by Sean Egan
M: You don’t like me, Bond. You don’t like my methods. You think I’m an accountant, more interested in numbers than your instincts.
Bond: The thought had occurred to me.
M: Good. Because I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War … If you think I don’t have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong.
Although a little manufactured, the repartee was destined to both instantly draw attention to the refreshment of the franchise and go down as one of its most famous pieces of dialogue.
A yet further sign of a new era is a layer of postmodernism. When Bond meets his CIA contact Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker), he dutifully chants his assigned greeting, ‘In London, April’s a spring month,’ only to be met with the response, ‘Oh, yeah? What are you – the weatherman? For cryin’ out loud. Another stiff-assed Brit with your secret codes and passwords.’ On a grimmer note, Trevelyan says to Bond, ‘I might as well ask if all the vodka martinis ever silence the screams of the men you’ve killed. Or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect.’
Yet, though the world has changed around him, Bond remains the same. His unapologetic womanising, speeding and relish for battle gives him an incorrigible charm that counteracts the disapproval. His patent decency and humanity, meanwhile, puts into context assumptions about his value system.
Trevelyan turns out both to be alive and to have been working for the Soviets since the incident in the pre-title sequence. That he blames 007 for the disfigurement of his face that resulted from Bond’s destruction of the Arkangel facility is fairly standard Bond movie motivation. More nuanced stuff comes with the revelation that he is the son of Lienz Cossacks, a Russian group who worked for the Nazis in World War II, surrendered to the British and were then handed over by them to Stalin. This is something for which Trevelyan wants revenge, hence his plan to bring financial chaos to Britain with GoldenEye.
Trevelyan makes an excellent opponent. Physical and strategic equals through their identical training, he and Bond are like good and bad bookends. They also have similar domestic hinterlands: both are orphans. In 006 stating that Bond lost his parents in a climbing accident, the films are finally incorporating the biographical details first laid out by Fleming in the You Only Live Twice obituary. The familiarity of the two men means Trevelyan is one of the few villains who don’t address 007 as ‘Mr Bond’.
GoldenEye took $350.7 million, making it the highest-grossing Bond film yet by around $150 million. Although part of GoldenEye’s outstanding success could conceivably be put down to the public’s joy at the return of a long-absent pleasure, it set the trend for Brosnan Bonds. It had taken him a long time to secure the exalted position of incumbent, but Brosnan found himself in the gratifying position of being instantly accepted as 007.
The man who had first approved the casting of Brosnan as Bond will have been pleased that he finally got to see him do well in the role. It was the final Bond-related triumph of Cubby Broccoli’s life. On 27 June 1996, six months after the premiere of GoldenEye, Broccoli died of a heart-related ailment at his Beverly Hills home.
The fact of the cinema Bond being a family business has meant that his name has not died with him. The credits of every Bond film now begin – and presumably will ever after – with the phrase, ‘Albert R. Broccoli’s Eon Productions Ltd. Presents …’
THE DINOSAUR LIVES AGAIN
Politics and cinema weren’t the only things that had changed in James Bond’s absence. The technology and financial potential of video games had advanced considerably in that time. Of Rare’s 1997 GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 computer console – the first Bond video game of any real sophistication – Raymond Benson reveals, ‘The video game made more money than the movie.’ From here on, video games would constitute a substantial plank of the Bond merchandising operation.
For a third of a century after Bond entered the world, the closest thing to a video game remained the good old board game. James Bond Secret Agent 007 was the first one, manufactured by Milton Bradley in 1964, a proposition involving numbered squares and plastic miniature figurines. The fact that set into the board was a clock with an hour hand that moved would actually have been considered by both kids and adults of the time to be fairly hi-tech.
