuclear submarine) to make a stop at Elektra’s castle in Istanbul. But this is a man who has, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, tangled with Bond before. His limp was the result of a bullet Bond fired at him- intended to wound, but not kill, as a matter of professional courtesy.


And despite the fact that Bond and Zukovsky were formerly opposites during the cold war, Zukovsky develops something of a begrudging respect for Bond, eventually firing a shot at him with his dying breath to free Bond from Elektra’s torture device, a returned professional courtesy, if you will. He’s a far more interesting character than Wade, and that’s why he earns the award for best ally in the Third Age.


Best Action Sequence:
Best action sequences are frequently the signature to a Bond film- they are the big set pieces where a huge battle happens. There’s lots of chaos, the outcome of the conflict will determine how the balance of the story will play itself out, and Bond is right in the thick of things.

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

- GoldenEye: Bond chases Ourmov and Natalya through the streets of St. Petersburg in a Russian tank, destroying everything in his path. The chase culminates in game of chicken between the tank and Trevelyan’s train.

- Tomorrow Never Dies: After gaining entrance to Carver’s stealth boat, Bond must not only rescue Wai Lin, he must sabotage the ship, rendering it visible to radar, scuttle the nuclear missile, and finally deal with Carver. Explosions, gun fights, fisticuffs ensure, culminating with the seavac being turned on Carver.

- The World Is Not Enough: Zukovsky’s caviar factory is attacked by helicopters with buzz-saw blades attached to them. Bond’s BMW is cut in half, Zukovsky’s Rolls Royce falls off a collapsing pier, and when Bond finally contends with the troublesome helicopter, he gets the information he’s after by rescuing Zukovsky from his own caviar tank.

- Die Another Day: Bond vs. Graves, and Jinx vs. Frost, in two parallel fights aboard a plane rapidly falling to pieces after flying through the Icarus heat beam.

Of those four, the only one that doesn’t immediately seem to have the intensity of the rest is the parallel fights from DAD. Let’s eliminate that one. Of the three remaining, the two of them have a scale that is really quite epic: the tank chase and the big fight on Carver’s boat. And that makes this a tough choice. As much as the shoot-em-up on Carver’s steal boat was reminiscent of Bond organizing the troops to take the Liparus in The Spy Who Loved Me (winner of the best action sequence for the Second Age of Bond), the abiding objection is how Wai Lin seemed to keep getting herself caught. So the winner of the best action sequence for the Third Age of Bond is the tank chase from GoldenEye- arguably the most destructive car chase sequence ever in a Bond film.


Best Fight:
Best fight is not the same as Best Action Sequence. This is fisticuffs between Bond and the villain, and Queensbury Rules need not apply. And fortunately, we have a few more of them in this Age of Bond than we had in the Second. Here are our nominees:

Bond and Trevelyan fighting one another in the confined space of the inner workings of a satellite dish receiver (GoldenEye.)

Bond is lured into a sound-proof recording studio to be beaten to pulp by several of Carver’s thugs, and manages to be the last man standing (Tomorrow Never Dies.)

Bond and Renard have a tussle concerning the plutonium rod Renard is attempting to insert into the submarine’s nuclear plant. (The World Is Not Enough.)

Bond and Graves have a good old-fashioned sword fight (Die Another Day.)

As tempted as I am to give the nod on this fight to the sword fight from DAD, my objection to it comes down to the fact that the intensity of that fight was watered down with an un-necessary musical score played over it. No, Bond and Trevelyan’s fight was the most authentic, and as they didn’t use a musical score over it, the tension was heightened all the more just by hearing the ambient noises of the fight itself. And it truly harkened back to Bond’s fight with Grant in From Russia With Love. Best fight: Bond vs. Trevelyan in the satellite dish.



Best Spy Moment:
This category does require at least a bit of an explanation. “Spy moments” are those incidents in a Bond film where our hero is forced to do some serious snooping, or is forced to act in more traditional espionage-like manner. Although this may include the use of something Q has given Bond, the point of the scene is not the gadget itself, it’s the payoff in the form of some vital clue or piece of information Bond did not have before, and that helps get him (and the audience) closer to understanding the big picture being painted by the villain. And Bond looks good doing it, because it is only the sort of thing a true spy would do.

