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DIE ANOTHER DAY
Rating: 
UK/USA. 2002.
Director – Lee Tamahori, Screenplay – Neil Purvis & Robert Wade, Producers – Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson, Photography – David Tattersall, Music – David Arnold, Visual Effects Supervisor – Mara Bryan, Model Effects Supervisor – John Richardson, Special Effects Supervisor – Chris Corbould, Production Design – Peter Lamont. Production Company – Albert R. Broccoli’s Eon Productions.
Cast:
Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Halle Berry (Jinx), Toby Stephens (Gustav Graves), Rosamund Pike (Miranda Frost), Rick Yune (Zao), Judi Dench (M), John Cleese (R), Will Yun Lee (Colonel Tan-Sun Moon), Kenneth Tsang (General Moon), Michael Madsen (Falco), Emilio Echevarria (Raoul), Madonna (Verity), Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny)
Plot: James Bond goes undercover into North Korea to infiltrate an arms purchase deal by Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, but is exposed. He is captured where he is imprisoned and tortured but is eventually released 14 months later due to political expediency. But M refuses to place Bond back on duty and so Bond goes AWOL, determined to expose the traitor who betrayed him. He follows the trail of the North Korean assassin Zao to a clinic in Cuba that allows people to assume new genetic identities. There Bond finds a link to billionaire diamond merchant Gustav Graves. He travels to Graves’s ice dome in Iceland as Graves unveils The Icarus Project, an orbiting solar laser. But Graves is really a North Korean agent who is planning to use the laser to raze the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas.
Die Another Day is the 20th James Bond film, the fourth and last of the Pierce Brosnan entries. It also came out in the year of the fortieth anniversary of the James Bond film series. The Pierce Brosnan James Bond films – GoldenEye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and the excellent The World is Not Enough (1999) – are revisionist Bond films. They smartly recast the James Bond film for a post-Cold War world; they bring Bond sharply up to date in a post-feminist world, notably in recasting M as a woman engaged in a battle of the sexes with Bond; while the character of Brosnan’s James Bond has become much more ruthless and cold-blooded than ever before. But Die Another Day is a mixed film. It fails to really engage in the self-analysis and questioning of the Bond character that the other Pierce Brosnan films do. Actually it feels more like a Timothy Dalton era James Bond film – a point when the series was trying to cut back the cartoonish absurdity of the Roger Moore era and aim for an extravagant realism – perhaps a Dalton Bond film that has been made with a not-very-deep patina of Pierce Brosnan-era polish.
Where the other Brosnan films deconstructed Bond, Die Another Day is merely content to nostalgically look back at and reference the past. We have a visit to the old gadgets room where we see mothballed devices like the jet backpack from Thunderball (1965), the briefcase and the shoe with a dagger from From Russia with Love (1963) and the crocodile submarine from Octopussy (1983). There’s an appearance of the book A Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1936) whose author, James Bond, Ian Fleming borrowed the name of the character from. Halle Berry’s appearance out of the ocean in a bikini of course quotes Ursula Andress’s famous poster shot entrance in Dr No (1962), and there’s a hi-tech revamping of the laser deathtrap sequence from Goldfinger (1964). Even the plot involving a diamond smuggling operation and an orbital laser weapon is strikingly reminiscent of the plot for the film version of Diamonds Are Forever (1971), while the villain who is surgically altered and becomes a successful British industrialist has been taken from the original character of Hugo Drax from Ian Fleming’s Moonraker (1955) novel.
Die Another Day seems at least at the outset to be a much more plot and character-driven Bond film than usual. The Bond AWOL plot worked well in License to Kill (1989) and does again here, although after a strong beginning the rest of the film lapses to formula. There’s a credits sequence that is quite inventively set in and around images of Bond being tortured, while all the usual silhouetted dancing girls are quite dazzlingly set to the film’s dual imagery of ice and fire. Alas the credits sequence is severely hampered by Madonna’s techno theme song, which is unqualifiedly the worst ever title song in the history of the James Bond films. The film also has a much higher content of outrightly sf gadgetry than the series has had in some years with an invisible Aston Martin, exo-skeletal suits, solar lasers, VR training simulations (which leads to a very silly climactic sequence where Miss Moneypenny, who is otherwise completely unused throughout, gets to finally make out with Bond) and the rather nonsensical notion of gene replacement therapies as a handy means of gaining a new identity.
