Die Another Day

Die Another Day has taken huge amounts of bashing from many 007 fans, from many different corners of the fanbase. Wheter or not people agree on the Roger Moore movies being too silly, the Daltons too serious or the Brosnans too shallow, everybody seems to agree that Die Another Day was like this big meteorite that sent the franchise to extinction, ready to be rebooted with Daniel Craig. Being a Bond fan myself, I remember seeing it at the theater and being greatly amused by it. Picking it up later on DVD, my enthusiasm did falter upon second viewing. But I happened to see it again just the other day, and I realized that it really is quite an entertaining piece of electric boogaloo. After Craig’s two outings in the Bond role, this sort of comic book 007 seems archaic and so does Pierce Brosnan – he can, almost, be placed beside the Spice Girls and blend in on the “cool britannia/90′s memorabilia” shelf.

That being said, he wasn’t bad in the role at all. People tend to fuss and fridget about what should and shouldn’t be Bond, and forget that one of the most fundamental traits of the franchise is that the movies always carefully mirror their time and evolve along with the decades. The gritty and rough, slightly depressing, world of Daniel Craig’s 007 isn’t strange considering that we’re living in a rather disillusioned time and for some reason people have a bigger need for darkness and violence (horror has to be Saw and Hostel, Batman has to bee The Dark Knight, fantasy has to be orchs being decapitated, and a bright, dumb character like Jar-Jar Binks is not allowed today). It’s no wonder that James Bond, today, is a dark and depressed hero. What hero today isn’t? But do you remember the 90s? It was the decade of naive optimism, at least as far as pop culture goes, and I remember the hype surrounding the return of James Bond very well. Today we say that Bond is “modernized”. Even back then you said it was “a Bond for the 90s”. I don’t think anybody in those days would have expected anything else than the type of comic book-adventure James Bond movie. Looking back on it, the Brosnan movies may vary in quality but as part of the franchise they make perfect sense. I think Die Another Day came along too late, proving it to be one of the very few times when a Bond movie had forgot to catch up with the times. But after 9/11, this can be said about a great many deal of films around 2001-2002.

One peculiar thing about Die Another Day is that, being the 20th movie in the series, it has a meta level that gets in the way of almost everything else in the movie. It really is “the 40th anniversary movie” of the series, like some kind of special episode of a TV series or a weird, gimmicky kind of self-parodic unofficial movie. It’s not just that it has, at least, one nod to every other movie in the series, there’s this whole spectacle of celebration throughout the movie. It can’t be a coincidence that one of the greatest pop stars of all time does the title song, or that this is the Bond movie where Halle Berry is the bond girl. Or that Monnypenny gets her cravings satisfied. Or that the Aston Martin is invisible! The movie is over the top from the very beginning, when 007 is captured and tortured for 14 months, to the end where…. well, there’s a whole lot of things blowing up anyway. Towards the end you really feel closer to watching a Jerry Bruckheimer production than a James Bond movie.

Die Another Day has many flaws, not only because it’s one of those 007 movies where the plot really is a ritual (did I forget to mention the plot? No I didn’t). A lot of things in it are silly, or dumb, or predictable, or “been there done that” and it’s all baked into a frantic frenzy of a movie, making it a little too much to even bare. Be that as it may, I like the movie for what it is. As an escapist action film it’s a lot better than a lot of other movies, I’m not particularly offended by anything in it, and I find there has been a lot of Bond films a lot worse – though it admittedly isn’t on the top list. Also, I find all of the Brosnan movies quite diverse form each other and not at all as formulaic and clone-like as critics have made it. I must say that I prefer Die Another Day’s madness over the dull Tomorrow Never Dies which in my opinion is the worst Bond movie to date. Both movies share the same trait – they come off more as fairly ill-conceived, generic action-vehicles than proper Bond movies – but at least Die Another Day is so preposterous that you really get enforced to watch it. They don’t share the subtle qualities of GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough – two very under-appreciated Bond films, that will perhaps get more respect with time – but as comic books, Tomorrow Never Dies is dull and Die Another Day… well, a lot more fun. Apart from the very odd torture intro, it is a movie that clearly isn’t trying to be serious at all. It has thrown away all credibility and novelty and comes off much like Octopussy, Roger Moore’s most unbelievably silly Bond film. But that’s also a kind of Bond, mind you. As much as Dalton and Craig have fought bloody, Moore and John Cleese have made it all into a joke. But that’s alright. No actor, or single 007 movie, has ever had monopoly on the franchise. As it has before, this kind of silly Bond will return.