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

- Bond deduces there’s more to Xenia Onatopp’s presence in Monte Carlo than a fast Ferrari and a game of chermin de fer. Her ship in the harbor is owned by a known Janus Syndicate front. Bond investigates, finds the Canadian Admiral she left the casino with dead, and realizes that means someone must be impersonating him at the launch ceremonies for the new Tigre Helicopter. (GoldenEye.)

- Bond uses Paris’ information to gain entry to Carver’s Hamburg headquarters, and retrieves the GPS encoder. After he escapes, he gets a phone call from Carver, and Bond has the presence of mind to realize Carver has set a trap for him back at his hotel. He uses his BMW 7-series as a vault to hold the GPS encoder, springs the trap involving Dr. Kaufmann, remote starts his big bimmer, and has to engage in a very unusual car chase to make good his escape: the chase takes place entirely within a multi-story parking garage, and Bond is driving his car from the back seat, using his phone. (Tomorrow Never Dies.)

- Bond is unable to convince M that Elektra King not only sabotaged her own pipeline, but murdered her father and is working with Renard. To get that proof means providing Elektra with the opportunity to make the next move, so he does this by going after a mobile skip inside the pipeline in order to diffuse a bomb travelling behind it on another skip. When the bomb turns out not to be a nuclear device, Bond realizes who must have put it there, and convinces Dr. Jones to jump off the moving skip and allow the bomb to detonate. Elektra thinks Bond is dead, and Bond is free to retrace a lead through Zukovsky. (The World Is Not Enough.)

- Bond strikes a deal with Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong to take care of Zao, the spy he was traded for in North Korea. Zao torched a trade delegation, which killed several Chinese in attendance, and they want Zao dead. The course they put Bond on takes him to Cuba, where he has to awake a “sleeping” agent by the use of the correct pass phrase. It’s from this sleeper agent that Bond learns about the “clinic” at Los Organos where Zao can be found. (Die Another Day.)

I have to admit I have a bias toward the BMW 7-series scene in Tomorrow Never Dies. I thought it was brilliantly executed on film, and I happen to be a fan of the 7-series anyway. But as much as I love the idea of a remote control car you drive from the back seat, I’m afraid I can’t give this category to that scene. No, I’m persuaded by Bond when he uses his deduction to solve the mystery. And knowing that he has an operative from the Janus crime syndicate inviting a Admiral from the Canadian Navy to sleep with her puts Bond into an investigative mode, and his investigation almost immediately reveals the Admiral is dead (with an eerie grin on his face, too.) Bond correctly deduces that means Onatopp and whoever is impersonating the Admiral must be after the new high-tech helicopter. Brilliant stuff, and the category goes to GoldenEye.


Best Death Scene:
It wouldn’t truly be a Bond movie without some on-screen deaths. Henchmen and the main villain are all due to depart this existence, and you know as the movie starts Bond will need to sort them out in order to be victorious. But some movie deaths are more colorful than others. So, the nominees for the Best Death Scene in the Third Age of Bond are: Xenia Onatopp is crushed against a tree; Trevelyan is dropped from the top of the aerial transmitter, but survives the fall (likely with lots of broken bones), then the explosion of the transmitter itself brings the whole array down on him; Boris is flash frozen when tanks fill with liquid nitrogen burst; Elliot Carver is dispatched by the seavac; Mr. Stamper’s foot is trapped under a missile just as it ignites, blowing the detonators Bond left on the missile; The last think Elektra King learns is that Bond never misses; Renard is impaled by a radioactive pike; Bond pulls the rip chord on Graves parachute prematurely, causing Graves to get sucked into jet engine; Miranda Frost’s heart is broken by a copy of “The Art War” and sharp blade protruding through it.

First of all, I’ll give Boris’ flash frozen moment the funniest death scene. He spends the entire movie annoyingly claiming “Yes! I am in-wince-ible!” in that Russian accent. So when he does it for the last time, correcting the codes Natalya put into the GoldenEye mainframe computer, his gloating is repaid by exploding liquid nitrogen tanks. The resulting image of the scrawny nerd frozen stiff afterward is the comedic payoff. But I don’t count this as the best death scene.

