Tomorrow Never Dies

Well, here I was searching for a theme for my review of Tomorrow Never Dies, and frequent commenter Jaquandor nails it for me. He describes TND as "a movie I like as an action movie, but not quite as much as a Bond movie."

Well, I guess that wraps it up, so we're done until next week...

OK, not. And while I basically agree with Jaquandor--although don't let me put any words in his mouth--TND is a decent Bond film that should have been a better one. It seems to be caught between two masters, serving both well, but neither as well as it should.

So let's leap straight into the teaser, because I think some of the movie's contradictions are nicely on display there.

We have great set-up: intriguing situation, Bond off screen being sneaky, M staunchly defending her man, lots of shots of Gupta (even though we don't realize this until the second viewing of the movie) to help set up the main plot, the snooty admiral getting his comeuppance...all work very well.

But the rest of it? Some people accused Bond of "going Rambo" in Licence To Kill, which pretty much means they never actually saw a Rambo movie. But here, the complaint is a little more valid. In the teaser, Bond has virtually no dialogue; there are relatively few stunts, just running around firing machine guns (and bigger guns) and blowing things up; no real gadgets. It all works on its own level--all well filmed, and tense, and exciting. But somehow, it just lacks that James Bond personality, doesn't it? Just a little bit? There's nothing as silly as a seagull hat, or as sweet as the Asgard Jump, or audacious as the Bungee Jump, no panache of the parachute into the wedding or M's airborne office. As I said, all well done...but just a degree or so off from being Bond. Am I right?

Now, this isn't a fatal defect. In fact, the over-the-top Rambo battle sequences aren't something that generally bother me during viewing. It's afterward, upon reflection, that some nagging doubts start to creep into my head. During the movie, I'm carried along, the pacing and the characters and the tension sweeping us so fast towards the conclusion that it's only when we try to recount the set pieces, and we describe that film, that we start to wonder, "Is this Bond?"

It isn't as if this is the first "commando" Bond we've had. The Spy Who Loved Me, for example, had a battle to take Liparus that lasted just as long as the final battle aboard the stealth boat in TND, and consisted of Bond and his freed submariners using machine guns, grenades, and bombs to cripple the ship. But somehow that TSWLM sequence, while considerably more slackly paced and less satisfying, feels more Bond-like than the TND finale.

One of the problems, I think, is the lack of a proper meshing between the two personalities of the movie, the Bond film and the action film. Take these two juxtapositions, for example. After the credits, we see an entire British naval vessel sunk, the sailors viciously murdered. The next scene: Bond in bed with a professor, entirely played for humor. No transition, no cue to the audience that the movie will be shifting tones abruptly enough to cause whiplash. They're both very well-done scenes (hell, Bond's bit is hilarious, and the "don't ask don't tell" is the best line of the entire Brosnan era). But the script and the direction just force them together in a way that is almost too jarring--brave real-world soldiers brutally killed while our hero is indulged in hedonistic pleasure.

Another example...Paris is murdered, Bond has the fatal confrontation with Dr. Kaufman, Bond says a tearful goodbye to her body...and two minutes later he's laughing his fool head off and being playful with the BMW/garage chase. Again, both scenes are good, but they clash with each other, and weaken each other: Bond's sorrow for the great lost love of his life dying is weakened by the fact that he spends no time mourning, and the fun of the car chase is made a bit bitter by the memory of such an important death occurring just moments earlier. The audience can't help but think, somewhere in the back of its collective mind, "oh, well, I guess he didn't really care that much about her...look at him smiling and having a good time."

There's a lot of that unbalance in the film: serious, realistic, tragic scenes thrown up next to scenes playing up humor and absurd fantasy. Either one of these approaches is fine, and you can even have both in the same movie, but you've got to deploy great care in how you position the scenes, and how you handle the shifts in tone. TND does a poor job of that, which weakens the film.

A lot of this comes down to the script, which was apparently created by the 1,000 monkeys method. Bruce Fierstein gets the sole writing credit, but things were much more complex behind the scenes. Director Roger Spottiswoode wasn't happy with Fierstein's initial draft, and did some reworking of his own. He then had United Artists fly 7 screenwriters to London for a "brainstorming session," and eventually hired Nicholas Meyer (!) to do the suggested re-writes. Other hands worked on it, too, and then it was given to Fierstein for the final re-write and polish. With so may cooks, it's not surprising that the broth isn't entirely consistent.

And the script fails to develop so much that was promising. Despite the overblown finale, despite the overlong motorcycle chase, despite significant interludes watching military men do their thing, the movie is the first movie to slip under the 2 hour mark since Diamonds Are Forever. Which means that, had they chosen, they could have trimmed some of the bombast and had plenty of time for things like character development and fleshing out odd points in the plot.

So between that, and Spottiswoode (the director of Turner and Hooch!!) seemingly not having a firm vision of what he wanted a James Bond movie to be, TND ends up being a jack of all trades but master of none. Most of the parts are pretty good, but they don't cohere together well, and as a result TND ends up, to a degree, being something less than the sum of its parts.

As for the over reliance on big-ass guns, at the expense of traditional spy craft, a couple of points must be made. First of all, at some point this was something the series would have to deal with. In an era when inner-city youth gangs were armed with automatic weaponry, it was obvious that the types of villains Bond would be coming up against would be much more heavily armed. With Uzis cheap and plentiful, at some point the series had to come to grips with the fact that Bond could no longer be expected to take down dozens of heavily armed assailants when he's armed with a mere Walther (assuming, of course, that the series wanted to be realistic).

That doesn't mean they made the correct choice in this picture, or executed it well. There are ways to script yourself around these issues, at least partially. Casino Royale (2006) showed you can write a down and gritty Bond film without having to resort to huge gun battles. TND, however, shows no such restraint. Sure, Bond's blasting away with big guns in the teaser--that's cool, he wants to create as big a distraction as possible. Sure, 007 and Wai Lin are shooting assault rifles in Carver's Saigon HQ--they're escaping, they've got to use whatever they can take off the guards. Sure, they have to go machine gun crazy in infiltrating the stealth boat--their facing dozens of heavily armed goons. Sure--Bond has to go for the missile launcher...Do you see what they've done? They keep writing themselves into situations where the only sane response is for Bond to be crazy heavily armed. So gradually the movie becomes Delta Force 2 instead of Bond 18. Nobody had the wit or restraint to say, let's try something different here.

I think another of their problems was Goldeneye. There was some pressure from the studio to live up to Goldeneye, if not top it. As I mentioned last week, Goldeneye was pretty heavy on the explosions. But it was also pretty heavy on the character development and introspection. With a much bigger budget than Goldeneye, they felt compelled to try to out-do themselves. But they mostly focused on the "blow 'em up" side of things, which left TND a less-balanced film than its predecessor.

OK, I'm sounding overly negative at this point, and I've got to stop, because there are a lot of great things in the movie. With start with the plot, which may have been a decade ahead of its time. Back in 1997, "GPS" was probably a bit of technobabble to a lot of people...ten years later everyone has 3 or 4 devices using GPS, and the world has become much more dependent upon it. Heck, even by itself, that aspect of the plot--madman subverts GPS for evil purposes--would make a ripping premise for a thriller. And while they make some big mistakes with the science of GPS (see Notes below), they do a good job of explaining how the bad guys are using it, and making it accessible to the audience.

It's the next part of the plan that throws a lot of people. Back in 1997, a common complaint was that having an evil news mogul trying to manipulate the news for his own benefit was just too out there, and if you throw in the fact that he was trying to stage a nuclear war for his own profit, it was decried by some as ridiculous.

