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.

We know who Batman is. Batman is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, whose parents were killed by a mugger outside a movie theater in Gotham City. At that moment, Bruce Wayne lost his identity and became a crime-fighting spirit of vengeance. Bruce Wayne is forever haunted by the deaths of his parents, and so puts on a scary costume and goes out every night on an impossible quest to rid Gotham City of crime. We know that Spider-Man is bespectacled-loser Peter Parker, we know that Luke Skywalker is a restless teenager aching to get off his crummy backwater planet, we know that Charlie Brown pines for the little red-haired girl who will never know he’s alive.

But what do we know about James Bond? In spite of having 21 movies made about him, he remains maddeningly elusive as a person. I was shocked to learn, in the new Casino Royale, that he’s an orphan, brought up as a ward of the state. That explains a lot, especially the glee evident in Daniel Craig’s demeanor at getting to live a life of luxurious splendor far beyond the station he was born to. But mostly in the movies Bond has no past to speak of, just a casually-worn knowledge of every subject in the universe, mostly-excellent taste in clothes, a life of drunken leisure and a desire to screw beautiful women.

(I was about to add his love of gadgets, but Bond has no love of gadgets — a car, a gun, a super-magnetic watch, they’re all just tools, things useful for getting the job done. Q has a love of gadgets, Bond couldn’t care less. If he can kill a guy with a coat-hanger, he will — he doesn’t need Q’s fancy crap, in spite of how often it comes in handy. And the car will inevitably be destroyed during a chase in some bad-guy’s warehouse. You don’t see James Bond worrying about his paint job.)

It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s Bond’s lack ofstory that has allowed him to have 21 movies made about him. The Bond movies occupy a peculiar narrative universe. They’re not a continuing narrative, they’re more of an attitude and a set of values, a formula if you will. A satisfying story demands a beginning, middle and end, but James Bond just goes on and on and on. Each adventure rolls off his back, rarely is a timeline or sense of past mentioned, he starts over fresh every time he slouches into M’s office. (“What do you know about a man named Scaramanga?” asks M at the beginning of The Man With The Golden Gun and Bond shrugs and recites, for about two minutes, every detail of Scaramanga’s life, as though it were common knowledge and barely worth mentioning.) Like pornography, Bond promises satisfaction and keeps you coming back in spite of never giving you what you’re accustomed to receiving in a movie theater. Perfect popcorn movies, the Bond features always taste more-or-less great, and you always want more in spite of the fact that they never really fill you up.

After watching Goldfinger the other day I began to wonder how Bond spends his time when he’s not blowing shit up and saving the world. He doesn’t seem to search out danger and intrigue, that’s just his job. Now me, when I’m not sitting at my computer writing I’m driving around town taking care of family errands and thinking about writing. Bond doesn’t seem to have this problem. When the job is done, he’s back to what he considers man’s natural state — sleeping late, playing cards, getting drunk and screwing beautiful women, preferably in the back of a boat adrift in some warm tropical sea.

(There was an excellent Saturday Night Live episode where Steve Martin played Bond on his off-hours, where he’s trying to live the Bond life in order to impress his date, but because he’s not on billable hours he has to pinch pennies, get free food from the casino bar and worry about dirtying his white dinner jacket.)

Indiana Jones has a similar narrative strategy, we only get little scraps of his life in dribs and drabs, and yet the Indiana Jones movies feel different, perhaps because of the scale of the adventures, perhaps because of the religious nature of the artifacts he searches for, perhaps because each movie takes him on an emotional and/or philosophical journey. Things affect Indiana Jones, he’s never the same man at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, but nothing seems to affect James Bond. I get the feeling that if it wasn’t his job to save the world, he wouldn’t particularly care if the world was saved or not. When he’s taken prisoner by Dr. No, and No tells Bond about SPECTRE’s plan to rule the world, Bond snorts with amused derision “World domination, the same old dream.” He has no serious worries that Dr. No has any real ability to pull off his mad scheme (whatever the hell it is, I still haven’t figured it out), it’s just his job to stop it. Or rather, it’s just his job to get the girl and get off the island alive, and if that involves stopping No’s scheme, then so be it. There’s always this feeling when he walks into M’s office that he’d just as soon turn right back around and go back to playing cards.

Maybe Bond exists best as a state of being. He does a lot of guy things — he parasails, bungee-jumps, punches people, chases women (well okay, he doesn’t do much chasing, the birds pretty much fall out of the trees when he walks by), drives fast cars, or cars fast anyway, consumes electronics. The consumer aspect of Bond is as powerful and important, I think, as any other. It’s not for nothing that brand-names are always being tossed around in Bond movies (from Casino Royale: WOMAN: “What’s that watch you’re wearing? BOND: “Omega.” WOMAN [visibly aroused]: “Perfect”). The only reason I know the term “Walther PPK” is because that’s, you know, James Bond’s gun. He’s a kind of style-sheet — a proper gentlemen wears X clothes, drives Y car, drinks Z drink, thinks about topic A, B and sometimes C, but only when necessary to do so for Queen and Country. A man, says Bond, learns everything in the world and is capable of performing any task imaginable, so that he may then live a life of luxurious decadence.