When it comes to a great death scene, I’m big on irony. When you have a character who gets sexually aroused by inflicting pain on others, who’s most intimate weapon is her thighs, which she uses to crush her victims (usually in the middle of love-making), and who spends the entire movie telling our favorite gentlemen spy that pleasure was all his, you’ve got a character who deserves a memorable dispatching. And Xenia Onatopp gets it in a cartful of irony. As she’s attempting to kill Bond using her most intimate weapon, Bond is able to fire her gun (conveniently slung over her back) at the helicopter from which she’s just repelled. The helicopter takes off, and because she hasn’t removed her repelling rope, she takes off with it, right into a tree with two forked braches to hold here there. The helicopter continues to fly off, and the pressure from the repelling rope does to her mid-section exactly thing she was just attempting to do to Bond. This is the best death scene by far, not just in this movie, but in the Third Age of Bond. In fact, I think they missed a great opportunity for a Bond one-liner. After he and Natalya look up and see Xenia dead by asphyxiation, he should have said, “You know, she had a real crush on me.”


Best Line:

For the most iconic line of the age, we go to Miss Moneypenny. “You’re such a cunning linguist, James.”


Best Script:
The rule when choosing a best script is that it has to have come from a film that earned a score of five. In the third age of Bond, only one film managed to achieve this, so it enters this list without any peers, and therefore wins: GoldenEye.



Best Set Design:
Here, I have to give this award to the set design for the stealth boat in Tomorrow Never Dies. It truly appears vast on screen, and that lends itself well to the big final action sequence at the film’s climax.


Best Score:
None of the opening theme songs in this four film age are what you could call truly iconic. Garbage’s song “The World Is Not Enough” is actually rather plodding and slow. And in my review of Tomorrow Never Dies, I went on at length at exactly how much I truly hated Sheryl Crow’s theme song. Of the remaining two, I’d describe the theme songs themselves as slightly better than average, but not great. Which makes this a tough selection. But I’m going to go with what will undoubtedly be a rather controversial selection: Madonna’s theme for Die Another Day. Part of that is for the song itself, another part of it is for the way the opening graphics show us what happening to Bond in his North Korean prison- something of a first for the opening credits to continue to tell the story in a Bond film.


Most “Iconic” Bond Film:
I said at the start of this that there will be no “best picture” category, and there isn’t. This category is for the film that most incorporates all the elements of a Bond film to not only show a heightened reality, but an original story with a theme, and some vintage moments. When combined, this gives you Iconic Bond. And sadly, the main problem with this category in the Third Age of Bond is that three of the four films fail on a basic test: they recycled parts from previous Bond movies.



For that reason, GoldenEye also wins the most Iconic film of the age. It has an original plot, a challenging villain for Bond, one of the most original henchmen ever featured in a Bond film, a fantastic fight between Bond and the main villain, a truly thrilling car chase scene on the streets of St. Petersburg, and it was genuinely a plot that reflected the new circumstances of the Third Age of Bond.

[Patrick]

What, more than 24 hours later, and not a single reaction to the Third Age awards? I was sure this would generate some controversy.

Listen, I flatly refuse to post my review of Casino Royale until I get reaction to these awards. Speak up, fellow Wrinklies.

[Aspadistra]

Why 'controversial'? Has to be Jinx - no question about it. Beautiful, intelligent and strong.

[Aspadistra]

Best henchman - Onatopp. Over the top and unremittingly evil.

Best ally - Zukovsky - a character with depth.

Shall have to ponder the rest.

[Patrick]

Why 'controversial'? Has to be Jinx - no question about it. Beautiful, intelligent and strong.

Best henchman - Onatopp. Over the top and unremittingly evil.

Best ally - Zukovsky - a character with depth.

Shall have to ponder the rest.

Thank you, Aspa. Always nice to know my writings are appreciated! As for the controversial bit... given the distain some of my fellow Wrinklies have for Madonna, I figured my selection of Die Another Day for best score would prompt a few rebuttals. I'm still a bit surprised no one has commented.

[barnaby morbius]

i'm still stunned. worse Bond theme ever. it doesn't even have a tune!

other than that i pretty much agree- Brosnan is a likeable presence but his films definitely deteriorated.

[Rich Flair]

I don't mind Die Another Day - it's no more silly or over the top than a lot of Bond films. It's certainly more memorable than Quantum of Solace. The song was shot,though.

[Rich Flair]

Shot?

[The Co=Ordinator]

I've never got beyond the thiRd age of Bond. Really must watch Casino Royale & QoS.

[Patrick]

WHAT?! You haven't gotten on board with the Fourth Age, oh Cyber one? We entered a new paradigm and you've paid it no attention?!

I'm shocked.

[The Co=Ordinator]

TBH, I've never felt the urge. Totally disagreed with the reboot. Should have followed Who and carried on.

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