This was an odd time, in my opinion, to start complaining about madmen having thin motivations for nuclear war. In You Only Live Twice, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. was quite willing to manipulate the U.S. and Russia into nuclear war for cash (and China for political gain). TSWLM saw a mad billionaire attempt to start a nuclear war just because he didn't like people very much. We've seen people willing to nuke cities for blackmail money (Thunderball), revenge and money (Goldeneye), and to enrich themselves (Goldfinger, A View To A Kill). So when people criticize TND because Elliot Carver is willing to blow up Beijing for "only" exclusive broadcasting rights in China for 99 years, you have to wonder a) how many other Bond movies they've seen and b) if they understand how many trillions of dollars such rights would be worth?

As to the evil media mogul, again, TND was ahead of the curve. This movie debuted a year before Fox News started up in the U.S. I suspect that after a decade of "Fair and Balanced, " Carver's manipulations of news don't seem quite so far-fetched. Not to mention a decade of governments manipulating media to justify wars, and a decade of media/internet companies violating every principle the claim to stand for (agreeing to censorship, turning dissidents over to the government) in order to maintain lucrative business operations in China. No, sadly enough, TND is only a half-step into the future. Far from being "the series' most unbelievable plot," as Steven Jay Rubin put it (really? More unbelievable than a madwoman ready to nuke Istanbul just to increase the value of her not-yet-completed oil pipeline? ), TND has more potential to become reality than any other Bond plot.

One weakness in the plot's development, though, is the complete lack of any Chinese participation, even though the entire plot is about an Anglo-Sino war. Carver's co-conspirator, General Chang, gets 4 seconds of screen time--literally--and not a word of dialogue or motivation. This guy makes General Orlov look like a well-fleshed out character! Other than Wai Lin and a couple of brief shots of a MIG pilot, the movie is bereft of Chinese involvement, which weakens the tension, just a bit. It wouldn't have taken much...some shots of an angry Chinese premier saber-rattling on a TV screen, M talking to her "opposite number" on the phone...hell, even a couple of stock footage shots of Beijing would have helped make the Chinese connection to the big boss's plan. As it is, "China" is just some big, formless bogeyman in this movie, and instead of witnessing two sides hurtling towards war, we just watch one side.

Eliot Carver himself is a fairly controversial villain, as fans seems to either love him or hate him. A lot of that comes down to Jonathan Pryce's performance. I'll come straight out--I loved it. But I'll also concede that I can understand where you're coming from if you don't dig him. Pryce has the disadvantage of following a couple of much more "realistic," down to earth villains, and Carver certainly doesn't fit into the Sanchez or Trevelyan mold. Ah, but Elliot Carver is a Bond villain in the classic megalomaniac mold, and Pryce brings him to life perfectly. To hear him say “delicious” is to know subtle yet just nearly over-the-top menace. He's no Stromberg or Drax (thank God!). I think the role required some scenery chewing, and he chewed it well. Pryce plays him as a man who actually believes that all of the news is really all about him. Just watch his speech launching his news network--how magnificently egocentric and vile! His chemistry with Bond is good (sort of...more on that in a minute), and the movie is always more fun when he's on screen. A winning modern performance of an old-school type villain.

However, the script does undercut Pryce a bit, leaving the villain far too underdeveloped. Once again, we're in the shadow of Goldeneye, and Carver can't help but suffer in comparison to the far more fleshed out 006. After Carver's nice little speech about "why" being the key to a good story, the movie ironically neglects to give us ANY "why" to Carver, except "because he's nuts." That's not necessarily bad--Bond films have done that for decades--but Goldeneye left us expecting more. In 1997 we want some background for the character (there were a few lines cut out from M's briefing, but nothing substantial), as to why he is the way he is.

As a result, much of his character--and the plot--in just stenciled in. Bond shows up at his party, makes a couple of "could be harmless, could know too much" remarks, and Carver orders him beaten up? Heavens, why? There was nothing to their original meeting to warrant that. Nothing Bond said indicated he was an actual threat. Given this behavior, how many other people did Carver have roughed up that night? It's as if the writers knew the form such a confrontation had to take, but not the substance--let's have the villain try to kill Bond here...just because that's what is supposed to happen at this point in a Bond movie. Sadly, the whole film is rife with half-formed Carver motivations. He's jealous about his wife? Too bad they never showed us that he had any actual affection for her, any chemistry between the two. Pryce's charm covers a lot of those cracks, but not completely.

The henchmen are a somewhat disappointing lot. This time out, Ricky Jay as Gupta is the techno-wiz, but he's no Boris. The script gives him nothing to do accept say "yes, sir." And even if it did, Ricky Jay is no actor. His wooden delivery gets swamped by Pryce's performance every time, and we're left with a boring technogeek, with nothing for the audience to latch onto. (In fairness, there are a couple of deleted scenes on the DVD that have Gupta throwing around razor sharp playing cards, which makes nice use of his magician skills, but they were pretty silly, and it's just as well they weren't used).

Götz Otto. I just like to type that...Götz Otto. Anyway, his Stamper is blond, and imposing, and Germanic. And that's about it. He doesn't really bring anything more to the game than, say, Necros did. When even Stamper's boss mocks him for the poor job he's doing of killing the heroes, you know he's not going into the henchman hall of fame. All imposing presence and talk, little actual action. (I should note that in Raymond Benson's novelization of the film, Stamper was born with a freak medical condition wherein the "pleasure and pain centers" of his brain were reversed, so things that would normally hurt a person actually felt good to him, making him formidable in a fight. I don't know if that was in one of the earlier versions of the script, or if Benson spun it out of whole cloth...but obviously someone was paying attention and partially recycled the idea for Renard in The World Is Not Enough). One more time: Götz Otto.

And the "so much for German efficiency" line is hilarious, so I guess that's in Stamper's favor.

The late Vincent Schiavelli was memorable as Dr. Kaufman, but he only had a couple of minutes of screen time, which is too bad. He had far more personality than any of Carver's other goons, and while his death was well done, it does mean for the last half of the movie we're stuck with the boring Gupta and the unimpressive Stamper. What a waste to have such a fun henchmen, in a matching fun performance, brought on screen, only to have him immediately whisked away...

The movie's plot makes one more crucial, deadly mistake. After all the emotional investment they try to give us with Paris--"I've always wondered how I would feel," "Did I get too close?"--they go and kill her. Which means that, mere moments after the death of the great lost love of his life, they have Bond so completely over her that he practically begs Wai Lin to hop into bed with. Put into Bond terms, you can't kill Tracy Bond halfway through the film and expect audiences to still feel sympathy for the loss if, in the next reel, he's catting around with Ruby Bartlett. It just doesn't work dramatically, it undermines Bond's characterization, and it undoes whatever significance you were trying to give to Paris (not to mention risking that the audience will regard Wai Lin as a "second choice"). When you build Paris up to be THAT big a part of Bond's life, you can't have him acting as if it never happened later in the film.

The funny part is, Paris, as a character, is almost completely unnecessary to the movie. Bond's trying to prevent his country from going to war, so he doesn't need the extra revenge motivation. She's of no real help to his mission--the only info she provides, that there's a secret lab, could just as easily come from somewhere else. She's there as a sacrificial lamb because, once again, the writers felt that that's what was supposed to happen at this point in a Bond movie--someone Bond cares about dies, to spur him on.

