My Goldeneye Review
alabamabondfan
Posts: 23MI6 Agent
I enjoyed Goldeneye but I'm not sure where I would rank it overall. I thought Pierce Brosnan was really good but not great. I'm not sure anyone could ever be great in my mind next to Connery. Really, Pierce would be every bit as good as Roger Moore if he was a little tougher. His acting and wit was superb, I just had a hard time believing his action scenes.
The action scenes in the film were excellent(overlooking Remington Steele's performance of course). I especially liked the tank chase through St. Petersburg. The fight at the end was really good as well.
The villians were good. Sean Bean as 006 was very good. I didn't really like Onatopp. She should have been called Overthetop. The general was pretty good.
I enjoyed the plot. I think it was slightly better material than Dalton was given to work with.
The girls in the film were around average to me. Natalya was very good looking but Overthetop didn't really do anything for me. The newest moneypenny was a HUGE improvement over the last one.
Tomorrow Never Dies is up next. Looking forward to it.
The action scenes in the film were excellent(overlooking Remington Steele's performance of course). I especially liked the tank chase through St. Petersburg. The fight at the end was really good as well.
The villians were good. Sean Bean as 006 was very good. I didn't really like Onatopp. She should have been called Overthetop. The general was pretty good.
I enjoyed the plot. I think it was slightly better material than Dalton was given to work with.
The girls in the film were around average to me. Natalya was very good looking but Overthetop didn't really do anything for me. The newest moneypenny was a HUGE improvement over the last one.
Tomorrow Never Dies is up next. Looking forward to it.
Comments
Pierce's action scenes were very believable to me at least, none of the Bond's do I doubt (except Dalton kind of).
It's funny as many are all ga-ga over Xenia instead of the superb Natalya. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Xenia, an you're certainly right about her being over-the-top because... she was. To each his own I suppose.
GE is my favorite, even more than AVTAK, which I frequently preach about around here. Whenever it's attacked, and they're becoming more frequent now because of a certain movie that will not be named that just came out last year, I've been more prone to defend this "golden" gem.
Have fun with TND! It's not my cup of tea, but it may be yours.
JFF
That's good to hear you agree with me on Natalya (that was the jist).
And taity, you have provided us with a conundrum...
Well, Pierce definitely showed us Bond's "feminine side". Which is a big reason why Daniel Craig is now playing the role instead.
BTW alabamabondfan, I've really enjoyed your trip through the Bond canon, your reviews are fun to read and always give me pause to think. Cheers! {[]
Have you seen OHMSS yet? I'm just curious because you seem like an OHMSS type guy and I'm wondering what you thought of it. Cheers!
And yes, I agree. Natalya was probably one of the best Bond girls ever.
1. Yes Eric Serra's score was quite disappointing. Not bad in itself. But simply not Bondian.
2. I agree, Natalya makes a great Bond-girl.
3. I thought Pierce was okay. He certainly looked great and his acting was good; but his interpretation was in my opinion a little safe. It lacked Dalton's edge and of course Connery's original charisma. Even Moore, whose interpretation I don't particularly like, was more memorable because he contributed something to the character. All these actors had an agenda: an aspect of themselves they managed to give the character. Whereas Pierce just played it middle-of-the-road.
4. The big plus of the movie is the care (and money) invested in production. I mean, these movies look better than their predecessors just by virtue of having been shot by more competent cameramen with better equipment. The late 70s and 80s Bond, by comparison, seem amateurish.
5. As for my one major criticism: the movie sags in the middle. Frankly I found the tank-chase sequence boring, and it was only at the very end that the movie managed to pick up the pace it had lost there. This is unusual as in my view flawed Bond movies tend to run out of steam in the third act (I can think of many good movies that just sag at the end: TB's endless underwater battle, YOLT's volcano, TLD's afghanistan sequence, TWINE's invasion of the blonde bimbo; AVTAK's silly fire-truck chase; even the really bad ones like MR and DAD are okay until the unbearable finale). But, weirdly, GE's moment of embarrassing plotlessness comes in the second act, bringing the movie to a grinding halt.
It's been a lot of fun making my way through the Bond catalog for the first time.
Lazenby, I thought it was ok. I thought GL was ok as Bond but I would have enjoyed it more if OHMSS was with Connery or even Moore's first Bond film. There were certainly some excellent scenes in the film but its probably not in my top 5. Nowhere near as bad as Moonraker/Octopussy/TLD though..........
In CR they set out to make a very good action movie with the personality of James Bond in the centre, and it made it a brilliant Bond movie!
A very short, but in my oppinion, to the point comment.
I like Xenia. I find her funny and appropriate to the flavour of the movie, which is more Bond as superhero than flesh and blood guy...however, the Over-the-Top joke is funny:)). In all honesty though Famke Jansen looked much sexier in the X-Men movies.
I personally like the titles, the symbolizing of the fall of the soviet union works perfectly with the noirish psychosexuality of early Bonds. And the song is good too.
This is definitely a comic book movie, as they all are. I think it is a decent one. I have recently begun to think of Bond movies in terms of A,B,C. An A is a true classic. A B is a decent Bond movie with some awkward moments and slow points. A C is a movie only redeemable by it being a Bond movie. There are fortunately not too many C's, though unfortunately several of Brosnan's are, in my books. GE wavers somewhere between A and B for me. Not quite a home run, but interesting for it being the first Bond dealing with the end of the Cold War, and having something new to contribute in terms of character development.