GoldenEye (1995) | Music

So much time had passed between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye that the Broccoli's and Wilson lost some of their traditional partners, including screenwriter Richard Maibaum, director John Glen, and composer John Barry. To replace Barry, they hired French composer Éric Serra who'd worked with Luc Besson on La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

Serra's score is notorious for its inappropriate (and to my ears, awful) synthesizer music, but there are some lovely orchestral sections. The romantic theme that plays as Bond arrives at the casino in Monte Carlo - and again when he's on the Caribbean beach with Natalya - is beautiful.

Sadly, he didn't include the Bond Theme almost at all, except for an electronic version that was supposed to play during the tank chase. Instead of his version though, the producers hired the score's conductor, John Altman, to write a more traditional arrangement of the Bond Theme that was used in the final cut.

Serra had nothing to do with the theme song, which was written by Bono and The Edge from U2. (Although he did do the closing credits song, a forgettable piece that sounds like a lesser Peter Gabriel or Sting song to me.) During the time when Duran Duran and a-ha were making Bond songs, it was a dream of mine that U2 also get to do one. I was a huge fan of that band. So I was excited that half the group would get to write the song for GoldenEye (appropriately, the other half arranged the Mission: Impossible theme for the first film in that series), but disappointed that it was sung by Tina Turner. She's got a great voice, but I didn't care for her stuff in the '80s and felt that she was another intentional throwback to older Bond songs instead of keeping up with the times, which is what I wanted.

It's a great song though. The  lyrics are dark and creepy, about a woman who's been scorned by a dangerous man and is watching for her chance at revenge. There's a cool parallel between that story and Alec's in the movie, if Alec is the woman and Britain is the man. The "goldeneye" in the song is hers/Alec's as they watch their prey and it fits with the golden peacock eye in Carson McCullers' novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which may or may not have inspired Ian Fleming for the name of his Jamaican house that gave GoldenEye its title. In McCullers' novel, the peacock sees a horrible, twisted reality that mirrors the point of view of some of the characters in the book. So, as the song points out, the Golden Eye of the Bond film isn't just the name of the MacGuffin, it's also Alec's way of looking at the world. Very cool.

What's also very cool is the opening credits. Maurice Binder was another casualty of the long break after Licence to Kill, so Broccoli and Wilson hired music video director Daniel Kleinman to design the main titles. He'd worked with a variety of bands in the '80s, including Madonna, Van Halen, Pat Benatar, and The Pretenders.

He brings a whole new style to the Bond credits, which was sorely needed, and he's been designing all of them ever since. Instead of just photographic tricks, Kleinman includes computer generated imagery, opening the sequences to many more possibilities and allowing more freedom to include themes from the movie. For GoldenEye, he opens with a reprise of the traditional gun barrel sequence, but shows the flames and bullet shooting out of it. The flames become a golden haze that then becomes a golden eye. This leads into imagery of falling Soviet iconography with some of the statues being broken up by women with hammers (more Soviet symbolism). Some of the statues also have golden eyes, further tying together the themes. And there's a sequence where two women's faces share the same head, representing the two-faced god Janus whose name Alec adopts as an alias. It's a fantastic job by Kleinman and one of my favorite title designs.

Top Ten Theme Songs

1. A View to a Kill
2. The Living Daylights
3. The Spy Who Loved Me ("Nobody Does It Better")
4. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
5. Diamonds Are Forever
6. You Only Live Twice
7. From Russia With Love (instrumental version)
8. Live and Let Die
9. Dr No
10. GoldenEye

Top Ten Title Sequences

1. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2. Dr No
3. Thunderball
4. Goldfinger
5. GoldenEye
6. From Russia with Love
7. The Spy Who Loved Me
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. Live and Let Die
10. Moonraker

GoldenEye (1995) | Villains

GoldenEye fakes viewers out by setting up General Ourumov as a main villain similar to the evil Russian generals from Octopussy and The Living Daylights. His plan is much simpler than theirs though and he really plays more of a henchman role to the scheme's actual mastermind. Ourumov would be a forgettable character if he weren't played by Gottfried John, who gives him a wonderful sense of bemusement. And I love how he runs into Bond's interrogation, breathless and barely in uniform, to prevent Bond's revealing anything damaging, which he does nicely. He just comes across as incredibly bright and it's too bad he's dispatched so easily once the true villain is revealed.