(Also, as I mentioned above with Carver, I wish we had seen some reason those two were together...really, there's nothing at all onscreen between Paris and Elliot, and that only serves to make her look somehow like a gold digger who married the first rich guy she could find after Bond left her.)

Which is not to knock Terry Hatcher at all. She is as sexy as hell, her chemistry with Brosnan sizzles, her love scene with Bond is hot. I like her take on the character--a no nonsense American, practical enough to say "Shut up and take the information I'm giving you, James." It's not Hatcher's fault that the screenplay doesn't give her a lot to do, and throws her away as a prop.

And then there's the Yeoh problem. Remember all the time Goldeneye spent building Natalya's character, before she even met Bond? Contrast that with Wai Lin. Do we know a single thing about her? No. The film just throws her up there--competent Chinese agent, and that's it. No background, no characterization, nada. As a character, she's a complete cipher, which is a shame, because Michelle Yeoh is capable of giving us a lot more than that. But in the shadow of Goldeneye, and even more in the shadow of Paris Carver, Wai Lin is essentially a non-entity as a romantic interest.

It's not Yeoh's fault--it's not her doing that TND is structured so that she Bond's rebound love for the movie, and it's not her responsibility that after a scorching love scene between Paris and Bond, we have to wait all the way until the last 5 seconds of the film for a tepid kiss that, frankly, feels tacked on. But she and Pierce do seem to have very little romantic chemistry going for them, and it sure seems as if he's trying harder than she is. She's like Pussy Galore...competent bad-ass, but poor romantic match-up with Bond.

Which is not to dismiss her kick-assed-ness, because she rocks. For some reason, she never quite got the publicity as Babara Bach or Halle Berry as "a new type of Bond girl" just as competent as he is and liberated yadda yadda. But she acquits herself fairly admirably, and is a far better agent than the other two. The scene where she take down 4 goons with 2 bullets is righteous (although pro-tip: if you don't waste all of your bullets shooting up the engine control panel, you wouldn't be in that situation), and a good contrast to some of the rest of the movie's overkill. But she does need to be rescued by Bond twice during the film's final 15 minutes (apparently, the otherwise none-too-effective Stamper is her kryptonite)...and she does set off the alarm in Carver's lab, while Bond had managed to get in and out without doing so. Remember: you can be the most competent female agent in the world, but you're not allowed to outshine James Bond, because it's his movie, dammit!!

Pierce Brosnan has a tougher assignment this time out, as the screenplay is considerably weaker, and has his character jumping through so many tonal shifts that he must have gotten quite dizzy. He manages to be convincing in whatever the scene is asking him to do, but his performance feels weaker because the script doesn't give him a stable emotional through-line to follow this time around. Even if you like his performance, it's tough to watch him practically panting after Wai Lin the whole second half of the film, with no visible signs of mourning for Paris. There were press reports that Brosnan feuded mightily with Spottiswoode on the set, and I like to think that it was over the emotional inconsistency of what he was being asked to do.

This has been an odd review to write, because as Jaquandor said, there are two levels to judge it on. As an action movie, it's very successful, exciting, fun.

So when I spend so much time picking it apart, I feel that I'm doing the film something of a disservice. And in isolation, it's even a pretty decent Bond movie. It has a lot of things going for it, and given a choice between this and, oh, Live and Let Die, I'm going to watch this one 9 times out of ten.

But I've chosen to accentuate the negative here because we have a textbook example of how what should have been a really, really good Bond movie ends up a merely decent one. An obsession to justify a big budget and to"outdo" last time; no one in charge with the creative vision to look at what they were doing, and see how some parts fit the plan and some parts didn't; a paper doll approach to motivation and plot after we'd been spoiled by Goldeneye, forgetting that the care lavished upon the roles was what made that movie great, not the explosions. It's a clear case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, because sufficient care wasn't used in assembling those parts.

They forgot to let Bond be Bond.

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

**Let's talk about the entire GPS premise. On its face, the movie seems to misunderstand the concept. Everything in the film seems as if it's operating under the premise that disrupting one satellite signal will enable you to drive someone off course:

But GPS uses a constellation of satellites, from 24 to 32. The GPS receiver takes signals from a minimum of 4 different satellites and triangulates the data...advanced receivers, as the military would use, will take data from every available satellite, for increased accuracy. From almost any point on the Earth, at least 6 satellites are in line of sight, and most of the time 8-10 are in range.

So if Gupta was able to override only one of the satellites, the one bad data point data would likely be rejected as an error, and the Devonshire's system would have used the other 5-9 satellites to calculate it's position. And even if he was able to get one bad signal through, it's unlikely that that one signal could be "wrong" enough to override all of the correct signals from the other satellites, at least to the degree shown in the movie.

But let's say that Gupta has the mathematical chops to use one satellite to move the Devonshire 70 miles off course. Or, let's assume that Carver was able to override several satellites, without our seeing it. That still leaves a big problem: what about everybody else? Every other airplane, ship, and military craft receiving that signal should have also been off course too, right? Using a Carver satellite, like they showed, couldn't possible ruin only the signal received by the Devonshire--it had to disrupt the navigation of everybody using that satellite!! Including the "U.S. Airbase" in the South China Sea that Bond visits later...wouldn't they have noticed they were getting screwed up GPS data? And to get a boat like that 70 miles off course, you likely had to feeding it bad data for several hours. So where's all the late and off course air liners and cruise ships? No accidents caused by this? What about the Chinese MIGs? There should have been dozens or even hundreds of reports of bad navigation, which should have bolstered M's case before Admiral Butthead.

**We're never told how the Americans "lost" the GPS encoder that Gupta buys. Given the security they require to even let Bond look at it, they really owe us more of an explanation than that. I smell a couple of Cletus' coming...(not to mention the fact that the British detected the "mysterious signal" on the GPS frequency while the Americans didn't?? Oy...)

**One last GPS note (I promise): An "exact satellite fix" is fine...but when enemy fighters are buzzing me and insisting I'm off course, maybe, just maybe I poke my head above deck and actually look, you know? Break out a compass? Or a sextant? Just to be on the safe side?

**The theme song is not amongst my favorites. Sheryl Crow's voice is thin and whiny, the melody eminently forgettable. The situation isn't help by the fact that the end theme, sung by k.d. lang and co written by David Arnold, is much, much better in every way. As always, it's telling when the end theme gets used in the actual score, and the main theme is ignored.

**Daniel Kleinman's opening credit sequence is a disappointment after last movie's...it's really just a lot of generic images, that seem to have nothing to do with the movie's plot or themes...nowhere as near as sexy.

Oh, and welcome, David Arnold. Nice to have you aboard. Your score is actually pretty good...but you're no Eric Serra (thank God).

**Best deleted scene EVER: you may have noticed then shot, when Bond is getting the BMW from Q. There's a cage in the background with a big cat. What was up with that?

From the deleted scene on the DVD, we see that earlier Q takes Bond up to the first cargo container, announces "Pay attention, 007, your new car," clicks his thingy, the sides of the crate drop away, and surprise--the cage contains a jaguar, which roars at Bond. Trying to look nonplussed, Bond quickly, quips "A Jaguar?" Q grumbles "Wrong assignment...let's try again, shall we?"

Aside from being a good joke, there's two noteworthy things here. First, it doesn't come across on the screen at all, but Benson's novelization says that this was a deliberate practical joke by Q. Which is pretty rad...you go, Q.

But, secondly...Wrong assignment? This means that Q had another assignment, somewhere in Germany, involving a freaking jaguar. Think about that. I want to know more.

