Heavy Bondage: Goldeneye

The film is located precisely on the cusp between fantasy and near reality. For the first time in a Bond film there is even something that could be called emotion.
- Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard, November 1995

Goldeneye
Film: 1995
Book: n/a

Irreverent Synopsis: Nine years ago, Bond and 006, Alec Trevelyan, trash a chemical weapons facility in the USSR. Alec is apparently caught and shot by one Major Ourumov; Bond, assuming 006 is dead, short-fuses one of his bombs and gets away. Cut to 1995. The USSR doesn't exist, the world has changed, and Bond is being evaluated for continued viability. Meanwhile, Ourumov (now General) is in league with the mysterious Janus to steal the Goldeneye weapon system - an orbital EMP device - from the Severnaya test facility. Other than the traitorous hacker Boris, one person from the facility survives: Natalya Simonova, who gets captured by Janus - Alec Trevelyan, angry at the British government for a perceived betrayal of his parents and angry at Bond for, he believes, leaving him to die. Bond and Natalya escape and find Alec's duplicate Goldeneye control setup in Cuba, where he intends to EMP London back into the Stone Age, but not before stealing a boatload of money electronically. The usual explosions and destruction ensue as Bond, with considerable help from Natalya, saves the day.

Major Observations: It's interesting how easy it is to find things to say about Bond movies which have obvious flaws, but hard to say anything substantive about one you love. This may very well be my favorite Bond film of all time, and it's a trick to go beyond that.

I confess, though, that on repeat viewings it becomes clear exactly how biased I am simply because I like Brosnan, his mannerisms, and his style. For example, rewatching the pre-credits sequence I noted that here I read Bond's coldness (toward Alec) as professionalism; he's on a job and not interested in verbal byplay. If Timothy Dalton pulled the same attitude I would probably read it as wooden acting. Go figure.

The thing is, I believe that Brosnan is charming, and charm is what Dalton most notably lacked ... to my mind, at least. Devotees of Connery, on the other hand, will say that Brosnan is entirely too charming by half. On the third hand, as I noted at the beginning, Connery and Brosnan do a better job of walking the brute/gent line than Dalton or Moore did ... so the people who would have preferred Connery style can at least be pleased that they weren't given another Moore. Brosnan can be rough convincingly when he has to - witness the final fighting sequences with Alec in this film, which are brutal enough to be painful to watch.

Another problem, frankly, is that I never believed in Connery's sexuality - I don't find him aesthetically pleasing on any axis, whereas Brosnan is one of the extremely small set of men that I find drop-dead sexy.

Anyway, having stated my biases baldly, I can proceed to the observation that this film moves surprisingly fast for having only one really big damn-the-torpedoes action sequence (the Russian escape and tank chase through the middle of Moscow). It's an oddly talky Bond film, and quite a lot of time is given to the psychology of Bond, why he even exists, and whether he is still relevant.

Surely a great deal of this introspection reflected the thought processes of the film's producer. Albert Broccoli had been through a bad few years. After Licence To Kill, it was reported that he had put his personal holding company for the Eon business, Danjaq, on the block. But even at the time the rumors stressed that any potential sale would not affect the existence of a follow-up film. However, in 1989-1990, MGM/UA was involved in a series of purchases, takeovers, mergers, and other changes at the top, culminating in a merger with Pathe in 1990. Danjaq filed suit simultaneously, in an attempt to block the licensing agreements for international (i.e. not America or UK) TV showings of Bond films - Broccoli maintaining that Pathe's intended terms for such broadcasts were going to rob him, and furthermore, implying that Pathe was going to use these ridiculous licensing terms to make easy money to pay for its part of the merger costs, essentially at his expense.

This effectively put the kibosh on any new Bond films until the suit was settled, in 1993. Meanwhile, Richard Maibaum (who had reportedly broken with Broccoli before then anyway) had died; Maurice Binder, the person who gave Bond credits their distinct look, had died; John Glen was out, John Barry was out, Timothy Dalton had by mutual agreement voided the third film in his contract (too long a delay), and Broccoli's own health was failing - he had handed over the Eon reins officially to stepson Michael Wilson and daughter Barbara Broccoli.

It was a very smart decision to play up the six-year gap between films, turning it into a reflection on the collapse of the USSR and the changes in the world. It was maybe not so smart to put in as much introspection as the script did, particularly not on the part of Alec Trevelyan. I can't tell whether he is played badly by Sean Bean, badly written, or both. Also, frankly, most of the story's plot holes hinge on what he did in that time gap and what actually happened at the Arkhangel facility. Was Ourumov's shooting him a set-up? Was it a defection arranged in advance? That would certainly explain why he was so annoyed at Bond giving him three minutes on one timer instead of the expected six - must have messed up his getaway something fierce. But it still doesn't quite ring true. (His money plot also doesn't make a lot of sense, but we won't go there.)

The other villains are far more interesting - Gottfried John as Ourumov, reinventing the good Russian/bad Russian game against Tcheky Karyo's excellent defense minister Mishkin; Alan Cumming, barely recognizable at this early stage, as the hacker Boris (who is more amoral than evil, and is rewarded for this by a relatively kind and gentle death); and especially Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp, who is played so kinky and outre that for once a ridiculous Bond-femme name actually seems to work.

"Who is that?" "The next girl." »

Xenia is probably the best villainess ever in a Bond film, and one of the best female characters period; the shame is that the film doesn't use her more, and kills her off in a rather perfunctory way. And then there's Robbie Coltrane as Zukovsky, whom I don't consider a villain but who is really entertaining to watch nonetheless.