The next jump forward was a role-playing game of the type that became very popular in the eighties, with Dungeons and Dragons the iconic success story of the genre. In Victory Games’ James Bond 007, released in 1983, the actions of players were dictated initially by a roll of a die, then their own instincts, with the designated Games Master determining whether their actions were correct by reference to provided scenarios. That several supplements and additional adventures were added to the ‘basic set’ over the following four years is testament to the fact that James Bond 007 was a superior example of its kind (it won multiple awards) and sold accordingly (it easily outstripped its espionage role-playing competitor, TSR’s Top Secret). A classy product was completed by high-quality cover art.
Victory’s licence came to an end in 1987, with licensor and licensee failing to agree terms for an extension. There have been no similar products since, the role-playing games market having been (like that of comic books) all but obliterated by video games. (Four 1985 James Bond Find Your Own Fate books in the Ballantine series of that name operate on a similar premise, but don’t quite count: one person chooses different plot outcomes.)
Not that video games were initially anything to write home about. Angelsoft’s PC games A View to a Kill (1985) and Goldfinger (1986) were marketed when home computers were still in the silicon Stone Age. These text-based adventures required proxy Bonds to type at the blinking cursor proposed solutions to their current situation, using the traditional article-less idiom (‘Put clip in gun’; ‘Open door’). Such stuff seemed fun before the days of graphical user interfaces, PC multitasking and competent graphics cards, but today appears qualitatively indistinct from role-playing games, interactive books or, indeed, reformatting your hard drive.
James Bond 007 (1983) constituted a series of generic tableaux wherein a vehicle fired missiles at other objects to the accompaniment of tinny ‘Choo! Choo!’ sound effects. In A View to a Kill (1985), Bond was a matchstick figure identifiable only via ‘The James Bond Theme’ playing in the background. In The Living Daylights (1987) he had evolved into a sprite comprising a collection of different-coloured pixels. Live and Let Die (1988) was a step forward from these sideways-scrolling propositions, containing approximations of that film’s speedboat chases in a first-person format (the player facing the action). Significantly, though, it started life as a non-Bond endeavour. What turned an ordinary video game into something to do with Bond was still a matter of names, music, copyrights and gentlemen’s agreements with the player.
The N64 GoldenEye 007 game was a first-person shooter, meaning the player killed baddies with the gun that was poised at the bottom of his screen, supposedly in the player’s/Bond’s hand. Its quality in terms of gameplay, graphics and sound was almost unrecognisable from the sideways-scrollers and platform games that had preceded it, not just in Bond games but in video games per se. For the first time in decades, Bond was ahead of the curve. With video-game critics talking about GoldenEye 007 in terms of best game ever and close to perfection, it picked up the Game of the Year award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Its 8 million sales up to 2001 made it history’s biggest-selling video game. As it retailed at over $60, this meant serious profits. The game also had the supplementary beneficial effect of making Bond an icon for a teenaged demographic to many of whom he had hitherto been only a peripheral cultural presence.
The first Daniel Craig-related Bond game was Quantum of Solace (2008). By now, such was the quality of the graphics that, in the parkour scene transported from the 2006 Casino Royale film, 007’s climb up the crane was more stomach-churning than in the film itself, while the Bond avatar
(face permanently visible despite first-person orientation, and entire body occasionally observable) was often almost indistinguishable from the real Craig.
Because in video games the player controls the action, James Bond had now become the blunt instrument Fleming had originally foreseen – a blunt instrument, furthermore, often in the hands of children. However, Eon’s family-oriented approach at least meant Bond games were not allowed to stray into the vicious and disturbing types of violence seen in products like Grand Theft Auto.
James Bond video games are an aspect of the Bond phenomenon that is in some senses ‘invisible’. The extent of their success – and the depth of their profitability – makes little or no impression on generations who simply don’t play video games. This includes even many older Bond fans who otherwise make a point of being cognisant of Bond’s impact on the culture. Yet, though it may be a quasi-underground phenomenon, it is real and hugely important. The care and cost devoted to the video-game market is demonstrated by the fact that Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein was hired to write several of them.