**This movie is all about what the Bond-M relationship should be. Admiral Roebuck doesn't believe Bond would get through to the terrorist "bazaar," and M lays an "I told you so" on him. Her steadfast support ("What's he doing?" "HIS JOB!") is on a par with Bernard Lee's absolute faith in Bond in Thunderball. And we've gone from "sexist misogynist dinosaur" to M ordering Bond to use his sexual wiles on Paris Carver...funny how the media didn't play that one up, eh?

**OK, OK, we get it--smoking is bad.

The movie repeats itself, as Bond twice uses the "need a light" gambit to knock out a goon. Really? Twice in the same movie? You already ran out of ideas?

**Another repeater: Bond using a knife to cut off clothing so he can escape the Teutonic blond henchmen in their final battle. Did that in The Living Daylights already, guys.

**On the flip side, there are some good homages. Bond sitting alone in his hotel, drinking Smirnoff while waiting for a killer to show up, nicely echoes Dr. No, for example, without ripping it off.

**Speaking of that scene...Owen Gleiberman is still an idjit. I'm just sayin'.

**The motorbike chase is very well done...great stunts, excellent choreography for the two-people-handcuffed-together-on-a-bike bit (OK, there is some clumsily obvious squib use)...but it just goes on a year and a half, doesn't it? Another spot where someone needed to step in and say, "let's make some trims here."

Thailand does fill in quite nicely for Saigon, though.

**Brosnan bash...takes down the goon with an ashtray. Gotta love the casual take down of goons with household items...

**Now wait a minute...Carver's goons used machine gun fire to try and break into the BMW earlier, right? With absolutely no success, right? Then how come, during the chase, both windshields get taken out by those same guns?!?

At least BMW gets their money's worth this time, unlike last movie...a grand car chase, even if spectacularly misplaced within the movie.

**The first 3 Brosnan films all have plot points that rely on the broken up Soviet Empire not being able to hang onto their advanced weaponry...the Goldeneye, the nuclear torpedoes in this movie's teaser, and nuclear warheads and a whole flipping submarine in TWINE. I know Eon shied away from making the Soviets overt bad guys during the Cold War. So what, we're making up for lost time now?!?

**Jack Wade is back, though it's hard to see why. This is not a dig at Joe Don Baker, it's just hard to figure why they thought this movie needed him. I guess the producers thought returning characters gave the audience some sense of continuity.

**Why in the world does Carver's missile have a 5 minute launch countdown?? Does that make any sense? You've somehow overcome the British arming codes, rigged it to fire from your cute little stealth boat...why in the world add a countdown, which we can be pretty sure it didn't have on the Devonshire?

Speaking of which, I usually don't too quibbly over countdowns matching movie time, and Bond films have actually been fairly good in this regard. But that 5 minutes takes about 10 minutes of screen time, the last 2 minutes takes over 4 minutes. C'mon, guys, if you're going to give us a countdown, at least play fair with it!!

**Lots and lots of cool gadgets in Wai Lin's safe house in Saigon...too bad she didn't actually use any of them while she was being attacked!!

**All right...M finally has proof that Carver is behind the plot. Now she has the information to stop the impending war. So what does she do?

She drives it over to wherever that situation room is.

Again...she drives it over.

Oh, sweet lord, maybe M doesn't have the balls for the job. WWIII is minutes away...you don't call, or fax, or email it? You drive it over?!? Why not just put a stamp on it and let the postal carrier bring it over?!? Sheesh...if she gets stuck in traffic, the war starts!!

Bond Score: 3. Professor Inga Bergstrom (the "little Danish"), Paris, and Wai Lin. Cumulative Bond Score: 50!! Congratulations, James!!

And as always:

Be here next week, when I try to get away with comparing a James Bond movie to a Shakespeare play...and no, not the one you think.

America Still Sucks...

...just not as much!

In an earlier post, I looked at how the Connery-era Bond movies seemed to take a rather dim view of the capabilities of the United States of America. We may have been the preeminent military and economic power in the world, but we were still a bunch of slack-jawed yokels when it came to the "gentleman's game" of international espionage. Despite that, American audience ate Bond up. Curious, eh?

So now, let's take an overdue look at the Moore-era treatment of the good ol' US of A. As always, the movies are rated on the Cletus scale.

Live And Let Die: Oh, my sweet heavens. Let's see if I have this straight. Apparently, every single black person in America is either working knowingly for drug dealing Mr. Big, or cowering in fear of voodoo. A whole nationwide chain of soul food restaurants is being used as a front to pedal drugs, and nobody in America knows (which doesn't exactly justify Felix Leiter's move to the DEA). Roving bands of African-American funeral processions are killing people on the streets. Diplomats are murdered at the United Nations with impunity. And the ONLY ones investigating this are the British secret service??

Meanwhile, southern cops are unrepentant racist rednecks. The U.S. (in violation of international law) has eavesdropping devices in a foreign embassy (I know, I know, they all do it...). The CIA is more concerned with the damages Bond is racking up than actually investigating anything.

At least Felix provides the explosives at the end.

Rating: 5 Cletus' (out of 5). Seriously, if Kanaga hadn't killed a couple of British agents, America would be a bunch of drug-addicted zombies controlled by organized crime...


The Man With The Golden Gun had no direct American involvement (unless you count the teaser, in which we see the series' continuing preoccupation of showing American gangsters as old, dressing like it was 1942, and worshiping Al Capone). So we go to

The Spy Who Loved Me: Americans come off well enough here...yes, their submarine is captured, but the same happened to the Brits and the Russkies. More importantly, they're good fighters when it comes time to take over the Liparus. And the captain is a stand-up guy, giving Bond extra time so he can rescue Anya.

Rating: 1 Cletus. On of America's best showings.



Moonraker: Wow. Just like You Only Live Twice, Americans don't seem to have invented radar yet. The Moonraker shuttle is stolen--in mid flight!!--over Canada, but somehow gets all the way down to Brazil without being trackable by the Americans.

Then, they're unable to detect 6 (yes, 6) simultaneous shuttle launches from Brazil...even though the space station was shielded, the shuttles weren't. So, if the Soviets were to be launching a massive space shuttle based attack, we'd be clueless and dead. Guess we got lucky it was only a genocidal billionaire madman, and the MI-6 was there to save the day.

Mitigating factor: Holly Goodhead was actually a pretty good secret agent and astronaut (albeit portrayed by a terrible actress). The U.S. does have, ready to roll at a moment's notice, a bitchin' space special forces unit, armed with never-seen-again lasers.


Rating: 4 Cletus'



For Your Eyes Only manages to avoid any American entanglements whatsoever (unless you count stainless steel delicatessins). Which brings us up to

Octopussy: Mostly no American involvement. Yes, it was an American air force base attacked, but most people would have been fooled by this ploy, and not even a British officer would have believed a clown about a nuke.

One demerit, though: after Octopussy's circus smuggled a NUCLEAR WEAPON onto your military base, you just let her (and her circus) go?? Even if it was unknowingly, don't you hold her for a little bit of questioning?!?

Rating: 2 Cletus'.



Never Say Never Again: Interesting to see how a non-Eon production treated us. Sadly, it's not much better. Apparently, our security measures are so slipshod that international terrorist groups have the President's retina pattern. And high-ranking U.S. Air Force officers can be cajoled by heroine-dispensing dominatrixes into betraying their country.

Then again, every other nation is portrayed as being run by bureaucratic bunglers and buffoons, and thanks to M and Small-Fawcett, Britain actually comes off worse than the U.S.

