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SPOILERS FOR A MOVIE RELEASED OVER A DECADE AGO!
In the midst of the Cold War, James Bond 007 and Alec Trevelyan 006 infiltrate a Russian chemical weapons facility to disable it in the time-honored tradition of chemical weapon disposal: Blowing it all to hell. Before these close friends can get to their bro-grabs, General Ourumov captures Alec. Bond has the choice between surrendering and escaping in a wild pre-credits thrill ride. You can guess what choice he makes.
Nine years and a naked ladies credits sequence later, Communism has fallen and it’s THE NINETIES! Thus, everything is computer crimes and lasers and M is a shrewish ballbreaker (amusing, by the time of Casino Royale this comes full circle and she’s the warm maternal figure to Daniel Craig’s jackass hero) and everyone makes jokes about sexual harassment, though since this is a Bond movie, the women are complaining that James doesn’t sexually harass them enough. That’s how Ian Fleming rolls!
Here’s where the plot kinda stumbles. Bond is getting a performance evaluation (snicker) from some woman who probably has a ridiculous name like Julie Honeybuns or Christie Silklips or Megan Fox. He sees Famke Janssen driving a Ferrari and gets into a car chase with her because… well, hey, she’s Famke Janssen. In a Ferrari.
They end up in Monte Carlo, mainly so Bond can wear a tuxedo and gamble, but Xenia Onatopp (groan) is more interested in an American admiral. But no sooner has Bond been left holding his telescope (it takes pictures!), than Xenia kills the admiral by crushing him to death between her legs. Insert requisite and heartfelt “if you’ve gotta go” jokes here (no, seriously, can this be some kind of Adult Make-A-Wish Foundation. “You have nine months to live, Mr. Carter.” “I’m going to have sex with Xenia Onatopp!” “Wait, sorry, you have nine years to live.” “…can I still have the sex?”). So it just so happens that Bond came across the key operative in an evil plot hatched by his old BFF (spoiler!). And this is all part of a scheme to get an EMP-proof getaway vehicle for the real crime, which is also a prequel to the real-real crime. You could fan-wank that it’s Alec baiting a trap for James Bond, but that’s still a bit silly. And really, Bond is psychic enough without being able to literally stumble across bad guys.
So Xenia steals a helicopter, blows up a Russian satellite installation, and the plot finally gets moving. The satellite dish did more than get really clear reception of ESPN-HD… it controlled an EMP satellite system called Goldeneye. There are two survivors, Boris (played by Alan Cumming, before he turned out to be kind of awesome and came out with a cologne called Cumming) and Natalya Simonov, who showed up late when the Bond franchise was assigning silly names to women. And, these being world-class hackers, they use passwords that are the answers to silly word games instead of unbreakable strings of numbers and letters. Xenia’s there not just to have way too more fun killing people, but to steal the arming codes for the Goldeneye satellite (which must be seen to be believed. Somehow, it involves two keys to be turned at the same time, this clunky-looking eye thing, and then it shoots a LASER BOLT into a different computer to actually start the system. No wonder the Soviet Union fell, if they spent all their rubles making stuff like that instead of just letting you press Enter on a keyboard).
MI6 sees this on satellite (NINETIES!), and, naturally, since it’s a stolen FRENCH helicopter being used to destroy a RUSSIAN facility, they decide to send a BRITISH secret agent. After the standard pow-wow with Moneypenny, Q, and M (she looks so weird with dark hair!), Bond goes to Russia and meets Joe Don Baker, in possibly one of the weirdest, yet earnest pop culture combinations until Samuel L. Jackson shared the screen with Yoda. Then he talks with Valentin Zukovsky, who directs him to Xenia Onatopp (this being THE NINETIES, he makes a safe sex joke during their fight), who FINALLY sends him to meet Janus, the criminal mastermind who YEAH IT’S SEAN BEAN. AT LONG LAST!
This is really the heart of the movie, Bond versus a rogue agent, so it’s really a shame the movie spends so much time on the “mystery”. I mean, it’s Sean Bean. Do you really think he’s just going to be the guy who dies to prove what a badass some random Russian guy is? It’s pretty much Bond finding out Alec is Janus and then BAM, off to Cuba for the final fight.
