128) GoldenEye

GoldenEye (1995)

Director: Martin Campbell

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Izabella Scorupco, Sean Bean, Famke Janssen, Joe Don Baker, Judi Dench, Alan Cumming, Gottfried John, Robbie Coltrane, Desmond Llewelyn

I had a bit of a splurge during the week and I bought myself the complete James Bond DVD box set. I've wanted them for ages but could never bring myself to buy them in one hit, and at the same time didn't really want to accumulate them over time because they keep re-releasing them with different covers and then the set wouldn't match (a bit anal I know). But I figured the break in the series that was created with Casino Royale was sufficient enough that I could accept having all the pre-Casino Royale ones matching and those from after that looking different. That is, of course, assuming that MGM manages to recover and we do end up getting 'Bond 23', which is yet to be seen.

After stealing a state of the art Tiger helicopter, renegade Russian General Ourumov (John) and his deadly but beautiful right hand woman Xenia Onatopp (Janssen) attack a Russian military base at Servernya, stealing the access key to the GoldenEye weapon, a satellite which triggers a nuclear pulse, destroying all electronic equipment. MI6 send in James Bond (Brosnan) to recover the key and find out who is orchestrating the plot.

The 1980s was a difficult decade for James Bond. It was the decade of the action movie blockbuster. The 1980s saw the stakes raised in the action genre with the likes of Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis at the height of their careers, and as such the Bond franchises place in the action genre seemed to come under threat. The decade saw six Bond films released; three starring a visibly aging Roger Moore (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill), two starring one of the more underwhelming Bond's, Timothy Dalton (The Living Daylights and License to Kill) and Never Say Never Again, an 'unofficial' Bond movie starring a 53 year old Sean Connery, 21 years after he first played the role. After releasing five official Bond films in eight years, MGM would wait six years before firing up the franchise again with GoldenEye.

So while GoldenEye was not complete re-imagining of the franchise like Casino Royale would be, it was none the less a reboot of sorts, seeking to get the waining franchise back on track. In this regard it would prove to be quite a success. It became easily the highest grossing Bond film to date, more than doubling the gross of the previous film in the series. Critically it was well received, being regarded as the best Bond film for well over a decade and a real return to form for the franchise. Pierce Brosnan was a hit as the new Bond. He would appear in four more films and come to be considered second only to Connery in the hierarchy of James Bonds. But watching the film today, it is amazing how much Casino Royale, and Daniel Craig as Bond, have changed my perception of what has come before.

I was a big fan of Brosnan as James Bond. I thought he had the right mix of icy coldness and smugness to play the part. In GoldenEye there was obviously an effort to flesh out his character a bit more than in previous films. There are scenes in which Bond is shown to have a level of self-awareness that was never a characteristic of his before, even if these scenes are a bit naff. For example, there is an exchange between Natalya and Bond in which she asks him "How can you act like this? How can you be so cold?" To which he replies, "It's what keeps me alive." But even with this conscious fleshing out of Bond's character, I still felt he looked hopelessly two dimensional compared to the Daniel Craig Bond.

James Bond action sequences have always been extreme, and they still are in the new Bond movies. Occasionally though, these extreme sequences go a bit too far and fall into the ridiculous. The windsurfing scene in Die Another Day was the last straw for the faithful few who had held on through John Cleese's presentation of the invisible car, but the opening scene of GoldenEye isn't all that much better. Bond chases an unmanned aeroplane down a tarmac on a motorcycle. The plane reaches the end of the tarmac and drives off a cliff before Bond can get to it, so he drives off the cliff on his motorbike and then free falls to the door of the plane, climbs in and flies the plane to safety. This was the moment in the film which really hit home I was in a different era of Bond films.

The real masterstroke of GoldenEye is the introduction of Judi Dench as M. It is no coincidence that she was the one element from the Bond series that was retained for the Casino Royale reboot. She brings a real sharpness and seriousness to the role, plus the fact that she is a woman provides a fantastic juxtaposition with the misogynist world Bond inhabits.

I hadn't watched a Bond movie in ages and this may well have been the first of the older Bonds I've watched since Casino Royale and I must say that Casino Royale has changed the expectations of the franchise. It brought a level of darkness, seriousness and severity to what had previously been the epitome of escapist cinema. GoldenEye and Casino Royale are amazingly different films given they are both directed by Martin Campbell. Casino Royale changed what it meant to watch a Bond movie, and as a result I think I was kind of disappointed by GoldenEye in a way I wouldn't have been were I watching it five years ago. Bond has changed. What we have now is a completely different series and we have to treat it as such, much in the same way that we do with Nolan's Batmans.