WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT?  Elliot Carver, kind of a cross between William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, with a dash of Steve Jobs thrown in as well (not to mention Faye Dunaway from Network) wants to start a war between the English and the Chinese so that he can cover it with his brand-new satellite-driven media empire.  Imagine, back in the innocent, wonder-filled days of 1997 it counted as the fanciful stuff of movie spy-thrillers that a media mogul would start a war just to profit from its coverage.  What Elliot Carver doesn’t seem to realize is that the technology existed, even in 1997, to do exactly what he’s doing totally legally and without building an extremely large “stealth boat” (whatever that is) to start his fake war.

In a poorly-developed subplot (which I actually had to look up to figure out) Carver has also made a deal with a renegade Chinese general  wherin Carver will help put the general in charge of China in exchange for broadcast rights to Chinese television.  Why Bond Villains feel they need to have secondary evil plots thrown in as an afterthought is beyond me.  Is it not enough to start a war so that your satellite network can profit from it?  Why scheme with a renegade general as well?  And who’s to say that the renegade general is going to keep his promises once he becomes the new leader of China?  Why the hell would you trust a renegade general?  Any general renegade enough to stage a coup in his own country isn’t going to give a damn about some media mogul in a flashy haircut.

WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD?  Bond must track down a CIA high-tech whatsit that Second Villain Henry Gupta has bought from some terrorists.  M has figured out that Carver has used the whatsit to steer a British ship into Chinese waters, sparking an international incident (he has also sunk the boat with a giant underwater torpedo-drill).  Bond goes to Carver’s HQ in Hamburg, where Carver is celebrating the launching of his new satellite dealy.  He tries to get to Carver through his wife, whom he has had an apparently serious affair with in the past.  This plan backfires and Mrs. Carver winds up dead.  Bad guys come after Bond, who escapes Hamburg with the whatsit and flies to the South China Sea, where he tracks down the true location of the sunken British ship.  There he hooks up with Wai Lin (what, no obscene pun for the girl?), a Chinese spy.  They are captured by Carver’s men, taken to Carver in his HQ in I think Shanghai.  (Why do Bond Villains insist on having Bond brought to their headquarters so that they can explain their evil plan to him?  Can’t they do it by telephone?)

Where was I?  Oh yes.  So Bond and Wai Lin escape from Carver’s clutches, get their act together, and go blow up Carver’s stealth boat before it can launch a stolen missile at Beijing.

After the heavily-plotted Goldeneye, it’s actually kind of nice to see a Bond movie with a plot closer to something like Thunderball, with the emphasis on action set-pieces instead of complexity of motives or mystery.  In fact, come to think of it, there’s no mystery to Tomorrow Never Dies at all, and I must congratulate Mr. Bond for the re-dedication of his detective skills.  When this Bond enters a room, he’s actually looking for a specific thing, he’s not just walking around poking at things.

WOMEN: For what I think is the first time in a Bond movie, I actually believe that Bond had a somewhat meaningful relationship a woman.  His scenes with Mrs. Carver actually indicate that their affair ended in something resembling painful awkwardness.

Of course, no sooner does Mrs. Carver die but she is replaced by Wai Lin and forgotten.  And no sooner does Wai Lin prove herself to be a supremely capable equal to Bond does she get wrapped up in chains and tossed into the ocean for Bond to save.  It shouldn’t bother me at this point but it does.

That said, the fact that both Teri Hatcher and Michelle Yeoh make impressions as actual characters in a Bond movie (two women in one movie!), and two actual sort of unique presences in Bond narratives, has to count as some kind of miracle.

HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY?  Elliot Carver seems okay cool to me.  His plan makes sense for the most part and he doesn’t do anything gratuitously stupid or careless.  His Second Villain is Mameteer Supreme Ricky Jay (little does he know that the Americans have BritishMameteer Supreme Colin Stinton working for them).  His Third Villain (or Head Henchman) is a pale imitation of Donald Grant from From Russia With Love; they’ve tried to make up for this definciency by naming him Stamper.  His Fourth Villain (that’s got to be some kind of record) is Milos Forman regular Vincent Schiavelli as a forensics expert who specializes in staging accidental deaths.  That’s a great idea for a character but there’s no time spent with him, so he’s forced to sit down and explain to Bond who he is and Bond has to sit there and listen before he gets the chance to kill him.

He’s got a ridiculously oversized stealth boat (I still don’t know how that’s supposed to work) that is the size and shape of a Ken Adam set — honestly, who needs to build a gigantic stealth boat, with 100-foot ceilings and massive piles of high-tech stuff in it?  All it needs to do is launch a torpedo-drill and then later a missile.  And why oh why does Carver need to be on his stealth boat when he launches the missile?  I would think, if anything, in this day of satellite communication, Carver would prefer to be in Hamburg or Shanghai or wherever — he is, in fact, shown running his world-wide network from there earlier in the movie.

Major points are also deducted for bringing Bond to his headquarters, letting him escape after blowing shit up, then having him brought to his headquarters a second time, aboard his stealth boat.