”Do I get to say ‘thank you’ this time?”
So Bond asks Alec why the betrayal and the juicy confrontation is unfortunately derailed by a pretty silly backstory about how Alec’s parents were Lienz Cossacks and his dad killed his mom and so Alec became a British spy so he could fake his death and defect to the Soviet Union and became a Russian crime lord and eventually destroy London with technology he couldn’t possibly have known existed. Oh, and he blames Bond for scarring his pretty pretty face because Bond reset the timer on the bombs to three minutes instead of six after he saw Alec executed. Yeah, sorry I didn’t give you time to escape after I saw you shot through the head, pal. I imagine I wouldn’t be too rational about assigning blame if I didn’t need make-up to cosplay as Two-Face, but still, what a whiner.
Bond is captured and gift-wrapped to the Russian authorities, along with Natalya, and they have a brief talk before being interrogated by the Russian Minister of Defense (that dude who plays every Frenchman ever. No, not Jean Reno, the other one). As you’d expect, Bond escapes, tries to save the girl, and finally gets into a pretty cool tank/car chase with Ourumov (one problem with setting the film in Russia… reviewing it is hell on my spell check). In the process, he guns down quite a few innocent Russian soldiers for an adult, realistic Bond movie. But they’re Commies, so who cares?
The next section is just too rushed for my taste. Bond attacks Alec’s missile train hide-out and gets into your standard “save the girl or stop the villain” situation. Of course, he has a little time to chat with Alec before Natalya is brought out as Ourumov’s hostage, so he probably should’ve kneecapped Alec or shot Xenia or SOMETHING. But anyway, Alec taunts him and he can’t let die the woman heloves literally met ten minutes ago. She even later asks him “James, when you said I meant nothing to you, did you mean it?” Lady, back then he didn’t know you from Paula Abdul. Get over it.
But as you’d expect, Natalya being a cutie-pie instead of Sean Bean makes a difference and Ourumov won’t live to plague my spell-check another day. Bond and Natalya nip out to Cuba to save the world, but still find time for some lovin’ and brooding by the beach. Natalya rips into Bond’s detached warrior ethos some, but the next morning she’s totally along for the ride as they fly over Cuba searching for the satellite dish that turns out to have been built underwater to hide it from aerial surveillance… although how the US missed a giant satellite dish being built underwater…
Bond takes pretty big advantage of the Hero’s Death Battle Exemption as his plane is blasted by a missile, yet all it does is wing (haha) the plane so he has to crash-land. He wakes up to Famke Janssen squeezing him between her legs, trying to kill him; either that, or it’s the best dream ever. She gets killed after shoring up her Depraved Bisexual credentials with Natalya (and yet, for some reason, the producers wanted to give Halle Berry’s Jinx her own movie. Dudes, XENIA ONATOPP! I’d be there opening day!).
Bond infiltrates the satellite and gets captured (that seems to happen a lot), and the details of Alec’s fiendish plan become clear. Trevelyan is going to hack the Bank of England and transfer all the funds to his accounts (NINETIES!), then cover it up by… firing a giant death-laser at London. That’s like covering up a fender-bender by assassinating the President. Of course, he’s also trying to get revenge on England for the Leinz Cossacks, but it’s hardly the perfect crime Bond treats it as. Goldfinger has nothing to worry about.
Shockingly, Bond escapes and starts the satellite dish to blowing up, but naturally has to settle things mano-e-mano with Alec to save the day. It’s a pretty cool fistfight, though Alec’s final defeat is pretty wimpy. He sees Natalya, gets distracted, and Bond takes him out. He could’ve at least used his belt grappler or laser watch to wound Alec before dropping him.
With Alec dealt with and Karma personally bitch-smacking down Boris, they’re free to end the movie with a Gitmo reference that plays a lot differently today.