Nineteen eighty-four saw the publication of The James Bond Bedside Companion by Raymond Benson, a Bond fan since the age of nine. It won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Biographical/ Critical Work. During the course of his research, Benson met Peter Janson-Smith, head of the board of Glidrose. This latter connection would transpire to be fateful.
‘We stayed in touch,’ Benson says. As well as the Casino Royale play, Benson ‘did little odd jobs’ for Glidrose over the next ten years. ‘They would send me [John Gardner’s] manuscripts from then on and I would find continuity Bondian universe mistakes and they’d get them fixed.’ The fact that in the mid-eighties Benson wrote two James Bond computer games – A View to a Kill and Goldfinger – would no doubt also have played a part in the momentous telephone call made to him by Janson-Smith in November 1995. Benson: ‘He called me and he just said, “Raymond, John wants to retire from doing Bond. We wanted to know if you’d like to give it a shot.” It was just offered to me on a silver platter. I couldn’t believe it.’
While it was a given that Benson knew the Bond universe better than most, he was not a published novelist. However, Janson-Smith had seen his unpublished first novel. Benson explains, ‘They figured they could guide me through writing that first [Bond] novel.’
Smith explained there were certain hoops through which Benson had to jump. ‘I had to come up with an outline of a story on spec that, first, they would approve and then both the British publisher and the American publisher would approve. So I did the outline and then I had to write the first four chapters on spec. Same approval process. Then I got this contract.’
Naturally there was a conversation about the approach Benson would be taking towards his version of 007. ‘I had actually suggested that we do period pieces and set them back in the fifties or sixties. Peter said, “No, we want to stay in sync with the movies,” because at that time they had just rebooted the movies again with Pierce Brosnan and GoldenEye was a huge hit. I said, “Well I want to keep the character of Bond the same.” John Gardner had gone politically correct. I said, “I want him to have all of his vices intact. I want him to smoke again, and drink a lot and sleep with a lot of women.” They said, “Yeah, that’s fine. Just make it work within the context of the 1990s.” They only said, “Make ’em like the movies and make M a woman.”’ Benson adds, ‘We just don’t talk about his age. We just say, “Well he’s a little older and wiser” and that’s it.’
Something that caused controversy was the fact of Benson’s American origin. Even Benson admits he had always previously assumed that his nationality made it impossible for him to write Bond continuation novels. ‘I was being vetted,’ he says of the inevitable cultural gaffes. ‘They corrected a lot of stuff in the first couple of books.’
The first Bond fiction Benson published was a short story, ‘Blast from the Past’, which appeared in Playboy in January 1997. This was his idea, he being keen to revive the Bond short-fiction tradition that had died with Fleming. Benson’s debut Bond novel was Zero Minus Ten, published the following April. It revolved around terrorist events in Hong Kong – a topical subject given the handover to China that year of the then-British territory.
Benson had to be careful about things that might cause problems between Glidrose and Eon, whom he describes as ‘feuding cousins’. For instance, he ignored Bond-film continuity in his novels: ‘If you put anything in that was only in the films then you could get in trouble.’ For related reasons, Benson didn’t use SPECTRE and Blofeld in his books, even though Glidrose owned the literary rights to them. As an alternative, Benson created The Union. He describes this outfit, which appeared in a trilogy of books, as ‘like the working-class SPECTRE’.
Like Gardner before him, Benson also wrote novelisations of the Bond films. ‘I had to kind of switch,’ Benson says. Of how the novelisations differed from the ‘real’ Bond books, he explains, ‘He had more lines that were jokes, witticisms, that I wouldn’t have had in my books.’ Asked if his novelisations sold better than his other Bond fiction, Benson says, ‘I don’t think so, because usually they were just in paperback. They did have a small print run in England of hardcovers that sold to collectors.’
By this time, video recorders had achieved wide penetration of the home market and James Bond films were available to rent cheaply, thus reducing the market for the book of the film. Ultimately the market would be destroyed. Benson: ‘It’s now being shifted more and more to novels of video games. I actually enquired about a novelisation for Skyfall and the people at Ian Fleming Publications just said that they and Eon decided that they’re not going to do novelisations any more. They didn’t think it was worth it.’