I love Famke Janssen, but I have a rough time buying Xenia Onatopp. She has some great moments (I adore the way she says, "Nice to meet you, Mr. Bond" at the end of their first encounter), but her orgasmic sadism is too much. She's insane to the point that she's no longer fun.

She's also a super sloppy lover and her make-out scenes hurt me to watch as much as they do her partners to participate in.



GoldenEye just killed it on casting its bad guys. Boris Grishenko is an annoying character, but so watchable thanks to Alan Cumming. Among his many flaws though, what bugs me most about him is that he types one-handed so that he can use the other to play with Bond's explosive pen. I get being a tactile thinker, but that seems excessive in that particular scenario.



Besides being played by the great Sean Bean, Alec Trevelyan finally delivers what Scaramanga was designed to: the anti-Bond. Scaramanga was a great assassin, but that doesn't make him an evil version of Bond, who - licence to kill or not - has never been about murder. Trevelyan used to do what Bond does and he knows Bond's thought processes, because they were his own. There's a great moment where he questions whether Bond's drinking and womanizing work as cures for all the deaths that Bond's witnessed or caused. He's a crucial part of GoldenEye's pulling apart the character of James Bond to see how he works and how he can be used going forward.

Sadly, Trevelyan works much better thematically than he does as an actual villain. He makes all the usual mistakes, starting with failing to kill Bond when he has the chance. Instead, he goes with an overly complicated plan that involves tying Bond into a helicopter cockpit that's going to shoot itself with its own missiles. And later, he makes the same error that SPECTRE kept making in You Only Live Twice when Bond's looking for the secret base in Cuba. There's no way Bond would have found it if Trevelyan hadn't shot a missile at Bond's plane to let him know he was close. Guess those other Double-Os really are that bad.

Top Ten Villains

1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Never Say Never Again)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
4. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
5. Maximilian Largo (Never Say Never Again)
6. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
7. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
8. Doctor No (Dr. No)
9. General Gogol (For Your Eyes Only)
10. Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me)

Top Ten Henchmen

1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Gobinda (Octopussy)
6. May Day (A View to a Kill)
7. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker)
8. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
9. Oddjob (Goldfinger)
10. Necros (The Living Daylights)

GoldenEye (1995) | Women

Caroline, the psychologist sent by M to evaluate Bond, is a weak and easily manipulated character. She appears to be an intentional throwback to stereotypical Bond Girls from the past - a way of setting a base level for the rest of the movie to comment on - but she's still annoying.



I like Natalya Simonova a lot. She gets pulled into the story against her will, but even though she doesn't have spy skills, she's able to use what she does have to help herself and Bond. And in keeping with the theme of Bond's relationship to "female authority," he even defers to Natalya a couple of times, playfully calling her, "sir."

Like I said the other day, too, Natalya's also very perceptive. She sees through Bond's act and calls him on it, grieving that she'll never get as close to him as she would like to. Viewers always know that Bond's romances will never stick, but it's rare for his companions to realize it too. She's too good for him and cracks my Top Ten.

My Favorite Bond Women

1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Melina Havelock (For Your Eyes Only)
3. Kara Milovy (The Living Daylights)
4. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
5. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
6. Natalya Simonova (GoldenEye)
7. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
8. Domino Derval (Thunderball)
9. Holly Goodhead (Moonraker)
10. Mary Goodnight (The Man with the Golden Gun)

GoldenEye (1995) | Bond

Actors and Allies



Brosnan's Bond in GoldenEye is darker than Moore's, but jokier than Dalton's, which means that he's essentially playing the Connery version. He's tough, but not taking things too seriously. On the other hand, some things that Dalton winked at - like ordering his special martini - Brosnan plays totally straight. It'll be interesting to watch the rest of the Brosnan films and see how well they can keep the balance between darkness and humor. My memory is that they don't do it as well as GoldenEye.

