Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I saw Die Another Day on Wednesday night. In short, it's a fine film -- probably the best of the Pierce Brosnan Bond films.

What I liked about the film was the way it subtly tweaked the classic Bond formula in spots, not completely diverting from formula but turning it upside-down a bit. There is the standard pre-titles sequence, in which Bond escapes certain death to make a thrilling escape that actually doesn't quite work -- instead, he's taken prisoner and held in torturous captivity by the North Koreans for fourteen months. (In fact, the existence of any time frame at all is something of a departure for a Bond film, since lengthy periods of time are rarely spelled out in these films.) The torture of Bond actually plays out during the film's titles, which is another bold departure from the standard. (In this sense, the theme song by Madonna actually makes sense -- it's really connected to the images on the screen, and not really intended to be a stand-alone song at all.) Then, Bond doesn't escape -- he is actually traded by the North Koreans, in one of those spy-trade scenes we all know from espionage movies. ("OK, here's the bridge. Start walking, and don't look back.") After some unpleasant confrontations with M, with the result that Bond is basically "fired", he escapes -- from the British, his own people -- and embarks on his own journey of investigation and revenge.

I won't say anything more about the plot, so as not to spoil anything, if anything really can be spoiled at all in a Bond film. I will note that all the classic, Bond elements are here: the globetrotting (Korea to Hong Kong to Cuba to England to Iceland); the initial meeting with the bad guy on his own home turf; the initial "friendly wager" between Bond and the bad guy (Bond, it turns out, is very good with a sword); the villain's grotesque henchman (who got his grotesque nature via an explosion set off by Bond); et cetera. Most of these moments, though, are shifted a bit in their subtext, so they take on different light. For instance, there is the obligatory moment that Roger Ebert calls the "Fallacy of the Talking Killer": this is where the villain has Bond at gunpoint and has only to pull the trigger to achieve victory, but he instead talks long enough to give Bond a chance to wriggle out of his clutches. However, this time it is Bond who fails to kill the villain when he should, and to his detriment. (I should note that this also happened in the prior film, The World Is Not Enough, but not nearly as convincingly as it's handled here.) Another example is the typical scene where Bond saunters into a posh hotel and boldly demands "his usual suite" -- only he's just escaped the British after his fourteen-month captivity, and thus has long hair, a beard, crappy threadbare clothes, and no identification.

The film is also full of tiny, throwaway moments and sight-gags meant for devoted fans of Bond. For instance, there is a scene when Bond is in Cuba where he picks up a copy of a "Field Guide to Birds". The joke here is that Ian Fleming first decided on the name "James Bond" for his British spy because he was trying to come up with a dull-sounding name for him, the concept being that the spy is a boring man to whom exciting things happen, and then he spied a "Field Guide to Birds" written by one James Bond, and Fleming thought, "My God, that is the dullest name I've ever seen." Also fun is the scene where Bond is given his gadgets by Q, the background of which is decorated with many old gadgets from Bond films past.

Much press has been given to Halle Berry, the first Oscar-winning actress to play a Bond heroine. She does a fine job, but the script shortchanges her a bit: she's given a great deal to do, thankfully, but she has fairly little to say. There is a lot of potential here for one of the more memorable Bond heroines, but we simply get no background on her at all. Nevertheless, I liked her a great deal. Her initial appearance -- a visual homage to Ursula Andress's first appearance in Dr. No -- is stunning, she acquits herself very well in the action sequences (with a very nice fight scene of her own at the end), and even in the couple of scenes where she's a Bondian damsel-in-distress she doesn't sink to shrieking "James! James!" like the other Bond heroines so often do. She reminds me of the Lois Chiles character in Moonraker, in her competence and boldness. (Chiles is one of my favorite Bond women.) I just wish Berry had been given more dialogue and her character a background.

The only other significant flaw in the film is the look of some of the latter action sequences, which involve some fake-looking CGI instead of the more traditional high-quality Bond stuntwork. One of these, in particular, looks very bad as Bond somehow manages to escape a crumbling glacier. This has to be seen to be believed. It is NOT good. There are also some moments of unbelievability during the action climax, but thankfully they're not as bad as the escape from the glacier.

The script also has a couple of "Duh!" moments, when I wanted nothing but to yell at the characters, "Duh!". One of them involves M complaining about the fact that she was ignorant of something she really should have known, if she had done her own homework. The bit of info she's upset about doesn't strike me as something that would be hard to find out. But those moments are, thankfully, fewer than the similar moments in TWINE and Tomorrow Never Dies.

Finally, a quick word about Pierce Brosnan. I've liked him as Bond in all four of his films, but never so much as in this one. He's got some gray at the temples, and some lines in his face, that give his Bond some heft and some age. I do think that these Bond films are still a bit heavy on the "action hero" aspect of the Bond character and light on the "spy" aspect, but Die Another Day begins to get the balance back a bit toward the "spy" side of the ledger, which is a welcome change. Brosnan can have the role as long as he wants it, as far as I am concerned. (Provided, of course, that he stops wanting it before he looks as old as Roger Moore did in A View To A Kill.)

Die Another Day is a fine addition to the Bond corpus.