On the plus side, Bernie Casey is one of the more useful Felix Leiters ever, the American troops prove quite useful, and Kim Basinger is at least not as annoying as some other American Bond girls...

Rating: 3 Cletus'



A View To A Kill: A hard one to judge. Unlike Goldfinger, it's hard to say that the U.S. government should have seen this one coming.

Then again, an American (state) official is shown being bribed into allowing Zorin to pump sea water into fault lines, which he knows to be dangerous; American cops are shown as bumbling and stupid; and the head of the KGB can apparently drive around unwatched or followed, picking up nearly naked Russian spies in the street.

And then there's Stacy Sutton...shudder...

Rating: 3 Cletus'.



So, without doing math, I'd say that in general, America came off better during the Moore era. Part of that was the movies shifting to even more international locales, and seemingly a growing sense of confidence that American audiences would accept Bond without having to have an American along to hold his hand (hence, Felix Leiter being written out of the Eon series for 14 years).

And when America was involved, we often came off better than in the 60's.

But LALD? Man, that one set back Anglo-American relations decades...

Goldeneye

Goldeneye was different.

In many ways, the 6 year gap (caused by ridiculously convoluted legal squabbles) after Licence To Kill caused a major shake-up in the franchise. Some old friends left, some new blood came on board. But it was somehow something more than that.

In an era of a "New World Order," the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dawning of the technology and communication era, what would Bond mean? In the first post-Anita Hill Bond, how could we have the same attitude towards his womanizing?

And the franchise itself could have been in turmoil, as many of the old family had moved on. Cubby Broccoli was retired. Richard Maibaum, who had had at least a hand in the script of all but three of the Eon Bond films, had passed away, as had Maurice Binder, creator of so many memorable title sequences. John Barry was nearing retirement, and was no longer interested in doing Bond films. John Glen ,who had directed the previous five movies, was directing a British sci-fi TV show, and would soon retire; everyone else who had ever directed a Bond film was either long retired or passed on. The "old guard" was gone.

Yet the influx of new blood brought something that the franchise had never really seen before: a "modern" Bond. No, they didn't "deconstruct" Bond , not really, or radically change direction. But for the first time, we were given an examination of what the concept James Bond meant in contemporary times. Note that I didn't "re-examination," as the franchise had never really shined the onscreen spotlight onto Bond and his role in the previous 30+ years.

This is especially clear when watching all the 007's back to back. Never before had we seen Bond's female companion seriously questioning why he was doing what he was doing...oh, she still went along with him, but she made him think about his actions. Never before had we seen a Bond and an M question each others usefulness and methods, actually questioning their roles in the 1990s. Never before had we had so much as a line of dialogue from another Double-O...now we have two of them talking non-stop about what all the martinis and women really meant. Hell, we now even have Bond declaring what he has to do to "keep himself alive."

Was this an intentional move by the producers, to make Bond more "human" and "relevant" in the 90's, to shore up the franchise by keeping it tonally consistent with other movies out there? That after a long gap and with a new Bond, it was the perfect time to shake up the formula a bit? Or was it just what the new writers happened to want to write about this time?

One hint by be to look ahead a teeny bit: in all of the Brosnan movies, they made things more "personal" for Bond. Despite Bond's declaration to M that it was "never" personal, in the Brosnan era we're given: 006 as a friend who betrayed him, Carver kills Paris, Elektra uses Bond in a way never seen before, and Bond is out for revenge on whomever set him up in Die Another Day. True, at times things had been made personal for Bond before (especially Licence To Kill), but just as often there had been "just doing my job" where Bond finishes off the villain calmly and saunters away for the pre-end-credits sex pun. But for the Brosnan films, it was as if there was a new directive--find a way to make the plot personal.

This time around, we can thank the writers for doing so in such an effective way. Michael France wrote the original screenplay, and got a "story" credit; Jeffrey Caine rewrote it; Kevin Wade gave it an uncredited polish; and Bruce Feirstein turned in the finished product (France has been made comments about feeling "under credited", so I'll not stir any pots with any attempts to say who is responsible for what. Let's just applaud them all, shall we? Fun fact; France's next--and only--screenwriting credits were Ang Lee's Hulk, the Punisher movie with Thomas Jane and The Fantastic Four. Uhhh, ouch?).

Regardless, the idea of giving Bond a mirror image to fight, someone his equal and opposite, was so obviously brilliant in retrospect that you wonder how in the world no one thought of it before. The idea of a rogue Double-O works on so many levels. It gives Bond a mastermind whom we know to be his match in training and skill, not a bloated milquetoast multi-millionaire who has to rely on henchmen for everything. It causes Bond, and the audience, to examine his loyalties, by showing us there's another path he could have taken. And best of all, it gives Bond some guilt over the death he feels he "caused," and how that guilt turns into destructive hatred when he finds out he's been used and betrayed. Making 006 the early sacrificial lamb AND the ultimate villain was simply a master stroke. Think of it this way: we have a villain who never calls him "Mr. Bond," just "James." Now that's radical.

The teaser itself fulfills the standard of being its own mini-movie, while still elegantly setting up the main plot. And a grand mini-movie it is, too, introducing us to our new 007 in with an exciting mission, extraordinary stunts, and a bit of pathos, as well. The action is thrilling, the Arkangel set great (and the models, as well). Just listing everything that goes on in these few minutes--the bungee jump, the infiltration, the meeting up with 006, the sabotage, the discovery, the "murder" of 006, the tense stand-off, the escape, the chase, the jump after the plane, the explosion--still puts most other action movies to shame, even in 2008. And with a few simple lines of dialogue, we establish Brosnan firmly as James Bond. Unlike with Connery and Moore, they actually put the new Bond in his own teaser the first time out, in action, and the audience immediately gets over whatever cognitive dissonance it might have had over the new man in the role. The Goldeneye teaser is clearly one of the best in the series' history.

By the way, have you noticed that the Brosnan teasers never have women in them, M and Moneypenny and Cigar Girl excluded? Connery, Moore, Dalton, they often started or ended with Bond getting some…but never in the Brosnan era…just pure business. See, George Lazenby: It DID happen to the other fella.

The structure of the movie is a bit unusual for a Bond movie. After the teaser, we don't start with a briefing from M, or even a mission (it's unclear why he's in Monaco...is he there specifically to look after the Tiger helicopter, or is he just there for pleasure and stumbles into it?). Instead, in a bit of a tip-off to the movie's approach, he's undergoing a psychological evaluation ordered by M, while having fun driving aggressively. That's an underlying metaphor for the movie--we're going to examine the underpinnings of what Bond's about, but we're damn well going to have fun doing it.

After playing around in Monaco a bit, we still don't get our scene with M. We have a long interlude, where we're meeting many of our players, bringing others back in, and setting the stage for what our actual plot is. Ourumov and Onatopp come back, and we meet Boris and Natalya. This movie takes a lot of time and care to build its supporting cast. Boris is presented as a quasi-likable jerk, with no indication that he's one of the bad guys. And we see Natalya as smart and resourceful. And Goldeneye is unique in that we spend more time getting to know the Bond girl before she meets Bond than in any other movie--only From Russia With Love even comes close, really. And so we get henchmen and allies who are characters in their own right, already established before they take sides; they're not merely appendages of Bond or the villain.