Benson was productive in his tenure as a Bond scribe, with six novels, three novelisations and three short stories to his name. ‘The whole seven years while I was doing Bond, it was a roller coaster,’ he says. While the workload may have been offset by the fact that the entire job was a fantasy come true, there were some real downsides: ‘I got death threats from some fans, mainly because I was American.’
Pierce Brosnan’s second Bond outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, premiered in London on 9 December 1997.
Inevitably, Martin Campbell had been asked back. He says, ‘I remember thinking, “Well just how many control rooms can I blow up?”’ This would transpire to be the complication of Eon’s new policy of engaging the services of ‘worthy’ directors: their artistic-mindedness made them disinclined to repeat themselves. Roger Spottiswoode, a man who had veered from the wildly populist (48 Hrs, Turner & Hooch) to the highly worthy (Under Fire, And the Band Played On), directed a film written by Bruce Feirstein.
The film’s title is the first with absolutely no connection to Bond’s creator, save a vaguely Fleming-esque ring. That it is not mentioned in the film is a consequence of the title’s farcical origins. Chief villain Elliot Carver owns a newspaper called Tomorrow and a fax informing MGM of potential titles, among them Tomorrow Never Lies, was misread.
The title song by Sheryl Crow is only half-decent, and Crow doesn’t have the range to do justice to her own creation. The film is scored by David Arnold, who had recently been successful with a Bond-music tribute album called Shaken and Stirred. John Barry himself was so impressed by it that he concluded Arnold was the heir apparent and recommended him to Barbara Broccoli. Arnold would score five Bond pictures in a row.
Although the beginning of the story shows tensions between the West and China, the mutual suspicion has been deliberately orchestrated by Carver (Jonathan Pryce). After decades of obsequiousness towards the Soviet Union while simultaneously being relaxed about offending their fellow human-rights abusers the Chinese, the Bond series is now being sycophantic towards Beijing. As with The Spy Who Loved Me, Bond ends up working with an attractive female operative from the other side, in this case Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh).
Jonathan Pryce does not quite have the menace to be fully effec
tive as a Bond villain, even if he is put in the Nehru suit traditional for a main Bond baddie. Also not quite convincing is his motivation, which is less psychopathy or personal enrichment than the expansion of his media empire. However, he does provide an amusing moment when he mocks Wai Lin by throwing self-defence shapes while issuing such things as ‘Hiyaa!’ The moment mocks the very chopsocky traditions that the film elsewhere exults in.
Unusually, Bond’s sex life comes back to haunt him. It transpires that he once had a fling with Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher), wife of the villain. When he greets her, she responds by slapping his face. As with the last film, Brosnan’s Bond is portrayed driving his Aston Martin DB5 for leisure and a BMW for work. Bond switches from a Walther PPK to the new model, the P99.
Brosnan is ever more comfortable in the role of Bond. Moreover, he is noticeably more hollow of face, the loss of those slightly bulbous cheeks removing just about his only physical flaw.
Bruce Feirstein and the team of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade provided the screenplay for The World Is Not Enough – premiered in LA on 8 November 1999 – from a story by Purvis and Wade. British director Michael Apted was known primarily for classy fare such as Agatha, Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist.
The film’s title is of course a link to Fleming even if the invocation of what Bond explains as a ‘family motto’ is rather contrived and irrelevant to the plot.
The pre-title sequence lasts for nearly a quarter-hour and is a good one, involving a mass fight in Switzerland and a boat chase in London culminating in Bond tumbling from an exploding hot-air balloon onto the Millennium Dome, a new and spectacular fixture on the capital’s skyline. The chase sees Brosnan executing underwater the tie-adjustment that he made his urbane Bond trademark.
The so-so title song is by David Arnold and veteran Bond movie lyricist Don Black, and performed by the group Garbage.