Brosnan is a great Bond, the reimagining of Bond as a world-weary veteran of the Cold War is compelling (it’s a shame they abandoned it to make him a commando with the maturity of a 13-year-old boy watching Beavis & Butthead), and Sean Bean makes for an awesome villain. It even has Famke Janssen as a femme fatale who literally gets off on killing people. I’m always glad to see producers thinking that, if you can’t show nudity and you can’t cast people who have naked pictures on the internet (you can betray my state secrets anytime, Eva Green), then you might as well cast someone who will spend the entire movie faking orgasms. I’m serious, Famke Janssen’s acting range in this movie is Aroused and Climaxing. It’s as awesome as you’d expect.
I could watch this all day.
So, good movie, but it could’ve been a great movie. First off, the music is horrible. The theme song itself is good, probably the next best thing to cloning Shirley Basset, but everything else drops the ball. The movie opens with this horrid techno rape of the classic Bond theme that makes you doubt the existence of a loving god or, if you’re an atheist, makes you ponder the probability of some dark Chthonic god, lurking, like an aural Cthulu, to influence Eric Serra’s score. It’s that bad. I kept wondering if Peter from Forgetting Sarah Marshall had had a hand in the music, you know, “I don’t even do music, I just do tones”. I’ve heard elevator music that’s more exciting.
I can get having techno during action sequences, but usually it’s driving techno, pulse-pounding techno, get-high-on-ecstasy techno. This is… boring techno. It’s the techno your grandparents listen to. It’s easy listening techno. It’s like the Diet Coke of techno, only I don’t prefer actually prefer it to regular Coke. The only emotional response this music gets from me is wanting to stab the composer in the throat. I HATE IT! THEY’RE ANIMALS AND I SLAUGHTERED THEM LIKE ANIMALS! ATTICA! ATTICA!
I really hate the music.
But I do like the relationship between Bond and Alec (not like that… although Alec does at one point purr “you know, James and I used to share everything… absolutely everything” to Bond’s love interest, so you never know). They underplay it instead of teary man-pain, which makes it a lot more effecting. When Bond plays Ourumov against Alec by saying “He’ll betray you… just like he betrays everyone”, he sells the hell out of the last three words. It’s obvious that Alec’s betrayal has hit close to home, but I don’t think the movie does a good enough job exploring that. It spends too much time on post-Soviet shenanigans.
I think the Bond guys need to realize that characters are more interesting than doomsday plots. There’s only so many ways you can blow up the world, after all, and so long as the evil scheme is reasonably plausible, we would much rather spend time with charismatic madmen and witty retorts from Bond than with death-ray satellites and stolen nuclear warheads.
Now, it’s possible that in some alternate universe, I’d be complaining that Bond’s rivalry with Alec was overexposed, but here, I found it very interesting and wanted to see more of it and less of the Bond! In the NINETIES! stuff. The premise of Bond coming face to face with a old friend turned traitor is a good one, but there’s just a little too much convoluted plotting stopping up the works. I wish they’d worked at alternate motivations, explored the contrast between characters, because in some scenes Alec strays far too close to a generic cackling madman (for instance, when he threatens to rape Natalya. Now, wouldn’t Bond know that his best friend was a crazed rapist? I can believe Alec as a spy who switches sides and is out for revenge in the same way Bond has done at times, just darker, but as someone who’s just completely depraved… it beggars belief).
I also mentioned that this Bond was a more disillusioned Bond than Roger Moore’s, someone who you can believe sprung out of Timothy Dalton’s vindictive portrayal in License to Kill. When Alec asked him if his constant womanizing made it easier to live with the memory of all the women he couldn’t save, it showed a willingness of the filmmakers to take a different tack with the character and question some of the basic elements of the Bond fantasy. It was done better in Casino Royale, which I think was better plotted (AND HAD A BETTER SCORE!), but this is still a well-made film.
So even though there's nothing wrong with the first half (aside from that GODDAMN MUZAK DOESN'T EVEN DESERVE TO BE CALLED MUSIC!), when you look at all the stuff crammed into the second half, it makes me think how much better the film would've been if they'd just cut to the chase. Imagine a scene where M orders Bond to kill his old friend. Imagine Q and Bond reminiscing over Alec. Imagine Bond and Natalya's relationship being as fleshed out as James/Vesper was in Casino Royale. That's the movie I wanted to see.
