In defense of ‘Die another day’, 20 years later

It’s been 20 years since Pierce Brosnan fingered Halle Berry’s belly button while rolling in a pile of diamonds at the end of die another day.

Usually, an anniversary in the Bond universe is the time to argue why a movie is the best, or at least perfect for gorging on nostalgia.

But I’m afraid die another day not a good movie. In fact, it’s not a good movie in many ways.

You can find fault with most Bond movies, but die another day asks you to imagine that Gustav Graves, the villain played by Toby Stephens, came from nowhere, became a Richard Branson-esque playboy mogul, and settled into the British establishment so successfully that he was knighted, all in the space of 12 months. And that he is actually a North Korean colonel.

Commercial product placement is also outrageous. Why does MI6 have a poster for a new Philips razor in their disused tube station? Are they that desperate to get Q to fix his mustache?

Finally, Moneypenny uses John Cleese’s VR machine to… well, you can see for yourself.

So no, I’m not going to ask you to imagine that die another day is incredible. What I am going to ask you is to imagine that he is more responsible for the mega-franchise that Daniel Craig leaves behind than we like to remember.

Bond films fall into three broad categories: serious and gritty, high-end, and an ill-advised mix of genres. As for seriousness, see Royal Casino and the Dalton years. If it’s a high-end movie, Roger Moore has to wow a pigeon while he drives a gondola. As for the mixtures of genres that are not recommended, they are Live and Let Die Y The man with the golden gun.

die another day it manages to be all three. It’s a high-end movie, incredibly serious, and it combines both in one messy mess.

I recently spoke with one of the producers of die another day and told me that the movie was supposed to be a reaction to The world is never enough. You will remember that in the previous film Bond was trying to thwart a plot to bomb Istanbul by a man who can’t feel pain because a bullet is making its way slowly through the center of his brain.

Why? To make his girlfriend’s pipeline more profitable. Honestly, if it weren’t for die another day, The world is never enough it would be the one that everyone remembers the more absurd movie of the two.

The North Korean part – the part where Bond is tortured, for 14 months, behind enemy lines – was where they started. In fact, if we consider that the events of the film begin on November 20, 2002, Bond has been in captivity since before 9/11 occurred. Imagine that interrogation.

Before certain people started sneaking invisible cars and kitesurfing, this was meant to be a hard-boiled, authentic spy story, perhaps more Le Carré than Ian Fleming.

Traces of that film have survived. There’s the torture part, and Bond also loses his 00 status because he’s suspected of being a traitor. All this because it has been mixed with a completely different film

So a way I’ve found to enjoy die another day again is to think a little more about her. My idea is that Bond’s experiences at the hands of the KPA were so horrible that he went mad, and that the entirety of the film, after the part where he escapes from his MI6 handlers in Hong Kong, occurs completely in Bond’s head. He’s gibbering in a cell on the outskirts of Pyongyang like Jonathan Pryce at the end of Brazil.

The fencing duel featuring Madonna, the part where Bond smokes a huge cigar and looks like Schwarzenegger, while John Cleese is lost in time, like tears in rain. He even makes the CGI kitesurfing sequence make sense. The man has gone mad. Of course, he can’t render water correctly.

But there’s another way to see die another day: the need to make a punchy Bond movie was there, but it was so poorly represented that its fundamental stupidity invited a rethink.

The things that made the Daniel Craig era so vital are in it, in one form or another: M’s mistrust of Bond’s abilities, Bond’s cantankerous attitude towards technology, an attempt to bring seriousness by having Berry, who found out she had won her Best Actress Oscar halfway through filming.

Then, when Chinese agent Chang reminds Bond that Hong Kong has been returned to his country’s government, Bond reassures him with a sigh, “Yeah, well, I’m not here to take it back.”

This particularly wounded and grieving British character is a key element of Craig’s Bond era, which reaches its climax with the reading of the Ulises of Tennyson by M in Skyfall.

Furthermore, in purely monetary terms, it proved that the Bond films had not hit their ceiling. At the time, die another day it was the most successful Bond film, grossing $431 million at the box office.

But above all, it was the last installment of a certain type of Bond movie. His references to all previous films to celebrate the 20th Bond film – the jetpack of ThunderballRosa Klebb’s knife shoe, Graves’s Union Jack-decorated parachute—acted as a kind of purge.

Having gorged on all the nonsense that made Bond seem like a relic compared to Jason Bourne and the like, there was nowhere else to go but to the neo-noir musculature of Royal Casino. Brosnan put up with a villain named Mr. Kil so Craig could get punched in the balls by Mads Mikkelsen. Stripped of any impulse to foolishness, Bond was reborn.

Still not convinced? Follow the example of Gustav Graves. “I never get mad,” he tells a reporter. “As we say in fencing: ‘What’s the point of him?'”