Finally, we get to the obligatory scenes at MI-6 headquarters. First, we welcome Samantha Bond as our latest Moneypenny, and it's a gross understatement to say that she's a marked improvement over Caroline Bliss' mousy weeper. This is a Bond/Moneypenny relationship for the 1990's, where she can give as good as she gets. This is no one-way unrequited crush, but sexual-tension filled verbal fencing between equals, where both parties know what they want but don't go for it, because that would ruin the fun. And her final line, where his punishment for "sexual harassment" is to "make good on all his innuendos," actually sets the scene for his conversation with M (although most people missed this).

Ah, yes, the first meeting with Judi Dench as M. Much, much hay was made of this in the media. The scene was she calls him a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" was the clip played ad infinitum on every news show, every preview, and blathered about in every review. Of course, what everybody seemed to forget was that Bond was also calling out M here, in terms he didn't really mean, as well. It was two dominant predators marking their territory, sorting out their new working relationship, trying to put each other in their place. The fact that the scene ends with M's wan smile and a request for him to "come back alive"has the same effect as Moneypenny accusing Bond of sexual harassment and turning into a proposition a sentence later: harsh words coating softer feelings. As to the sexual misogynist dinosaur business, it's pretty clear that she doesn't seriously mean it, especially in later movies, where she's encouraging him to use his sexual wiles and appreciative of his "blunt instrument"qualities.

Did you realize that this was Judi Dench's only scene in the movie? It surprised me upon re-watching. Such is the dominance of her performance, her small role feels like it fills up the whole film. That's why the lady won an Oscar, guys. I do wish they had given her at least one more scene--I would have loved to see her reaction to the revelation that 006 was alive and now a criminal mastermind. In following the irascible Bernard Lee and the underrated Robert Brown, Dench surpassed any reasonable expectations and took M from a stock character to a newer, more vital, more involved role than we had ever scene. So good was she, that when they decided to toss everything out for the Casino Royale (2006) reboot, they kept her as M, even though that made no sense within the series' murky continuity. But hell, how can anyone object? She's that good.

So Bond takes off to hunt down the Goldeneye, putters around St. Petersburg, and we finally get the great reveal (spoiler alert): 006 is the bad guy. The movie did an excellent job of hiding this, making us believe Ourumov was the ultimate bad guy up until this point. The shock on Bond's face, the quick shift to anger at being betrayed, completely shift's the movies direction in an instant, as we begin an hour of a doctoral dissertation on "compare and contrast the good Double-O agent to the bad." From this point on, the main plot, the hunt for the Goldeneye, the threat to London, all take a back seat to the Bond/Trevelyan clash (which blunts whatever disappointment we might feel when it's revealed that the plot is just an over-engineered bank robbery). It's good licence to kill versus bad licence to kill.

And oh, 006, how evil you were. Alec "Two Face" Trevelyan's first “death” helped set the tone for how Bond lived the rest of his life, and his return shook Bond to his core, while giving him a foe who knew him as well as he knew himself, someone who could out-think him and out-fight him (maybe). The easy camaraderie they showed in the teaser made it that much more painful later. Sean Bean plays Alec note-perfectly, giving us a man we can believe was both Bond's friend and later deadliest foe. You don't suspect him at all in the teaser...in fact, you can even picture him having his own secret agent film series. Of course, thanks to Goldeneye, now in every movie with Sean Bean, you assume he’s the traitor (Lord of the Rings, Ronin, etc.) or an evil bastard.

(I will say, however, that I wish they had leaned a little bit less on the crutch that he was a Lienz cossack. While it's historically true that a number of cossack factions did fight with the Nazis in WWII and were turned over by the British to Stalin, the movie hammers it so much that it comes perilously close to ethnic stereotyping--"every cossack is automatically a traitor, always." There's a difference between a great motivation and an inborn tendency towards evil behavior, and the clumsiness of the movie blurs the line a bit, I think.)

And extra kudos for the way Bean is able to show how narrow a line a Double-O walks. Every bit of evil he indulges in--the greed, the sexual sadism (he's into Onatopp's pain games, the particularly icky kissing and licking of Natalya), the laser-like focus on revenge--are all things critics have accused Bond of at various times in the franchise's history. Bond manages to avoid crossing the thin tuxedoed line that Trevelyan has dashed across with glee. Bean is playing Bond tweaked just a few degrees to the wrong side, but never carries it over the top. The fact that his accent and delivery is almost exactly the same as Timothy Dalton's only helps sell the point.

As for the plot, I do have some serious questions, which I'll address in the notes below...not everything seems to make sense. But director Martin Campbell, who has now become the go-to guy for First Bond Movies, manages to keep things moving briskly, never giving us time to question too much. The pacing is excellent, and Campbell keeps cutting between various locales and characters (virtually unprecedented, except for the villain, in the series) to keep our interest piqued. Campbell has a facility with both the action and drama, as well as the comedy and love scenes. Bravo.

I do have to question, though, how many goddamned explosions there are. I'm not sure how much to blame the script and how much to apportion to Campbell. I like explosions as much as the next guy, but lordy, how much is too much? In Goldeneye, four (yes 4) villainous headquarters explode. Arkangel blows up in the teaser, Severnaya explodes (in several stages), Janus' train HQ blows up real good, and the Cuban base really, really blows up good (again, in several stages). Meanwhile, some Soviet MIGs explode, Russian cop cars explode, the Tiger helicopter explodes, Bond's tank blows up when the train hits it, Onatopp's helicopter explodes, the antenna engine explodes...Bond's plane into Cuba is shot down, but miraculously doesn't explode!! All well done, great effects and model work...but really, it was overkill. Check out the cover of the latest DVD release in the first picture in this post--no girls, just a big explosion!!

Speaking of models and effects, farewell to Derek Meddings. His work was almost always top-notch, and here they give him tons to do. He was more than up to the challenge, which made his death prior to the movie's release all the sadder. Perhaps if he had were still around, we wouldn't have had some of the CGI abominations in DAD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've gone a long time without saying much about Pierce Brosnan himself, because I am having trouble figuring out how to frame it. In full disclosure, I have to acknowledge that I was dead-set against his becoming Bond back in 1987...I thought that, based upon his Remington Steele work, that he would just be a younger Roger Moore, another comedy-lite 007. Well, either I was wrong, or the intervening years really added intensity and, well, balls to his persona. I'll let you decide which. (If you think the latter, than ironically NBC actually did him a favor with their dickweed move of not letting him become Bond in 1987.)

Brosnan is not the best actor ever to have the role, but he has been given more acting to do than most of the others, over the course of his tenure. That alone immediately helps him to stand out a bit. To that extent, Brosnan benefits enormously from the "modernizing" of Bond, as he gets to explore motives and emotions prior Bonds were never given a chance to.

And he acquits himself quite well. As I said earlier, the writing helps by putting him in a situation where were inclined to accept him as Bond immediately. But it's not entirely that--Brosnan embraces the role with gusto, and as a result the audience accepts him quite easily as James Bond. And he takes that acceptance and pulls us into his performance. At times I'm tempted to say that he comes across as a blend of Connery and Moore, somewhat more comfortable than Connery with the comedy, but more at ease with being the hard-nosed killer than Moore was. That's overly simplistic, of course, but given that many peoples' reaction to Dalton was that he was too grim and serious, it's no surprise that Brosnan and the producers pulled back a little bit. But Brosnan invests himself in all aspects of the role, and seems equally comfortable with some of the tonal shifts the movie pulls. Whether lovin' or fightin' or introspectin', I never see Brosnan (or Remington Steele) up there, I only see Bond. That's a victory.

