I Watch Films: Tomorrow Never Dies

 

Tomorrow Never Dies

In a pre-credits sequence Bond disrupts a terrorist arms fair on the borders of Russia; the main point being that he has to fly a plane with a nuclear torpedo away before it is blown up by an attack from the Royal Navy*. In a bit of foreshadowing, one of the buyers at the fair is Henry Gupta, a cyberterrorist for hire, who is seen with a GPS encoder, a device that can send GPS signals off course.

Soon afterwards a Royal Naval ship thinks it’s in international waters, but the GPS singals have sent it off course and it is in Chinese territorial waters; it’s then sunk by a mysterious stealth ship. Strangely the Carver Media Group got the news out before it ought to have been able to. M sends Bond to Hamburg where Carver Media is headquartered despite needing to be sensitive as Carver, a media tycoon, has political connections. The reason is Bond once dated Paris Carver, the wife of Eliot Carver, the head of Carver News. Bond makes contact with the Carvers at a party to celebrate the global satellite network going online and all but accuses Eliot Carver of crimes**. Seducing Paris he breaks into the Carver building to discover the encoder, also Wai Lin who claimed to be from the New China News Agency but is in fact a Chinese spy. Returning to his hotel Bond finds that Paris has been killed; he outwits the hitman and escapes.

Using the encoder they realise the Naval ship was off course, in fact in Vietnamese waters. Bond parachutes in, meets Wai Lin on the wreck, only to discover her ship has been taken by Carver’s men. In the Vietnamese Carver building Wai Lin spots General Chang. They make a spectacular escape and piece together the villain plan (China doesn’t allow Carver Media in. General Chang will call an emergency Politburo meeting, the stealth ship will use a stolen British missile to attack and kill them, allowing General Chang to take control and negotiate a peace deal; Carver will be allowed into China).

The Bond film that dares to ask – what if a media tycoon was evil? After the return to form that was Goldeneye, this was something of a step back. Bond’s one-liners aren’t as on point, the villain is a cackling megalomaniac, Bond gets an almost-innocent woman killed to motivate him, then it doesn’t really motivate him.

Watch This: Some good stunts, some fun scenes and the villain is very easy to hate
Don’t Watch This: The long slow decline of Brosnan Bond begins, and worse still several memorable scenes were cut in the ITV broadcast version I watched

 

* Two things. This is a joint British and Russian operation. Presumably they have smoothed over the, shall we say, fallout from Goldeneye in which Bond was present when the Russian Defence Minister was killed, then went on to kill about a dozen Russian soldiers, steal a tank and destroy several St Petersburg police cars. Secondly, Bond has caused at least one nuclear incident in the past, when Dr No’s reactor melted down at the end of Dr No.

** This is the Brosnan special, he just goes up to the suspected villain and asks if they’ve committed any crimes.