Die Another Day
Can one have a rudimentary understanding of science and still appreciate a James Bond picture? It’s been pretty well discredited that 1) a woman sprayed with gold paint over her entire body would die, 2) two people could have sex very easily in a space shuttle and 3) Iceland is a floating glacier. In fact it’s quite green, but never mind that fact, because 007 films never really deal with reality. But is that so wrong? In this case, no, it’s not, and it makes for a grand time.
It all comes down to the point that Bond is fun, not serious or realistic, and it wouldn’t take a genius to figure that out. James Bond is Superman without super powers, and therefore someone men can easily relate to. He’s gets to play with guns and electronics, he beds many beautiful women, and he always wins regardless of the odds against him. What man would not want this life?
Everyone knows who James Bond is, so what’s the point of discussing character? The Bond franchise is all situation and periphery characters at this point in the game anyway, and that situation involves North Korea , double agents and as many double entendres as can fit into 123 minutes of screen time. Our story begins in North Korea where Bond is attempting to purchase weaponry from soldiers using diamonds that just happen to have a bomb hidden with them. Tipped off, the North Koreans capture him after a protracted opening sequence with explosions so big that you might mistake it for a preemptive nuclear strike. Bond knows there is a traitor who set him up and he spends the rest of the film trying to find that person and stop a war between North and South Korea .
Die Another Day is the fourth outing for Pierce Brosnan, and by this point in the series he has the Bond persona down as well as Connery did in his heyday. He is relaxed and witty, making even the dumbest sounding lines roll off his tongue as if he were performing Shakespeare. Gunplay is second nature to the man at this point. He isn’t as cool as Connery was, but he is better than either Roger Moore, George Lazenby or Timothy Dalton.
Here the plot is somewhat secondary to the sometimes silly action taking place on the screen. And then the biggest Bond fan will not care if it makes logical sense, but will have questions such as Are the explosions big enough? What types of cool new gadgets does he get to play with? What sexualized names will the women in the film have? How many times will someone wait to kill an enemy, thereby allowing long fight sequences? All of these questions are points in an outline that Bond fans have come to recognize and smile at knowingly as they take place.
This year marks the 40 th anniversary of the James Bond film franchise, the most profitable in British film history. Is it high art? Could it win Best Picture? Who the hell am I kidding? The answer is obvious, but for 40 years the collaborators on this mammoth series have pounded out answers to the above questions that keep the audiences cheering for more.