One prime example is in one of the many great set pieces, the tank chase through St. Petersburg (OK, most of it was actually filmed in England...still). It's very well done, even if it does go over the top just a smidgen a few times--but unlike Moore, Brosnan never gives into the silliness, never winks at the audience (unless you count the tie-straightening moment). He plays it right down the middle, and you believe that he believes that it's all deadly serious, which sells the sequence perfectly.

And speaking of set pieces, how about the final fight between 006 and 007? For the parts inside the transmitter, Brosnan and Bean did all of their own stuntwork (except for one shot) in an attempt to recreate some of the feel of the train car fight in FRWL. I applaud the cojones, and it's damn successful, thanks to the emotional context the film has built around these characters. Who would want to see Bond beating the crap out of Stromberg, for example? But such is the enmity between these two, the cathartic physical fight is necessary both for the characters and the audience. Bravo.

One note to future screenwriters, though--can you guys ease off on all the (bad) sexual puns? There's cute, and there's overload, and some were just terrible. Even Pierce couldn't pull off a lot of those...

Natalya, as played by the vivacious Izabella Scorupco, is one of the most “normal” of any Bond girl, a sort of Hitchcockian every-woman suddenly swept up in momentous events. The fact that the screenplay spends so much time with her early helps with this. And she handles herself very well, showing courage and resourcefulness without suddenly becoming a superwoman and losing the character. She bickers with Bond, but not in a pointless or mean-spirited way. She questions him, but also knows how to be of great value. Her abilities save the day, but in a wholly believable way. And she and Bond have great, believable chemistry. A top-tier Bond girl.

We have a motley crew of henchmen this time out, and at times they play more like a triumvirate a la Kronsteen/Kleb/Grant in From Russia With Love. But Onatopp and Ourumov clearly become subservient once Janus is revealed as 006. Those two do end up comimg off a tad weak, after the large build-up they received early in the movie. After Severnaya is destroyed, Ourumov doesn't really have a lot to do, and his demeanor from that point--drunk, panicked, subservient--don't make any more likable (for a henchmen). Plus, he isn't terribly good, is he? He let's Bond destroy Arkangel (surely that wasn't part of the plan? See Notes below), he fails in his attempt at the cover-up in front of the committee, his panicked killing of Mishkin is desperate and lucky...and of course it turns out that he didn't even kill 006 in the first place, so much of our hatred for him was misplaced. It's an odd downhill arc, from presumptive big bad to bumbling henchman, with no clear indication as to why 006 is his boss, rather than the other way around. Better luck in hell, I guess.

Xenia, Xenia, Xenia. I loves me Famke Jannsen to death...but rather than grow on you, her Onatopp also doesn't wear well in the movie, never sustaining or building on the interest we have in the first half hour. The fault's not Jannsen's, as the screenplay just has her repeating the same tricks over and over again. The third time she tries to squeeze someone to death with her thighs, and the umpteenth time we see her gain sexual satisfaction from pain and death, the act has grown a tiny bit tiresome. After her exciting drive with Bond in the opener, and their fun repartee at the baccarat table, we expect a lot more to come, but it's as if the writers have lost interest. Xenia has what, maybe 5 lines of dialogue for the rest of the movie? Part of it is the shift in focus to Trevelyan, but part of it is that the writers just let the character stagnate into another wordless goon. She's not a bad henchmen, but she could have--should have--been a great one.

Boris, of course, rocks the world.

I would be remiss if I didn't vent some spleen at the coyote ugly score by Eric Serra. Just to be clear, John Altman and David Arch are credited by some sources as having "provided the more traditional symphonic music," while the soundtrack credits say Serra wrote everything while Altman merely arranged and conducted the symphonic portions. So there's enough blame to spread around, I think. The zangy, off-kilter, discordant synthesizer riffs were already 10 years out of date when this movie was released, and are even worse now. Listening to the opening car chase or opening teaser is actually painful to me, and I can say this because the soundtrack is playing as I write this. And check out the stupid treacly piano backdrop that tries to sneak in when 006 reveals himself to Bond in the statue graveyard. Blecchhh. There are a few decent parts; I do like the kettle drum effects, for example. But not nearly enough to save this terrible, terrible score.

Which leads me to say that maybe, just maybe, I underrated the theme song in my rankings. Not one note from the song (written by Bono and the Edge, performed by Tina Turner) ends up within the movie proper, which is a shame as it's a fairly good song, especially when isolated from the rest of the soundtrack. Plus, maybe it's a better mix on the latest DVD release or just better equipment on my part, but the song actually sounds much better on screen than on the soundtrack CD. Hmmmm...

A final soundtrack note (3 paragraphs about the soundtrack?? Have you gone mad?!?!): the song played over the end credits, "The Experience of Love," is written and performed by Eric Serra, and is THE MOST ABSOLUTELY GODAWFUL THING EVER COMMITTED TO VINYL, CD, DVD, 8-TRACK, CASSETTE, OR ANY FORM OF SOUND MEDIA EVER. Ahem. Sorry about that.

Much more to discuss below, but I think that in summary, Goldeneye is very clearly a wonderful debut for the Brosnan era, a film with a swagger about it that (in most eyes) immediately put to rest the idea that the franchise's time might have passed. This is a movie with enough self-confidence to take on all of the pop culture critiques of the franchise and answer them, while still remaining the Bond we know and love. The story is Bond, while being original, and not merely cannibalizing past films. The new regime comes out hitting on all cylinders, and the result is a top tier Bond film, a wonderful return from a long cold winter.

Oh, and it made a pretty bitchin' video game, too.

SNELL'S RANDOM NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS:

Less random this time, actually, as initially I want to focus on some confusing points of 006's plans and how they came about.

**How, exactly, did this plan come about? Did Trevelyan approach Ourumov out of the blue, and say, "Help me fake my death and I can join you?" Did he already know Ourumov, or did he approach him after he found out that they would be infiltrating Arkangel?

**And what, exactly, was the endgame? Was Trevelyan planning to join the communist party? Was he planning to go black marketeer/weapons dealer even then? Did he foresee the forthcoming collapse of the Soviet regime, and figure now was a good time to start building a power base? Did he know about Goldeneye that far in advance, and already had his whole scheme mapped out? (and if so, why wait so long to implement it? Unless he was waiting both for the Tiger helicopter to be invented and Ourumov to be promoted to head of Space Command??)

And what, exactly, was Ourumov supposed to gain from this?? "Help me fake my death and nine years from now I'll make you rich?" "I'll give you lots of secret information to help you advance your career??

**Now, the plan depended on either Bond escaping, or being captured and escaping, or being captured and traded back to the British later (a la DAD). If Bond isn't going to go back and tell the story, there's no reason for faking your death, right?

Yet they don't seem to be too concerned about keeping Bond alive. The guards are all armed with real bullets...and they fire an awful lot of them at Bond. And Ourumov seems content to let Bond drive his motorcycle off a cliff. It seems like sheer luck Bond survives, rather than design, and if he dies, the whole charade is moot.

**Speaking of which, for someone who can "anticipate Bond's every move," did Alec really expect James to quietly surrender, or let himself be captured without a huge fight? I guess he didn't really know Bond that well...

**As to the fake death itself, we don't see the actual shot to Alec's head, but the next bullet Ourumov shoots, at his own soldier, is a live round. Did his gun have just one blank and the rest live? Were they all live, and he just shot to the side of 006's head (and thus, embarrassingly, fooling Bond with a movie stunt special effect)?

