Die Another Day
WHO IS JAMES BOND? James Bond is having a really bad day. He’s been captured by the North Koreans after trying to sell them some “conflict diamonds” in a sting operation, and he has been treated — gasp — the way a captured spy is generally treated in these circumstances. That is, he’s been tortured and interrogated and thrown in a filthy cell, instead of being handcuffed to a nuclear bomb or dropped into a shark tank or strapped to a laser table (that comes later). This has pissed him off. The torture and confinement is probably bad enough, but to add insult to injury, when he is released by the North Koreans he looks almost exactly like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, drawing one of the most unfair invited comparisons in the history of filmmaking.
WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? You’d never guess, but the bad guy has, unbelievably, a big space laser. After Diamonds Are Forever, after Goldeneye, after Austin freaking Powers, the bad guy has a big space laser. This time, he’s a Richard-Branson-esque capitalist who is really a believed-dead North Korean Army officer who’s gotten some kind of face transplant or mind-meld or something. He promotes the big space-laser as a “second sun” (ironically, he is, himself, a “second son” of a North Korean general) and calls it Icarus. So apparently he either has a keen sense of irony or else he believes everyone on the planet is a complete idiot.
Anyhoo, Mr. Diamond Merchant Who’s Really A Presumed Dead North Korean Army Officer builds a giant space laser so that he can blow up the DMZ at the border of North and South Korea, allowing North Korea to invade South Korea. If it wants to — I can’t remember if they even mention that in the movie.
WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? Bond, as I say, is captured by the North Koreans, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured. He’s let out, kicked out of MI6, and goes looking for this Xao fellow, a North Korean guy who happened to be standing nearby when a suitcase full of diamonds exploded. He tails Xao to Cuba and meets Jinx, who’s apparently some kind of American girl spy or something. He and Jinx try to get Xao, but he gets away.
Then, like in A View to a Kill, the plot completely changes halfway through the movie. Unlike A View to a Kill, the second half of the movie turns out to have something to do with the first half. This guy Gustav Graves shows up and he’s got a big space laser. Bond doesn’t like him because he deals in conflict diamonds, so he goes to the guy’s fencing club and challenges him to a duel. The duel ends up taking over the entire club (and destroys Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy,” which, I’ll bet you didn’t know, hangs in a private fencing club in London).
Bond then pursues Graves to this place with a lot of ice, where Graves is showing off his big space laser. Bond has come with MI6 agent Miranda Frost. Jinx is there too. Bond is certain Graves is connected to Xao somehow. What he learns is that Graves is actually Xao’s brother, believed dead but actually having a face transplant or something and calling himself a British diamond merchant now.
Anyway, Bond finds this out (or Jinx does, I think) and Xao shows up and chases Bond across the ice. Graves turns on his big space laser and melts a giant piece of ice, forcing Bond to surf, which he actually does twice in this movie. And at a certain point your mind just snaps, because there are no two activities more incongruous than surfing and big explosive action thrillers (Point Break notwithstanding).
Oh, and Miranda Frost turns out to be a bad guy.
Bond and Jinx team up to stop Graves from blowing up the DMZ in a big action set-piece featuring a sword fight between two women on a plummeting, flaming 747.
WOMEN? Jinx, the good girl, is played by Halle Berry. Miranda Frost, the bad girl, is played by Rosamund Pike. Guess which one is memorable?
Halle Berry won an Oscar while working on Die Another Day but she still ends up having to be rescued by Bond, not once but twice.
Madonna, in addition to singing the title song, shows up as a fencing instructor. It’s almost like the 1967 Casino Royale, with stars big and small showing up to do their cameos.
HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Gustav Graves isn’t cool at all. He’s a sneering, obvious bore. Having a literally fake face is no excuse. Xao is slightly more cool as the Second Villain, but I have to wonder about the diamonds imbedded in his face. Did his doctor, when operating on him, say “I have bad news for you, you will lose all your hair, all your skin pigment, and your irises, and worst of all, it is impossible to remove the diamonds imbedded in your skin”? Or was it more like this:
DOCTOR: Those diamonds imbedded in your face look painful. I’ll have to operate.