Not that GoldenEye has it perfect. For example, it can't find the right tone for Bond's relationship with Moneypenny (now played by Samantha Bond). Their scene together starts off pretty dark, with Bond's "flirtation" coming across more like sexual harassment. It's not that Brosnan's Bond is actually doing anything different from his predecessors; it's all in Moneypenny's reaction to him. She's barely tolerating him and eager to brush him off, which makes his jokes and innuendos seem unwanted.

That might be because she doesn't want to be in the office in the first place. It's after hours and she's dressed for a date, so maybe she's just irritated and taking it out on Bond. She does end up playing along with him by the end of the conversation, but is that just her going back to a banter she's used to? Or is she worn down by his nuisance?

Her being in evening wear isn't much of a clue. It's nice to know that she has a life outside of pining for Bond, but we don't know anything about the person she's going out with. Could be a first date; could be a night out with her sister for all we know. Unfortunately, we don't have enough to go on from these versions of Moneypenny and Bond yet.

Bond comments that he's never seen Moneypenny after hours. That reminds me of an interview that Lois Maxwell once gave where she talked about a backstory that she and Connery had created for their characters. They'd decided that Moneypenny and Bond had dated briefly while coming up through the ranks, but once they reached a certain level they realized that continued dating wasn't going to work. It was a mutual decision and that explains their easy flirting. Brosnan and Bond (Samantha, that is) don't have that kind of rapport and it's right there in the script that they don't. We'll have to keep watching the series to get a baseline for what kind of relationship they're supposed to have.

On to the more important woman in Bond's life, casting Judi Dench as M was a genius move. It puts a huge spotlight on Bond's attitudes about women, which was sorely needed if he's going to be a character that modern audiences can take seriously. More than just that though, Dench's M and Brosnan's Bond have an additional layer of conflict thanks to fundamental differences in their opinions about how espionage work should be carried out. She relies heavily on analysts (Bill Tanner refers to her as "the evil queen of numbers") where Bond is all about hunches and instinct born from experience.

It's manufactured conflict that doesn't pay off in a big way, but it does bring out a great conversation between the two of them. Explaining her methods, M gives Bond a speech about having the balls to send him to his death, and she means it too. Trusting the analysts isn't the same as playing it safe. But she's also not completely cold. As she dismisses him for his mission, she orders him to "come back alive" in a way that's extremely motherly. That's not a sexist thing. Bernard Lee was just as much the parental figure to Bond (as was the literary M), so Dench is carrying on an important tradition. She has something to prove in this introduction to her, but as we get to know her, she'll be just as strong as Lee. More so, because she'll be less enigmatic than he was. The weird M turns out to be Robert Brown, who was more cold and accountant-like than Dench by a long shot.

I love GoldenEye's intro to Q. When Bond arrives in Q-Branch, Q is looking frail and especially elderly in a wheelchair with a cast on his leg. Bond asks if it was a skiing accident (of course he would guess that) and there's a gleam in Q's eye as he fires a rocket from the cast and corrects Bond: "Hunting!" Then he stands up and starts the briefing. Desmond Llewelyn is in top form, as he was in Licence to Kill. Probably my favorite line of the movie is when Bond picks up a sandwich from a table and Q yells, "Don't touch that!" before adding, "That's my lunch!" It's a stupid line, but Llewelyn's timing on it is perfect.

Bond has a couple of field allies in GoldenEye, starting with Jack Wade. It's a much better role for Joe Don Baker than Brad Whitaker was in The Living Daylights. Wade is sort of a cross between Felix Leiter and Dikko Henderson from the novel You Only Live Twice. He's laid back like Felix, but in a crude way like Dikko. I like him a lot. My only problem with him is resentment that the Bond series had so screwed up Felix that the only way they could see to make him memorable was to replace him with a whole new character.

The other ally is Zukovsky, played by Robbie "Hagrid" Coltrane. I like that he and Bond already have some history and a shaky relationship, but the best thing about him is his karaoke-singing girlfriend, played by Minnie Driver just before her career took off.

Best Quip



"Head to toe," in response to Wade's paranoid question about the Russian Natalya, "Did you check her out?"