In the midst of the Cold War, James Bond 007 and Alec Trevelyan 006 infiltrate a Russian chemical weapons facility to disable it in the time-honored tradition of chemical weapon disposal: Blowing it all to hell. Before these close friends can get to their bro-grabs, General Ourumov captures Alec. Bond has the choice between surrendering and escaping in a wild pre-credits thrill ride. You can guess what choice he makes.
Nine years and a naked ladies credits sequence later, Communism has fallen and it’s THE NINETIES! Thus, everything is computer crimes and lasers and M is a shrewish ballbreaker (amusing, by the time of Casino Royale this comes full circle and she’s the warm maternal figure to Daniel Craig’s jackass hero) and everyone makes jokes about sexual harassment, though since this is a Bond movie, the women are complaining that James doesn’t sexually harass them enough. That’s how Ian Fleming rolls!
Here’s where the plot kinda stumbles. Bond is getting a performance evaluation (snicker) from some woman who probably has a ridiculous name like Julie Honeybuns or Christie Silklips or Megan Fox. He sees Famke Janssen driving a Ferrari and gets into a car chase with her because… well, hey, she’s Famke Janssen. In a Ferrari.
They end up in Monte Carlo, mainly so Bond can wear a tuxedo and gamble, but Xenia Onatopp (groan) is more interested in an American admiral. But no sooner has Bond been left holding his telescope (it takes pictures!), than Xenia kills the admiral by crushing him to death between her legs. Insert requisite and heartfelt “if you’ve gotta go” jokes here (no, seriously, can this be some kind of Adult Make-A-Wish Foundation. “You have nine months to live, Mr. Carter.” “I’m going to have sex with Xenia Onatopp!” “Wait, sorry, you have nine years to live.” “…can I still have the sex?”). So it just so happens that Bond came across the key operative in an evil plot hatched by his old BFF (spoiler!). And this is all part of a scheme to get an EMP-proof getaway vehicle for the real crime, which is also a prequel to the real-real crime. You could fan-wank that it’s Alec baiting a trap for James Bond, but that’s still a bit silly. And really, Bond is psychic enough without being able to literally stumble across bad guys.
So Xenia steals a helicopter, blows up a Russian satellite installation, and the plot finally gets moving. The satellite dish did more than get really clear reception of ESPN-HD… it controlled an EMP satellite system called Goldeneye. There are two survivors, Boris (played by Alan Cumming, before he turned out to be kind of awesome and came out with a cologne called Cumming) and Natalya Simonov, who showed up late when the Bond franchise was assigning silly names to women. And, these being world-class hackers, they use passwords that are the answers to silly word games instead of unbreakable strings of numbers and letters. Xenia’s there not just to have way too more fun killing people, but to steal the arming codes for the Goldeneye satellite (which must be seen to be believed. Somehow, it involves two keys to be turned at the same time, this clunky-looking eye thing, and then it shoots a LASER BOLT into a different computer to actually start the system. No wonder the Soviet Union fell, if they spent all their rubles making stuff like that instead of just letting you press Enter on a keyboard).
MI6 sees this on satellite (NINETIES!), and, naturally, since it’s a stolen FRENCH helicopter being used to destroy a RUSSIAN facility, they decide to send a BRITISH secret agent. After the standard pow-wow with Moneypenny, Q, and M (she looks so weird with dark hair!), Bond goes to Russia and meets Joe Don Baker, in possibly one of the weirdest, yet earnest pop culture combinations until Samuel L. Jackson shared the screen with Yoda. Then he talks with Valentin Zukovsky, who directs him to Xenia Onatopp (this being THE NINETIES, he makes a safe sex joke during their fight), who FINALLY sends him to meet Janus, the criminal mastermind who YEAH IT’S SEAN BEAN. AT LONG LAST!