Die Another Day is a James Bond film that works with intermittent success. One problem is that the film doesn’t really seem to know what to do with Halle Berry. She has a stunning entrance – redoing the Ursula Andress bikini shot from Dr No – and an even better exit from the scene – avoiding gun-toting heavies by stripping to a bikini and diving off a cliff. The pre-release publicity made a big thing about how she had been created as a female equivalent of Bond who could get in there and kick ass with the same sort of ruthlessness he did. But bar one or two impressive action scenes in the sanitarium in Cuba and particularly the climactic swordfight, she seems underused in this department. And the film seems uncertain whether she should be a traditional Bond heroine who is only there to be rescued and then fall into bed with Bond, or one who should be kicking ass alongside. Part of the problem could be Halle Berry herself who, aside from her Academy Award win for Monster’s Ball (2001), I am still not entirely convinced is a standout actress. Her toughness here seems to alternate with a flippant happy-go-lucky persona – it gives the impression that Berry didn’t have any clear idea of the character she was trying to create. Any presence she has consists more of her ability to look good in a bikini or skintight leather than it does any animal growl she radiates. Certainly as a character who is designed to act as a female equivalent of Bond, it’d hard to ever imagine her having the presence to go onto her own series of films lasting forty years later (an idea that was briefly tossed around after the film came out).
On the other hand the exquisitely glacial Rosamund Pike has the kind of screen presence that Halle Berry fails to bring to the film. When she emerges with sword at the end of the film, the effect is breathtaking. One wishes it were her that had been at the center of the film more so than Halle Berry. Toby Stephens, a mainstay of British period dramas who one last saw on screen as an anguished milquetoast photographer in the fascinating Photographing Fairies (1997) and then went onto to play real-life spy Kim Philby in the superb British mini-series Cambridge Spies (2003), is certainly an unusual choice for supervillain. It’s a role that one can almost imagine had been written for Hugh Grant, and Toby Stephens does rather well in the part.
One thing that the modern Brosnan James Bond films have done is sought diverse directors for each entry, rather than kept them in-house and all made by the same director as was the case with every entry up until the casting of Brosnan. For Die Another Day they recruit New Zealander Lee Tamahori. Lee Tamahori, formerly a commercials director, first caught attention with the searing Once Were Warriors (1994), a grimly realistic portrait of life among the disenfranchised, poor urban Maori. The international festival success of Once Were Warriors gained Tamahori access to a series of Hollywood films of variable quality, beginning with the unliked film noir Mulholland Falls (1996), which vanished with barely a ripple; then the acclaimed wilderness survival drama The Edge (1997), before the highly successful but utterly banal thriller Along Came a Spider (2001). Tamahori is also the first Maori director to step onto the international stage. (He offers the distinction of introducing a Maori henchman to the Bond universe in the person of Lawrence Makaore’s henchman who is seen fighting Bond during the laser sequence). However, despite the great promise as a major action director that he showed here, Tamahori showed himself as no judge of decent projects, next going on to make the laughable XXX: State of the Union/XXX: The Next Level (2005) and then returning to genre material with the Philip K. Dick adaptation Next (2007).
The one thing that Lee Tamahori certainly brings to the film is a really spectacular action flourish. The Pierce Brosnan films have all oddly been lacking in standout action sequences but Tamahori certainly makes this the most spectacular of the entire Pierce Brosnan era so far with a ferocious swordfight between Brosnan and Toby Stephens; a dazzling sequence where Bond is pursued across the ice in a rocket sled by a line of laser fire that then starts sawing through the cliff as he hangs over the edge; and an incredible climax with the various parties fighting in a bomber that is rapidly disintegrating around them and with Brosnan and Halle Berry bailing out in a falling helicopter that won’t start amid the rain of burning debris. Some of the action sequences don’t quite work – the car chase around the interior of the ice palace seems too cramped; the fight in front of the laser just seems a lot of flashing animated lights; and there’s a very silly sequence with Bond makeshift surfing on a tidal wave that fails through some really unconvincing visual effects (and moreover bring back cringe-inducing memories of the pre-credits sequence in A View to a Kill (1985), which had Bond surfing to the Beach Boys).
The other James Bond films are:– Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (non-genre, 1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Diamonds Are Forever (1971), Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (non-genre, 1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), The Living Daylights (non-genre, 1987), License to Kill (non-genre, 1989), GoldenEye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World is Not Enough (1999) and Casino Royale (non-genre, 2006). Casino Royale (1967) and Never Say Never Again (1983) are non-series Bond films.
(Winner for Best Supporting Actress (Rosamund Pike) at this site’s Best of 2002 Awards. No. 9 on the SF, Horror & Fantasy Box-Office Top 10 of 2002 list).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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