I actually enjoy the torpedo-drill, which has the power to chew large holes through battleships, then continue to chew its way around the ship in any direction its owner likes.  If I ever had the need to chew my way through a battleship, Carver’s torpedo-drill will be at the top of my list of ways of accomplishing that task.

NOTES: Terrific opening sequence, I wish it had more to do with the rest of the movie.

The title sequence, to my eye, is the first to actually look expensive.  No laser-light shows projected on women’s bellies here — full-blown cg psychedelia.

The car chase is splendid, but I’m sorry, not even James Bond can make a BMW sedan look cool.

And I also have a question about Bond’s cars.  After he leads the bad guys through a hair-raising chase and inevitably crashes his car, he always just walks away from it.  Isn’t that tantamount to blowing his cover?  When the local police come to get the wrecked vehicle, aren’t they going to notice the rocket-launchers in the roof?

I object to Helpful Animal Jim Wade as a replacement for Felix Leiter, but at least he’s played by the same actor two movies in a row.

Why must all high-tech spy stuff be kept in eerily-lit, expensively-designed, glass-fronted, concealed cabinets?  Why not just a cubby-hole behind the radiator or something?

I haven’t read all the Bond novels, but Tomorrow Never Dies struck me as the first Bond movie to take as its source material only other Bond movies.  I lost track of all the different plot devices lifted from other Bond movies, but I’d lay even money that there is something lifted from every single movie in the series and given a high-gloss 90s polish — the capitalist trying to corner a market, the big boat starting a war between two countries, the gigantic chase through the poor Asian neighborhood, the investigation of the undersea wreck, the Scaramanga island, the bad guy futzing with the navigation systems of a country’s war machine, the renegade general staging a fake war to seize control of a country, the high-tech whatsit falling into the hands of a madman, the list goes on and on (which is another way of saying I can’t think of any more — but don’t let me stop you, dear reader).  The fact that none of this bothered me while I was watching it probably means that Tomorrow Never Dies is a pretty good movie.

when this movie came out, I hadn’t seen a Bond movie since Moonraker. I hadn’t seen a Bond movie since Moonraker because the last Bond movie I saw was Moonraker. So I was greatly reluctant to see Goldeneye and I didn’t know Pierce Brosnan from a hole in the ground (in fact, I routinely confuse the two even to this day). Then I saw a trailer for Goldeneye and there was one moment, perhaps 12 frames long, where they showed Bond leaning up against a concrete pillar, trying to set a timer or something, whilst a squadron of goons shoot machine-guns at him. And a bullet hits the concrete about an inch from his face and Brosnan makes this face like, like, well how to describe it? He looks annoyed, as though a kid just shot a spitwad at him. He’s not cold, he’s not angry, he’s not emotionless, he’s just…annoyed that a squadron of goons are shooting machine-guns at him. And that one split-second moment made me think: “hm, I want to know more about this guy.” Even then it took me a number of weeks and a dead-end evening in Los Angeles (are there other kinds?) to get me into a theater showing Goldeneye.

And I had the time of my life.

When Connery appeared as Bond, he owned the part in a second. When Lazenby came along it was “Thank you, we’ll call you,” when Moore came along he was great in Live and Let Die but took the character in such broadly comic directions that it was hard to care about him any more, and then Dalton went in the opposite direction and made him driven, dour and grim. Now Brosnan comes along and, for the first time since Dr. No, he waltzes right in and immediately owns the part as much as Connery ever did. He looks great, he easily sells the pithy lines, he moves with grace and dignity, and there’s something going on behind his eyes.

WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? There seems to be a common flaw with Bond Villains, which is that they have at least two too many motivations for their crimes. Here, the bad guy wants revenge on Bond, wants a whole pile of money, and wants to plunge Britain into the stone age, because he’s the son of a guy who was something called a Lienz Cossack. That’s just too damn many motivations. Goldfinger is a great Bond Villain because his motivation is pure and simple and his plot is ingeniously demented and evil. The bad guy in Goldeneye has three motivations (Bond abandoned him on a mission, he wants money, he hates Britain for what they did to his parents) and it makes for a complicated mystery to solve, which is good, but it weakens the guy.

I mean, look here — the guy is agent 006, which is a great idea, and Bond left him for dead on a mission. So he becomes a Russian gangster and pledges to one day have his revenge on Bond. There, that’s a great idea for a Bond Villain right there. But no, he also wants hundreds of millions of dollars, which he plans to get by, well, let’s face it, he plans to get it the same way Blofeld tried to get it, by aiming a giant space-laser at a country until they cough up the dough. That would have been a good enough plot right there too (and, in fact, was a plot of at least three earlier Bond movies). But no! In addition, the bad guy wants revenge on Britain for something that happened at the end of World War II (or, that is, well before he was born). My guess is that the guys who wrote the screenplay for Goldeneye (the first new guys since the beginning of the series, thirty-three years earlier) had been waiting a long time to write a Bond movie and wanted to put in every single idea they ever had for a Bond Villain. As a result, the bad-guy plot loses a little focus — we like the revenge part of the plot because we are there when Bond abandons him during the mission, but then the “Lienz Cossacks” thing gets dredged up in the middle of the movie in the worst possible way — a long monologue from the villain in a dark junkyard. And then the money angle gets tossed in in the middle of Act III, like “oh yeah, and we’ll make a lot of money too.”

WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? In spite of the overly-complicated bad-guy plot, I will now aver that Goldeneye is the best script for a Bond movie so far. The mystery is satisfying, the plot is propulsive and compelling, the character work is by far the richest as yet. I believe James Bond is a (rather extraordinary) living human being, with likes and dislikes, friends and enemies. He exists in a richly-imagined fantasy world of spies and gadgets, close-calls and outrageous stunts. He never winks to the audience, although he certainly knows they’re there.

In the pre-title sequence, Bond is on a mission with 006 in Soviet Russia. The mission goes south and Bond leaves his partner, thinking him dead. Nine years later, he’s zipping around Glamorous Forieign Mountainland when he stumbles upon Xenia Onatopp, a zesty, maniacal driver and gambler. He investigates Onatopp and discovers, too late, that she’s also a crack helicopter thief. The helicopter Onatopp is stealing is a new prototype that is not affected by electro-magnetic pulses.

Turns out, Onatopp was stealing the helicopter for a guy named General Ouramov. Ouramov, we think, wants to take over Russia. To do this, Ouramov wants to get his hand on this Goldeneye space-laser thingy. The Goldeneye space-laser thingy projects an EMP that blows shit up. Ouramov steals the yellow ball that makes Goldeneye work and blows up the place with the space laser, killing everyone at the Goldeneye station. He and Onatopp get awayin the special anti-EMP helicopter.

After the Goldeneye station goes blooey, Bond goes to St. Petersberg to find out what happened. He hooks up with a Russian Gangster, who hooks him up with Janus, who’s kind of the Darth Sidious of the Russian gangster-world, and who turns out to be 006. 006 tries to kill Bond in a typically inefficient Bond-Villain way, and Bond ends up arrested by the Russian army. Ouramov shows up with Onatopp to kill Bond but Bond gets the drop on him and gets away again. Around the end of Act II, 006, Ouramov and Onatopp trap him and The Girl in a train compartment that’s about to go blooey. Bond and The Girl track the gang to Cuba, where the bad guys have built another Goldeneye station and plan to make their bid for taking-over-the-world-ness.

WOMEN: Xenia Onatopp, as played with ferocious intensity by Famke Janssen, is a cartoon but one you can’t take your eyes off. Like all Second Villains, she has a gimmick (she has, apparently, pneumatic-powered thighs that can crush a man’s ribcage), but Janssen plays her madness and eroticism so over-the-top that her gimmick seems almost an afterthought.

As a countermeasure, the Good Girl, Natalya, is a more-or-less genuine female presence. She’s beautiful, smart, funny, resourceful, and doesn’t take shit from anyone, Bond included. She’s important to the plot and doesn’t ever cede her agenda to Bond’s. She does not whimper or go wide-eyed when in danger and we almost believe Bond’s seduction of her, coming as it does seconds after they have escaped from an exploding train.

HELPFUL ANIMALS: Bond has a CIA contact in Russia, but it’s not Felix Leiter. No, instead it’s Jack Wade, played by the villain of The Living Daylights, Joe Don Baker. Baker is a swell actor and his chemistry with Brosnan is potent, but why couldn’t he be Felix Leiter? What, did the producers really say “Well, people won’t be able to accept him as Felix because Felix got his leg bit off in the last movie?” He’s been a different actor in every single movie and now they’re worried about continuity issues?

HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Pretty cool I guess. As another 00 agent, he’s got the same understanding of gadgets that Bond has. He hangs out in a spooky junkyard full of broken-down Communist monuments, which is pretty cool. He has overspent on his HQ, of course, as Bond Villains tend to do. I mean, it’s a radar station, you don’t need forty-foot ceilings and grand, winding staircases.

NOTES: The “big idea” of Goldeneye is that James Bond has a past. James Bond’s “past” seems to consist solely of the 17 movies that have been made about him. Everyone seems to know him, but they seem to know him only from his movies. And why not? Everyone does know him from his movies. A six-year-old could tell you what kind of car James Bond drives and how he takes his martinis. This device, meta as it is, serves to both give the character some depth (which he hasn’t really had up til now) and congratulates the audience for staying with the guy long enough to get the jokes (it also proves that, as Stanislavsky said, character is nothing more than habitual action). Brosnan’s blithe, breezy performance creates a tension with all the backstory, so as we fall in love with his devil-may-care aloofness, everyone else keeps dredging up all this stuff he’d prefer not to think about. It’s the most complex imagining of the character yet and a far cry from the Bond of, say, Diamonds Are Forever.

The glamour is back in a big way, and yet doesn’t feel forced or arch. The superb direction by Martin Campbell makes the only-slightly-unbelievable action feel playful, witty, sexy and seductive.

When all this is over, don’t forget to remind me to tell you about the Bond one-act I almost wrote.