Project Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies

We start with Bond away flying a plane somewhere, while Geoffrey Palmer shouts at his wife Judi Dench to call him off. She does, but he doesn’t, and Bond wins as usual. All is well, but not for long, because some British sailors are killed/murdered, and media mogul Elliot Carver  appears to know about such happenings before they happen. Curiouser and curiouser.

Carver (Jonathan Pryce) is trying to start a war between China and the UK, because he wants a monopoly on Chinese media as well as all other media, so he’s after China getting a new government to help along his dastardly scheme. Meanwhile, the waters are muddied further by Carver’s wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) being one of Bond’s ex-girlfriends (which, statistically, was bound to happen eventually). He seduces her as a means to the end of getting information on her husband, something that she seems fairly willing to allow. Meanwhile, Carver is keeping a close watch on his wife, presumably to find out if they’re real and/or spectacular, or maybe he doesn’t trust her or something. He asks Paris how she knows Bond after seeing them talking at one of his mad parties, but doesn’t believe her answer. Carver grows suspicious of his wife’s past with Bond and, after having his Computer Man investigate, orders them both killed. His Hard Man kills Paris, but Bond escapes with Carver’s GPS gadget (something that was probably an intriguing object and A Big Deal 20 years ago), before heading off to the South China Sea to find out what happened to the boat that got sunk.

In an underwater scene that is much easier to follow than Thunderball, Bond meets Wai Lin, a Chinese spy who is also after Carver. He suggests they team up, but she’s having none of it until he saves her a couple of times, after which she invites him back to her place, which is full of cracking gadgets and would-be assailants, of whom Wai Lin and Bond soon dispose. As they are trying to get into Carver’s ‘stealth boat,’ Wai Lin is captured and her life used as leverage against Bond. Rather than doing the sensible thing, Bond heroically saves her and destealthifies the ship, at which point China and the UK both attack it. Bond kills Carver with a big drill thing, and saves Wai Lin yet again from Carver’s Hench Man, who is killed in the explosion that Bond escapes with seconds left to play. Happy days.

I enjoyed this film more retrospectively than I did while watching it. Pryce is an excellent villain, walking a fine line between cartoonish and plausible, and I enjoyed the story surrounding his motivation. Brosnan plays Bond almost as a cross between Moore and Dalton, dignified and dark, but he also has a playful side to him that is more reminiscent of Connery. With technology advancing and film budgets booming, it looks as though the producers are going a lot bigger than they did in previous decades, and it’s working so far.