XAO: Are you crazy? With a gimmick like this I’m sure to make Lead Villain for sure!
WEATHER ANOMALIES: The sun shines in Cuba, giving everything a golden, summery glow. It does not shine, however, in North Korea, where everything is dingy and gray. Which I guess means that Communism is not, in and of itself, capable of extinguishing the sun. All of this explains why Graves is interested in creating a sun of his own — he didn’t get any of it in North Korea.
NOTES: I watched this movie with actor/blogger James
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in attendance, so forgive me ifI’m not getting everything in the plot right. It was weird to watch this, the 20th Bond movie, after watching the other 19 in a row, and watching no other movies in between, with a comparative Bond neophyte. He kept vocally protesting the movie’s detachment, artificiality and dramatic inertia, all things that moviegoers generally overlook when watching Bond movies. Here I was appreciating the lighting and the relatively complex plotting, and Urbaniak is trying to compare it to a real movie. Which, at the end of the day, it is not. (As a kind of palette cleanser, we watched the opening of Citizen Kane — as head-snapping juxtaposition of artistic realities as I think is possible on a movie screen.)
A note (sorry) on music: During the action-packed climax, Urbaniak made note of the Carmina Burana knockoff playing on the score. I noticed it too, and noticed another Carmina Burana knockoff playing under the climax of Pirates this weekend. And I realized that Carmina Burana has, somehow, in the past 20 years or so, become a staple of a certain kind of film scoring. How did that come to be? Dr. No gets by with “Three Blind Mice” but Die Another Day must bring in Carl Orff. But whenever there’s some kind of high-stakes action sequence now, here comes the furiously chanting choirs again. How did film scores become showcases for 20th-century classical music? In fifty years will people watch movies like Die Another Day and Pirates and think “Wow, those Early 21st-centuryers sure loved their imitation Orff!”
I don’t remember noticing all the gadgets when the movie came out, but they sure stick out now. They’re all over the place. I didn’t mind the invisible car when it showed up in 2002 but it bothered me now. Who knows, maybe in ten years everyone will have invisible cars and we’ll watch Die Another Day and chuckle at how outdated and clumsy Bond’s Vanquish is.
I also remember enjoying Cleese’s performance as Q in the theater, but it seems just as dreary and unfunny now as any late Cleese performance.
It never occurred to me before, but there’s a scene in the beginning where the North Koreans find a photo of Bond and he’s a dead ringer for Peter Jennings. And suddenly the career of Peter Jennings became 100% more interesting.
Xao, as I say, chases Bond across the ice in his Jaguar. Like Bond’s car, Xao’s is outfitted with rocket-launchers and machine guns and so forth. Now, I can see why Bond’s car has all that stuff (or, to be honest, I can’t see why it has all that stuff, but I’ve grown accustomed to the tradition of it) but I can’t for the life of me understand why Xao feels he needs to have a chaingun and rocket launchers in his Jaguar. And the whole sequence falls apart for me there. I don’t know why that’s the breaking point for me in a movie that includes a big space laser, a hotel made out of ice and Madonna as a fencing instructor, but here we are.
Bond sneaks into the bad guy’s arctic lab, a glass dome that is, of course, made up of hexagons. Nothing futuristic was ever accomplished without hexagons. Hugo Drax knew that.
Bond and Jinx sneak into the bad guy’s airfield using — what? I’m sorry, they use what to breach the airfield’s security system? Wirecutters? To cut through a chain link fence? Does Bond’s watch no longer have a miniature buzz saw on it?
In the explosive climax, Bond and Jinx bail out of a crashing 747 by climbing into a helicopter in the plane’s cargo bay and starting it up as it plummets toward earth. I could be wrong, but I’m not entirely sure it is possible to do that.
There is a valedictory aspect to Die Another Day, a kind of summing-up. Lots of in-jokes, clever references and navel-gazing. Or maybe I’m confusing “valedictory” with “not having any original ideas.” The problem with the Brosnan Bonds is that they feel the constant burden of The Bond Movies, that they’re part of a tradition, that they have something to live up to. In Die Another Day the whole construction, the whole hall of mirrors, finally collapses like, well, like an ice-hotel under the beam of a big space laser.
