A bit of NSNA. Really, it seems to me that Connery is not playing Bond in this movie. He seems hesitant and apologetic about everything, like a narcissist without his enablers. I have watched the bootleg vesion with mostly John Barry on the soundtrack, so watching this I get surprised by how awful some of the music is, and the other stuff too, cringey moments that get cut out of the other version.
Die Another Day seemed better than I remembered, largely because it's now so topical. References to the danger of North Korea are more potent, plus we have China and Hong Kong in the mix. Much of that passed me by at the time, and the writers were doubtless hoping to anticipate events, which they did but by nearly two decades! Even Madonna's awful theme sounds quite contemporary now.
The whole premise of the minefield and Moon getting around it with hovecrafts is simply ingenious. Bond shooting the minefield so it would blow up and deter his pursuants passed me by too.
In my defence, there is a lot of information and exposition early on and Wade and Purvis have the usual problem of producing a droll script (sometimes) with nobody directing or acting who can quite carry it off. 'It's a minefield out there' is a good line, a joke phrase that in this case also informs, but Brosnan has a mumbly bored delivery and the soundtrack just isn't quite clear enough for it to carry, you have to strain to hear the jokes which you don't anticipate because the tone is so dry.
In the pts chase the music level is all wrong, it's rubbish. That said, there is a real sense of dread and foreboding when Bond is stranded there that we haven't seen in another film.
In the era of Alexa, the whole invisible car thing isn't quite as bonkers as it might have seemed.
Of course the film is rubbish really and the main problem is that unfamiliar information piles up, as do so many different settings and set pieces just thrown at us, it doesn't charm at all. It doesn't settle into a theme. Again, it's hard to hear the dialogue quite, the nadir being that Cuban agent and his cigar, why like Matthis they keep insisting on these actors you can never quite make out I do not know.
Brosnan has some odd posturing in this film, puts me in mind of Beavis and Butthead, has anyone else noticed this?
Doesn't the film give away that Moon becomes Graves early on for anyone paying attention, in the DNA clinic where a photo of Moon is on the right showing his eventual destination Graves?
Still one of the worst and almost wholly charmless that said it does throw a lot at you and there have been many disappointments since.
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