Worst Quip



"One rises to meet a challenge," to Xenia Onatopp's expressing that she hopes he's more talented in bed than at cars or cards.

Gadgets



The gadgets are low-key in GoldenEye. Q pimps out Bond's BMW, but none of the tricks are ever used. All we get are some personal items. The laser watch is right out of Never Say Never Again and the explosive pen isn't super exciting either, even though it's used in a crucial moment. I do like the piton and rope built into Bond's belt, but it's not cool enough to crack my Top Ten either.

Top Ten Gadgets

1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Iceberg boat (A View to a Kill)
5. Aston Martin V8 Vantage (The Living Daylights)
6. Glastron CV23HT speed boat (Moonraker)
7. Acrostar Mini Jet (Octopussy)
8. Crocodile submarine (Octopussy)
9. Little Nellie (You Only Live Twice)
10. Rocket cigarettes (You Only Live Twice)

GoldenEye (1995) | Story

Plot Summary

Coincidences and hunches throw Bond into a case involving a destroyed Soviet satellite station and a ghost from Bond's past.

Influences

Before getting into the influences for GoldenEye, let's pause for a moment of silence for The Property of a Lady, what would have been the third Timothy Dalton movie. The 007 Wiki has more details about it if you're curious, but a couple of things are relevant to GoldenEye.

First, it was a financial conflict between the producers and the studio that caused Property to be delayed. Dalton had a three-picture contract (just like Moore had started with) and everything was on track to fulfill it. There was a script, but Broccoli and Family didn't like the way that MGM (who'd bought United Artists) were dividing profits from a distribution deal. It's all very boring to me, but here's the Wikipedia article if you're curious. The point is that figuring all that out took a lot of time, during which Dalton's contract expired and he (as well as screenwriter Richard Maibaum and director John Glen) walked away.

The second thing about Property that's relevant to GoldenEye is that some script elements survived, including the villain's being a former ally of James Bond. Again, the 007 Wiki has specifics. For the most part though, they went with a whole new story and abandoned the idea of using a Fleming title. Instead, they drew inspiration from the name of Fleming's summer house in Jamaica where he wrote the Bond novels. That's a lame inspiration, but a cool name.

In the movie, Goldeneye is the name of the EMP technology the villains are using; presumably named that because the device is circular and gold-colored. I was curious to know if there was any connection between that and the reason Fleming picked the name for his house, but I couldn't find any. Fleming claimed two different inspirations for the name. One was the novel Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, but the golden eye in that refers to an imaginary peacock that sees horrible and distorted reality, so it's a weird thing to name your house. More convincing is Fleming's explanation that it came from Operation Goldeneye, a WWII mission he planned while working for British Naval Intelligence. I haven't been able to find the source of the operation's name though, so I have no idea how it might connect (or not) to the movie title. In my imagination, I thought that maybe the source of inspiration had something to do with the sun, but I can't find any evidence to back that up. It looks like they just had the name and then created a story around it.

By the time Broccoli and Wilson were finally ready to make the next Bond film, a lot had changed. (And by Broccoli, I really mean Cubby's daughter Barbara now, because she took over for her dad, whose health was deteriorating. He died less than a year after GoldenEye's release.) For one thing, the end of the Cold War had eliminated the Soviets as the easy go-to villains for the series. And with Kevin McClory's still owning the rights to SPECTRE, it would be tough to come up with a new, villainous organization that didn't seem derivative. So they borrowed the traitor idea from the aborted Dalton film and threw in some Russian gangsters (pretty much the new go-to villains for '90s spy movies).

How Is the Book Different?

GoldenEye isn't based on a novel, but it's worth mentioning how much the world had changed since Fleming wrote his series. Not only the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also attitudes towards women. There was a big question about whether Bond was still a relevant character. Wisely, GoldenEye didn't just recognize that, it confronted and commented on it. And it did so in a way that kept the character of Bond intact.

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



I'll get into Brosnan's Bond more tomorrow, but he's not as serious as Dalton's. He's not as nonchalant as Moore either though, because GoldenEye gives an explicit reason for his glibness and it's pretty dark. The script and dialogue acknowledge the grimness of Bond's world and present his casual attitude as a coping mechanism. GoldenEye's admission that Bond has a tough, horrible job is very Fleming, even if the two versions handle it in different ways.

