10 Good Things about Die Another Day

Last night, as Adrian continued to watch all the Bond films ahead of Spectre's release, he tweeted about how dreadful it was.  I replied that it wasn't that bad, and we had a bit of a back and forth, culminating in this:

@merseytart I agree DAD is definitely not boring. You should do a ‘ten good things...’ and we’ll compare!

— Adrian Stirrup (@adrianstirrup) October 12, 2015

So here it is.  Ten Good Things About Die Another Day.

1.  80% of the Hovercraft Chase

Bond movies are always looking for new ways to cause vehicular trauma, and they'd never done hovercrafts before.  There was the brief glimpse of a Sealink in Diamonds are Forever, and the Bondola of course, but neither one was used as an actual device for destruction.  Die Another Day corrects this with an exciting, tense sequence that contains plenty of explosions, some interesting deaths, and an amusing climax with a good Bond groaner.  I'm knocking off 20% for the truly appalling back projection once Colonel Moon gets on board; that looks like something from the Roger Moore era.

2.  The Titles

Yes, I am going to defend Madonna's Die Another Day.  There's this idea that Bond themes have to be extravagant, overblown, silky torch songs crooned by a velvet throated madam, or to use a shortcut, "Shirley Bassey".  Would Shirley Bassey sing this? is a lazy shortcut.  Sometimes it works - the Bass would have done a great version of Skyfall, for example.  Sometimes it doesn't.  I have the Bassey Sings Bond album, and her take on A View To A Kill is horrific.  So is her version of Live and Let Die, and the less said about her cod-reggae cover of We Have All The Time In The World the better.  That doesn't stop them from being awesome Bond themes though, and while Die Another Day isn't in the same league as those three, it's still a great opener to the film.  It's dangerous and exciting and fast paced.  The lyrics are nonsensical, but so are the lyrics to The Living Daylights.  It's not trying to be a Shirley Bassey track from the Nixon era, it's trying to be a piece of music from the year 2002.  And Madonna is absolutely the calibre of artist who should be performing Bond themes: a legendary name in the music world, because singing a Bond theme is being admitted to a rare and privileged club.

(Having said that, I would pay an extraordinarily large amount of money to hear Shirley Bassey sing "Sigmund Freud: analyse this").

Daniel Kleinman's titles are genuinely disturbing, probably the first instance of his descent into madness that continued in Skyfall.  God knows what he's going to do in Spectre.

3.  James Bond walking into a five star hotel looking like a tramp and asking for his usual suite.

Because YES.

4.  Cuba

Alright, it's not really Cuba - twitchy insurers after 9/11 made them film it in Spain - but the Cuban sequence up until Bond goes to the beach is great fun.  Emilio Echevarria's Raoul is a proper old school Bond ally, like Kerim Bey or Sir Godfrey Tibbet: he twinkles charmingly throughout his scenes.  Die Another Day's version of Havana reminds me of Kingston in Dr No, all dusty streets and classic cars and saucy vixens on street corners.  There's even a brief appearance by Birds of the West Indies! Plus David Arnold's score is glorious at this point, camp and boisterous, and ending with the James Bond Theme picked out on Spanish guitar.  I will always give bonus points when the Bond Theme is played in the style of the location.

5.  Moonraker

As a Fleming fanboy, I'm delighted to see they finally adapted the Moonraker novel to the screen.  The middle third is a 21st century version of the book: the villain is a man who has undergone extensive plastic surgery and taken on a fake identity.  He becomes incredibly popular in Britain (even getting a knighthood) and uses his immense wealth to build a giant space device that will ostensibly bring great benefits.  In reality, it conceals a deadly weapon that he will use as vengeance for a lost war.  The British government don't trust him, and insert a female undercover agent to keep an eye on him; Bond is also assigned, and first meets the villain at a gentleman's club where he bests him in a battle of wits.  The female undercover agent is dismissive of 007 and resists his attempts to charm her.  Bond travels to the villain's base where he is introduced to the giant space device and the battle of wits continues.

Of course, there's nothing about lasers or ice palaces or Halle Berry, but it's nice to know that even in 2002 Mickey and Babs are trawling the novels for stuff they can nick.

6.  The piece of music they play when Verity first appears is called "That Looks Like Madonna."

Thank you, David Arnold.

7.  Rosamund Pike

Fun fact: only three Bond girls have ever received Oscar nominations, and two of them are in this movie.  (The third is Kim Basinger, and she wasn't even in a proper Bond film).  In 2015 it actually seems weird to think of Rosamund Pike as a Bond Girl, but this was actually her first film, a fact that seems even more remarkable once you watch the film.  Ros gives easily the best performance in the film, straddling drama and comedy, being equally convincing as a sword-wielding maniac and an icy vixen.  Watch the scene with Jinx, Bond and Miranda in the ice palace.  Pike/Miranda knows that "big bang theory" has a multitude of meanings, but plays it straight.  Jinx responds with "I think I got the thrust of it," at which point Halle Berry rolls her eyes, sticks her tongue out, and just manages to stop short of honking her boobs and shouting "I'M ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT FUCKING!".  Miranda's response?  A single "Really?" which is a masterclass of understatement and wit.  There are reports that in a number of drafts of Die Another Day, Miranda was the good girl and Jinx was the bad one; this is an alternate universe I would like to be part of.

8.  The Ice Palace

It's thrown away on screen, with Lee Tamahori absolutely refusing to give us any kind of awe inspiring wide shot of the interior.  Its geography makes no sense - it's somehow big enough to have luxurious suites, and a central party area, but it looks much smaller from the outside, and it's never clear how the domes and the hot springs relate to it.  Its destruction is illogical - it's melting after one blast of Icarus's ray, and bits of it keep falling off, but it's still strong enough to support a car chase, apart from the room Jinx is in which melts REALLY REALLY FAST.  But it's the kind of epic architecture you only get in a Bond movie, a hollowed out volcano of a supertanker of an Olimpatec Meditation Institute, and I treasure it for that reason.

9.  General Moon

Like Emilio Echevarria, Kenneth Tsang seems to be acting in a much better movie.  His character reminds me of General Gogol, that quiet, sympathetic face of the enemy, and his realisation aboard the Antonov that his son is (a) still alive and (b) kind of a bastard is a rare moment of real emotion.

10.  It's never dull

The worst, most terrible crime any Bond film can commit is to be dull.  For Your Eyes Only is the worst offender, an utterly beige film, and who hasn't occasionally fast forwarded through the underwater bits in Thunderball?  We're only human.  Die Another Day is never boring.  There's always something happening.  It might be nonsensical (DNA transplants!), it might be embarrassing (CGI Halle Berry jumping off a cliff), it might make you want to reach into the screen so you can punch an actor (Toby Stephens), but you're not yawning.  The only time your mouth opens that wide is out of disbelief during the parasailing sequence.  (Of course I'm not going to defend that).  It's not the Bond movies' finest hour, but over fifty years, you're going to get some highs and some lows.  It's the worst Brosnan, but its failure (artistically: it still made shitloads at the box office) gave us Casino Royale.  Sometimes the Bond films need a mistake so they can correct the course and go back to being ace.