This is really the heart of the movie, Bond versus a rogue agent, so it’s really a shame the movie spends so much time on the “mystery”. I mean, it’s Sean Bean. Do you really think he’s just going to be the guy who dies to prove what a badass some random Russian guy is? It’s pretty much Bond finding out Alec is Janus and then BAM, off to Cuba for the final fight.
”Do I get to say ‘thank you’ this time?”
So Bond asks Alec why the betrayal and the juicy confrontation is unfortunately derailed by a pretty silly backstory about how Alec’s parents were Lienz Cossacks and his dad killed his mom and so Alec became a British spy so he could fake his death and defect to the Soviet Union and became a Russian crime lord and eventually destroy London with technology he couldn’t possibly have known existed. Oh, and he blames Bond for scarring his pretty pretty face because Bond reset the timer on the bombs to three minutes instead of six after he saw Alec executed. Yeah, sorry I didn’t give you time to escape after I saw you shot through the head, pal. I imagine I wouldn’t be too rational about assigning blame if I didn’t need make-up to cosplay as Two-Face, but still, what a whiner.
Bond is captured and gift-wrapped to the Russian authorities, along with Natalya, and they have a brief talk before being interrogated by the Russian Minister of Defense (that dude who plays every Frenchman ever. No, not Jean Reno, the other one). As you’d expect, Bond escapes, tries to save the girl, and finally gets into a pretty cool tank/car chase with Ourumov (one problem with setting the film in Russia… reviewing it is hell on my spell check). In the process, he guns down quite a few innocent Russian soldiers for an adult, realistic Bond movie. But they’re Commies, so who cares?
The next section is just too rushed for my taste. Bond attacks Alec’s missile train hide-out and gets into your standard “save the girl or stop the villain” situation. Of course, he has a little time to chat with Alec before Natalya is brought out as Ourumov’s hostage, so he probably should’ve kneecapped Alec or shot Xenia or SOMETHING. But anyway, Alec taunts him and he can’t let die the woman he
But as you’d expect, Natalya being a cutie-pie instead of Sean Bean makes a difference and Ourumov won’t live to plague my spell-check another day. Bond and Natalya nip out to Cuba to save the world, but still find time for some lovin’ and brooding by the beach. Natalya rips into Bond’s detached warrior ethos some, but the next morning she’s totally along for the ride as they fly over Cuba searching for the satellite dish that turns out to have been built underwater to hide it from aerial surveillance… although how the US missed a giant satellite dish being built underwater…
Bond takes pretty big advantage of the Hero’s Death Battle Exemption as his plane is blasted by a missile, yet all it does is wing (haha) the plane so he has to crash-land. He wakes up to Famke Janssen squeezing him between her legs, trying to kill him; either that, or it’s the best dream ever. She gets killed after shoring up her Depraved Bisexual credentials with Natalya (and yet, for some reason, the producers wanted to give Halle Berry’s Jinx her own movie. Dudes, XENIA ONATOPP! I’d be there opening day!).
Bond infiltrates the satellite and gets captured (that seems to happen a lot), and the details of Alec’s fiendish plan become clear. Trevelyan is going to hack the Bank of England and transfer all the funds to his accounts (NINETIES!), then cover it up by… firing a giant death-laser at London. That’s like covering up a fender-bender by assassinating the President. Of course, he’s also trying to get revenge on England for the Leinz Cossacks, but it’s hardly the perfect crime Bond treats it as. Goldfinger has nothing to worry about.
Shockingly, Bond escapes and starts the satellite dish to blowing up, but naturally has to settle things mano-e-mano with Alec to save the day. It’s a pretty cool fistfight, though Alec’s final defeat is pretty wimpy. He sees Natalya, gets distracted, and Bond takes him out. He could’ve at least used his belt grappler or laser watch to wound Alec before dropping him.
With Alec dealt with and Karma personally bitch-smacking down Boris, they’re free to end the movie with a Gitmo reference that plays a lot differently today.