**I'd always thought that it was pretty odd that, after allowing a chemical weapons facility to be blown up by a British agent, Ourumov was able to get promoted to head of space command. But Goldeneye is a freeze-framers paradise, and here's Ourumov's biography from M's display screen:

Rehabilitated by GORBACHEV in 1987 following destruction of ARKHANGEESK facility...In spite of being given command of SPACE DIVISION, by Gorbachev, OURUMOV is believe to have been behind the Gorbachev coup but the inquiry was dropped after the suicide of a co-conspirator.

Well, isn't that interesting. I wonder why Gorbachev would have rehabilitated him...it doesn't seem to have been because of loyalty, as Ourumov later betrayed Gorby and fancied himself the next "Iron Man of Russia" (as opposed to the Iron Man of America, Tony Stark). Unless...was Gorbachev in on the plot? Did he protect Ourumov because it was his plan to bring 006 over?!? "Help me bring 006 over, and I'll make you a general?!?!"

But then 006 turns on Gorby, pushing Ourumov into running the coup against Gorbachev?!?!? Wow, he really must have been a Lienz cossack. OK, I'm getting perilously close to fan fic here...

And since we now that Ourumov betrayed Gorbachev AND betrayed his country to steal the Goldeneye (and kill the Defence Minister!!), he's got a lot of nerve thinking that Lienz cossacks are dirty traitors...

**OK, one final fan fic moment: M's screen says Arkangel was destroyed in 1987. Now it's silly to try and make sense of Bond timelines, and there's no reason to assume that The Living Daylights actually occurred in 1987...but 006 working for the Soviets might explain how Russian General Koskov knew so much about MI-6 training exercises, knew where secret British safehouses were, and why Koskov would specifically request Bond. Was Trevelyan behind the "smiert spionum" ploy???

**You would also think that, having a Double-O on the payroll, the Soviets (or at least Ourumov) would have been able to thwart an awful lot of MI-6 missions. But that might have been a tip-off that Trevelyan was still alive, so maybe he was very careful about what he doled out...

**Maurice Binder may have been gone, but Daniel Kleinman's opening credit sequence is stunning, updating Binder's look while remaining faithful to the style. Bikini clad women smashing up Soviet statues...oh, so perfect.

**More freeze frame stuff: the information Moneypenny transmits back to Bond regarding Onatopp's boat, The Manticore, says "Manticore is possibly heavily armed to military level." Hmm, we sure didn't see anything like that...Maybe we could have had that boat blow up, too.

**Interesting technology, by the way. In the 15 seconds it takes Bond to walk back to his Astin Martin, Moneypenny has a) received the transmission, b) looked all the stuff up, c) gone to M to get her orders, d) put together all the info into convenient report form, e) recorded a summary message for Bond, and f) transmitted it to him. Uhh...how? Don't ask, don't ask, just enjoy...

**Bond takes down an assailant with only a towel. That, ladies and gentleman, is freaking awesome. It would also be a Brosnan trademark, using some ordinary innocent household item to take down armed thugs, and then casually drop it...

**Pro-tip for a secret agent in a hurry to prevent something far away (like a helicopter being stolen): use your cell phone. Call ahead, alert the armed troops. If you don't have a cell (why??), the boat must have a radio!! Don't just rush over there yourself, when you can't possibly get there in time!! One little squawk and you could have prevented the whole fiasco from happening...

**That was a Canadian admiral who Xenia seduced and killed, whose ID they used to get into the ceremony. Doesn't that mean we should have seen some Canadian secret service action?!? Eh??

**Hey look, the real MI-6 headquarters!! No more Universal Exports storefronts!!

**In most of my reviews, I've mentioned how the movie relates to the Ian Fleming work. Well, we're done with that, folks. It's been mined. "Goldeneye" was the name of Fleming's Jamaican estate. Otherwise, everything is spun from whole cloth. They've cannibalized all the Fleming left, except for some short story called "Quantum of Solace," and they would never use that...

**Both England and the Soviets had the EMP resistant microchips back in 1985, in A View To A Kill. Guess they ended up not working so well, eh?

**Why does so much of the action center in St. Petersburg as opposed to Moscow?? Yes, I know, that's where they got permission to film, but still. I guess I can accept the Russian Space Division is headquartered in St P (M's screen said so). I can accept the the Russian Defence Minister and that unnamed committee might go there. But from the maps we see, there must be dozens of cities closer to Severnaya than St P. Why would Natalya go all the way there, ill-protected from the weather and on a dog sled?

**The requirements for the computers Natalya pretends to be interested in buying: 500 meg hard drive, and 14.4 kps modems. Ah, living back in Flintstones days...

**You would think that if 006 was as smart and clever as he kept saying he was, we wouldn't fall into the stupid trap of leaving Bond in an escapable death trap, like the helicopter or the train. But nope, Alec isn't any smarter than any of the other megalomaniacs Bond meets.

There's a good question: do other Double-O's meet as many world-conquering villains as Bond? Or is he just lucky?

**Hey, Minnie Driver!! A great cameo...except for us Americans, because almost no one in America had ever heard of her when this movie came out...

**Hey, Robbie Coltrane!! Valentin is a pretty good supporting character, and he has a good deleted scene on the DVD, too. I'm not sure, though, that this bit part justified a return in a greatly expanded role in TWINE...

**Oops...Wait a minute...Janus' identity is such a secret, but Valentin knows he's a Lienz cossack?!? How? He's never met the guy. Even 006's evil allies didn't know!! Was it on Trevelyan's Facebook page or something??? Was Alec just going around dropping hints in the Russian underworld, telling folks "you don't know my identity, but I'm a Lienz cossack!!"??? Why would he advertise something that would brand him as untrustworthy to anyone dealing with him? Maybe it was his accent that gave him away...

**Hey, Joe Don Baker. Really? As I've said, I'm no fan of the man, and whenever he has to portray anything besides redneck bluster he's really pathetic (watch his "Please, no" when Bond makes him reveal his tattoo...worst delivery EVER). I'm not sure why he's here, unless the producers felt that the relaunch of the franchise required making Americans look like chumps again. Or maybe it's a make up for the terribly crafted role he was giving in TLD.

Still, he does no real harm, and at least we'd never see the character again...

**Great, great sets. The Soviet statue gallery is so spooky and perfect it is frightening, and the perfect spot for 006 to reveal his "resurrection."

The interiors of all of the complexes that blow up are pretty damn good, too. Until they all blow up.

**Hat tip to Tcheky Karyo, who makes a great impression in a tiny role as Defence Minister Mishkin. The lost art of interrogation, indeed...

**Not to get cranky, but the BMW was most useless product placement ever!!! All of the good car stuff gets done with the Astin Martin. Despite Q's lecture, all we see of the damn car is a leisurely ride down a dirt road in Puerto Rico. Supposedly, BMW was thrilled with all the publicity they got, which turned into more sales, but it's hard to see why. Dramatically, they'd get more for their money next movie...

**Presumably Bond checked in with London before going to Cuba after Trevelyan. Shouldn't M have sent some more support for Bond, at least one more person, rather than relying on one untested Russian civilian and whatever plausibly deniable aid the Americans might provide? At this point it should be obvious that some of Trevelyan's scheme has got to be revenge against England, and we know there's a deadline...so sending Bond in with no support is a pretty foolhardy move.

**Bond**Jack Wade's final line, "Maybe you two would like to finish debriefing each other at Guantanamo," sure sounds a lot more ominous these days, eh?

**Score: 2. Caroline (the psychologist "evaluating" Bond) and Natalya. Cumulative Bond Score: 47

And, as always:

Tune in next week as Bond faces the power of the press.