I love that Natalya sees through Bond's humor. She's not one of the most memorable Bond Girls, but she's a good one and perceptive enough that when she tries to get close to Bond, she sees his barriers for what they are. When she calls him on it, his response is, "It's what keeps me alive." She disagrees. "No. It's what keeps you alone."

She and Alec serve similar functions like that. One way that GoldenEye directly matches Fleming is in its major theme about questioning duty. Fleming's Bond is constantly wrestling with whether or not he's in the right job and Alec is all about raising that issue. More on that towards the end of the week, too.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



As often happens in Bond movies, they part company with Fleming around the tightness of the plot. In GoldenEye, Bond becomes involved in the story through the simple coincidence of his being in Monte Carlo at the same time that Xenia Onatopp is planning to steal the Tiger helicopter. Why is Bond there? Why does he suspect Onatopp enough to look into her activities?

The movie never even tries to answer these questions. Thematically, it fits though. Bond is acting on hunches, which is a point of conflict between him and M. But even though the story proves him right, it does so unconvincingly enough that I can see M's argument. Then again, maybe that's the point: that neither M nor Bond are totally right about which method is best. But even if that's what the movie's trying to achieve, it could have done a stronger job at it.

Cold Open



After three other cold opens where a Double-O dies, GoldenEye does a nice fake-out by pretending to do it again. Of course, casting Sean Bean as 006 kind of gives it away - you just know he'll be back later - but it's a cool effort.

This is my favorite teaser so far. There isn't just one great stunt; there are two. It's starts with Bond's bungee jumping into a Soviet chemical weapons facility and - like On Her Majesty's Secret Service - keeping his face in shadows for a while. He's finally revealed hanging upside down in a bathroom stall, quipping to a guard. It's great.

Then, after 006 is captured and supposedly executed, there's an even better stunt where Bond chases a pilotless aircraft off a cliff on a motorcycle, then freefalls to catch up with the plane, jumps in, and pulls it out of its dive just as it's about to crash into a mountain. And it all ties in to the main story. Just perfect.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. GoldenEye
2. The Spy Who Loved Me
3. Moonraker
4. Thunderball
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. A View to a Kill
7. Goldfinger
8. The Man with the Golden Gun
9. The Living Daylights
10. Licence to Kill

Movie Series Continuity



Right after the credits, the movie reveals that the teaser sequence took place nine years earlier. That puts it between View to a Kill and The Living Daylights. Robbie Coltrane's Valentin Zukovsky character also suggests a rich history between him and Bond that we've never seen or heard of before. Which raises the question again about whether Brosnan is playing the same person as Moore and Dalton (and Connery and Lazenby before them). And again, there's no good theory that ties the series' continuity together.

I'm sort of working on one that involves brainwashing and false memories, but it's still a long way off. Mostly I haven't decided yet what benefit MI6 would see in such a scheme and why they would occasionally reinstate a Bond whom they'd used before and then moved away from. Or are there sometimes multiple Bonds? Was Brosnan's character operating simultaneously with Dalton's? Did they know about each other?

The Aston Martin DB5 makes a reappearance, driven by Bond in Monte Carlo as he's being evaluated by the world's worst psychologist. More on her later, but she's an intentional throwback to the kind of women who used to appear in Bond movies, while also introducing the idea of "female authority," as Bond puts it, and his reaction to it.

We see the new MI6 headquarters for the first time and it's the actual headquarters of the actual MI6, which had just opened the year before GoldenEye's release.

Bill Tanner makes his third appearance in a Bond movie, the other two being The Man with the Golden Gun and For Your Eyes Only. This is the first time that his friendship with Bond is especially emphasized though. In the novels, the two are best friends at the agency.

There's a new M of course. More on her later, but we learn that she has children.

And finally, we learn that Bond's parents were killed in a climbing accident. That's from the novels, but I think this is the first time the movies acknowledge it. Alec is also an orphan, leading us to wonder if that's an intentional similarity among the the Double-Os. Skyfall of course will explore this further, and it's looking like SPECTRE probably will, too.