We get a new Moneypenny, one who plays the flirting game but in a much more blunt and aware manner (Moneypenny will become the repository for the films' stock of single entendres in the future); and a new M - and thereby hangs a tale. Let us always remember that Lois Maxwell floated the idea of being cast as M, and was told that a female head of MI6 was simply not believable. Cut to 1996, when the head of MI5 (essentially, for those not familiar with the British system, MI5 is to FBI as MI6 is to CIA) was actually a woman, Dame Stella Rimmington. Irony of ironies - but it makes possible the casting of Judi Dench. Michael Kitchen comes in as a Bill Tanner entirely more appropriate than the one in For Your Eyes Only. Felix Leiter is (at least for the nonce) written out in favor of the wonderful Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker).

"They say in London, April's a spring month."
"Oh yeah? And what are you, the weatherman?"

Once again this is essentially a one-woman film for Bond, although heaven only knows what he had to do to stay on the good side of Caroline the psych assessor, and his flirtations with Xenia are pretty direct. Isabella Scorupco was fairly well-known outside America and the UK, but this was her first film in English. The Natalya character is the most capable Bond woman ever written who is not a fellow operative (thus ruling out Pam Bouvier, Wai Lin, and Jinx). Not only does she keep up with Bond reasonably well and panics only in places and ways where panic is excusable, but he would not, in fact, have been able to get through the plot of the film without her help - particularly the computer parts, where Bond is shown to be fairly mystified by the technology. It's downright refreshing - not just to have a Bond woman who is not a fainting flower, but to have a Bond who doesn't know everything. Shame about the Cuba beach sequence where she berates him, which is one of the parts where the film just plain talks too much, and is one of its only fast-forward-past moments.

Minor Observations: "Goldeneye" is the name of Ian Fleming's house in Jamaica.

Bond is off the cigarettes again, and this is directly attributable to Brosnan: "I don't give a damn about everyone's perception of the character. I think smoking causes cancer therefore he doesn't smoke." Do remember that Cassandra Harris died of cancer in 1991, and Brosnan was already active in anti-cancer charities by this point.

Once again this film would not be shot at Pinewood. Ironically, the producers couldn't secure enough space there! They instead took an old Rolls-Royce factory at Leavesden and converted it into a custom-made six-stage studio. This studio would later be bought by a Malaysian consortium and named Millennium Studios ... unfortunately, by Tomorrow Never Dies it was unavailable again, because it was booked almost entirely by one George Lucas, who was filming Star Wars prequels there ....

Robbie Coltrane reportedly liked the Zukovsky character so much that he asked he be kept alive, in hopes of being written into another film. He got his wish in The World Is Not Enough.

« Professional courtesy.

Yes, astronomy geeks, that is the Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico doubling for Trevelyan's Cuba transmitter. Yes, casting geeks, that is Minnie Driver as Zukovsky's girlfriend who can't sing (and she is indeed doing the singing).

As I initially said, I don't expect Bond to make complete sense in the real world, but I do expect at least basic fidelity to the laws of physics. While I suspend disbelief readily, his ability to catch up with the diving plane in the pre-credits sequence - and I mean just being able to get to the cabin, never mind whether he could pull the plane out of its nosedive in time - pulls me out of the film in an unpleasant way. It just isn't possible. I also don't like an explosion in space making a noise, nor the grafted-on electrical noises and visual effects of an EMP explosion (wouldn't everything just stop sort of boringly?), but those don't hit me the way the plane stunt does.

This is the first car placement in a Bond movie that actually sounds like an advertisement. Sure, other car models were always called out by name, but nothing more than that. Unfortunately, this "now Q will break for a car commercial" trend continues for at least two more films - and then they do something worse. (You may notice, by the by, that the BMW is barely used despite the talk-up. The BMW deal wasn't final until very late in the shooting.)

I love Bond's pause and wince when he has to say the name "Onatopp" to M. I also love Natalya's and Ourumov's facial reactions in the tank chase - her smiling at Bond's behavior, and Ourumov eyepopping and hitting the bottle.

Outright nitpicks: "Walther," as in the gun, is supposed to be pronounced "Valter." But I shouldn't pick on Zukovsky, since other Bond characters have done it too .... If Bond has a 34 waist (the belt Q gives him), I'm a monkey's uncle .... I also hope Q slipped him another exploding pen offscreen, since the first one got kinda used up.

One wonders what the people who got upset at Zorin's machinegunning spree in A View To a Kill thought of Xenia's, where she gets all hot and bothered by it. Ourumov certainly doesn't know what to make of it - another excellent reaction shot.

By the by, I am using the spelling of Ourumov that appears on M's briefing slide. If you have freeze capability, reading that slide is interesting: it says that Ourumov was "rehabilitated by Gorbachev in 1987" after the Arkhangel mess, and that "In spite of being given command of SPACE DIVISION by Gorbachev OURUMOV is believed to have been behind the Gorbachev coup but the inquiry was dropped after the suicide of a co-conspirator." Gotta love invisible detail.

This film was a tremendously successful reinvention; Broccoli need not have worried. In fact, at the time, it made more money than any Bond since You Only Live Twice. Unfortunately, Broccoli didn't get a lot of time to enjoy his vindication. He was never in sufficient health to actually visit the set of Goldeneye, though he followed its progress closely, and he died on 27 June 1996, at the age of 87.

Next page: Tomorrow Never Dies