It's easy to look back on James Bond's less culturally sensitive elements, but one movie remains particularly fresh and forward-thinking.
Within the murky, crocodile-infested waters of the James Bond film series and all the arguments over if they are still culturally kosher, one example emerges from Q's laboratory with its head held firm to stomp on the bygone ways of an Asian Sean Connery or JW Pepper before it. Released in the heady days of 1997, Tomorrow Never Dies was the second outing for Pierce Brosnan's Bond incarnation.
As a British navy vessel is sunk and a Chinese fighter jet is destroyed, the two nations are pitted against one another believing that their counterpart is to blame. In a bid for exclusive news coverage in China, the elaborate plan has actually been staged by one Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a news mogul for the "Tomorrow" newspaper and Carver Media Group Network. From the get-go here, this is perhaps Brosnan's Bond at his most confident. After an epic cold open involving a 'terrorist supermarket,' nukes, and Russian fighter jets — James Bond is back.
With a punch to the face of a man trying to light his cigarette, James muses "Filthy habit," as if balling up a fist to shake off the shadow of his Connery roots. The action flies and Brosnan in particular looks entirely at home in the role. The script whizzes by, and the quips are sharp and fork-tongued as they are uttered: Case in point, when Moneypenny discovers James in bed with his language tutor, she can't help but remark how much of a "cunning linguist" he's always been...
There's a spark and an electricity to this particular Bond outing. Looking at it now in 2022, it's a movie that exists in Bond's universe (a throwback of a place) and has managed to accurately guess our current era of technology and the way we devour media. Today's celebrities and figureheads are also the exact character that Pryce's Carver depicts.
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In perhaps Jonathan Pryce's finest performance, Carver is a different kind of evil. He doesn't necessarily enjoy the killing, but will do so to further his own name and company. Carver is Rupert Murdoch and Fox News (or The Sun newspaper if you're in the UK). He is the Russian Bots on Facebook, he's Jeff Bezos' monopoly and Donald Trump's campaign lies - and here, presented as a Bond Villain™, it's magnetic to watch as he muses over lines of dialogue, sometimes as simple as the one word "Delicious."
Carver is nefarious and mustache-twirling in the same vein of villain that cackles as they tie damsels to train tracks, but the train is current day and up-to-date to the very second. Elliot Carver is very much the infamous keyboard warrior, as he gets his henchmen to kill for him while he types tomorrow's shock-jock front page headlines.
But what kind of baddie would he be without his toys? Carver isn't a Bond villain because of any mechanical claws or some horrific scarring, but because he has such a stranglehold on the planet already through the much mooted "Fake News" we find ourselves drowning in today (or at least are told to believe we are). His evil comes from his 24 hour a day coverage and the lies that this permits him. He is a villain for the Twitter age, created before Twitter even existed.
Bond's own gadgets manage to reflect today too: take the self-driving car, not dissimilar to fellow real-world megalomaniac Elon Musk and his Tesla brand. Watch as Bond steers his car from remote control while plunging it off the top of a car lot and down to the high street below — echoing any of the seemingly unready-for-market-consumption vehicles that Tesla have let loose on the world.
The ice cool refrigerated freshness of this Bond outing extends to its female counterpart also. Michelle Yeoh stars alongside Brosnan as a Chinese agent who is just as adept and comes with her own Asian twist on the Q laboratory.
When her character, Wai Lin, is first introduced, Bond is passed over by Carver as the talking point in the room, dismissed as a dreary banker with too many questions. Later, when Lin and Bond are inevitably captured, now handcuffed together, they must maneuver the streets of Saigon together in an epic motorbike chase with trucks and a helicopter hovering closely behind, in one of the best action sequences in Bond. The chase is streamlined chaos, clearly edited and directed but frenetic in its action. With each dodge of a barrel or pedestrian, the two characters bickering plays like a live action Tom & Jerry cartoon — with added gunfire and coolness.
When required to jump a gap over the helicopter, Bond needs Lin behind him so he can properly balance the weight and judge the distance. The two are equal parts atop the bike: both required to complete this mission and not relegated to simply a throwaway fling. Yeoh's performance and character is much more important than the usual femme fatale in James Bond movies, to the extent that, by the very last scene when the day has been saved, their kiss feels out of place and tacked on in comparison to the characters we've just spent the last hour and a half with. Doubly so when Lin had rebuffed him earlier in the film.Related: The Rock Praises Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate in Black Adam
This emphasis on the individuality and strength of women can even be extended somewhat to love interest (and wife of Elliot) Paris Carver. Feeling far more rounded than your run-of-the-mill Brosnan-era Bond Girl like Christmas Jones or Jinx Johnson, these two have a mutual backstory. A vodka-drunk Bond even actively attempts to deter advancements from Paris (Teri Hatcher), asking her to leave when arriving at his hotel room. When the woman is killed (in a petty attempt at revenge from Carver), there's a genuine pain and remorse from 007 that she was involved at all, albeit briefly.
Tomorrow Never Dies has become somewhat forgotten in the 007 lineage for a variety of reasons, mostly because it was sandwiched in between the peak Bond film Goldeneye and the disastrous invisible cars of Die Another Day. Though the film made three times its budget at $333 million, the fact that it was released the same weekend as James Cameron's massive Titanic meant that Tomorrow Never Dies was bound to be overlooked (and became the only Brosnan Bond film to not open its first weekend at number one).
But in a world of poorly aged Bond decision-making and a (frankly incorrect despite good intentions) call for the series to become "woke" and recast, looking back at Tomorrow Never Dies' aesthetic reveals a well-judged and measured movie that ignores its previous gender politics (or lack of them) and more outlandish sensibilities; instead, it treats its female counterparts as mutually valuable as its protagonist. For a 1997 film, it also surprisingly estimated, pretty much to a T, where the future of villainy in our real world was heading.
Jon Holmes is an English writer and actor. His films have been showcased across the world via prestigious film festivals. Outside of his analytical work and joke writing, his fictional side leans in to the taboo with an aim to satirise that which most definitely deserves it. He is currently working on a short film lampooning casting in the film industry.