Brosnan is a great Bond, the reimagining of Bond as a world-weary veteran of the Cold War is compelling (it’s a shame they abandoned it to make him a commando with the maturity of a 13-year-old boy watching Beavis & Butthead), and Sean Bean makes for an awesome villain. It even has Famke Janssen as a femme fatale who literally gets off on killing people. I’m always glad to see producers thinking that, if you can’t show nudity and you can’t cast people who have naked pictures on the internet (you can betray my state secrets anytime, Eva Green), then you might as well cast someone who will spend the entire movie faking orgasms. I’m serious, Famke Janssen’s acting range in this movie is Aroused and Climaxing. It’s as awesome as you’d expect.
I could watch this all day.
So, good movie, but it could’ve been a great movie. First off, the music is horrible. The theme song itself is good, probably the next best thing to cloning Shirley Basset, but everything else drops the ball. The movie opens with this horrid techno rape of the classic Bond theme that makes you doubt the existence of a loving god or, if you’re an atheist, makes you ponder the probability of some dark Chthonic god, lurking, like an aural Cthulu, to influence Eric Serra’s score. It’s that bad. I kept wondering if Peter from Forgetting Sarah Marshall had had a hand in the music, you know, “I don’t even do music, I just do tones”. I’ve heard elevator music that’s more exciting.
I can get having techno during action sequences, but usually it’s driving techno, pulse-pounding techno, get-high-on-ecstasy techno. This is… boring techno. It’s the techno your grandparents listen to. It’s easy listening techno. It’s like the Diet Coke of techno, only I don’t prefer actually prefer it to regular Coke. The only emotional response this music gets from me is wanting to stab the composer in the throat. I HATE IT! THEY’RE ANIMALS AND I SLAUGHTERED THEM LIKE ANIMALS! ATTICA! ATTICA!
I really hate the music.
But I do like the relationship between Bond and Alec (not like that… although Alec does at one point purr “you know, James and I used to share everything… absolutely everything” to Bond’s love interest, so you never know). They underplay it instead of teary man-pain, which makes it a lot more effecting. When Bond plays Ourumov against Alec by saying “He’ll betray you… just like he betrays everyone”, he sells the hell out of the last three words. It’s obvious that Alec’s betrayal has hit close to home, but I don’t think the movie does a good enough job exploring that. It spends too much time on post-Soviet shenanigans.
I think the Bond guys need to realize that characters are more interesting than doomsday plots. There’s only so many ways you can blow up the world, after all, and so long as the evil scheme is reasonably plausible, we would much rather spend time with charismatic madmen and witty retorts from Bond than with death-ray satellites and stolen nuclear warheads.
Now, it’s possible that in some alternate universe, I’d be complaining that Bond’s rivalry with Alec was overexposed, but here, I found it very interesting and wanted to see more of it and less of the Bond! In the NINETIES! stuff. The premise of Bond coming face to face with a old friend turned traitor is a good one, but there’s just a little too much convoluted plotting stopping up the works. I wish they’d worked at alternate motivations, explored the contrast between characters, because in some scenes Alec strays far too close to a generic cackling madman (for instance, when he threatens to rape Natalya. Now, wouldn’t Bond know that his best friend was a crazed rapist? I can believe Alec as a spy who switches sides and is out for revenge in the same way Bond has done at times, just darker, but as someone who’s just completely depraved… it beggars belief).
I also mentioned that this Bond was a more disillusioned Bond than Roger Moore’s, someone who you can believe sprung out of Timothy Dalton’s vindictive portrayal in License to Kill. When Alec asked him if his constant womanizing made it easier to live with the memory of all the women he couldn’t save, it showed a willingness of the filmmakers to take a different tack with the character and question some of the basic elements of the Bond fantasy. It was done better in Casino Royale, which I think was better plotted (AND HAD A BETTER SCORE!), but this is still a well-made film.
So even though there's nothing wrong with the first half (aside from that GODDAMN MUZAK DOESN'T EVEN DESERVE TO BE CALLED MUSIC!), when you look at all the stuff crammed into the second half, it makes me think how much better the film would've been if they'd just cut to the chase. Imagine a scene where M orders Bond to kill his old friend. Imagine Q and Bond reminiscing over Alec. Imagine Bond and Natalya's relationship being as fleshed out as James/Vesper was in Casino Royale. That's the movie I wanted to see.
