Review: GoldenEye (1995)



 "For England, James?"


Haven't talked Bond properly before, haven't we? Well, let's fix that. While No Time To Die, the supposed end of the Daniel Craig era of everyone's favorite escapist superspy fantasy, has been postponed thanks to that teensy little trouble you may or may not have heard about this year, we've still got nearly sixty years of the franchise to look back on in the meantime. And where better to start with than the beginning of another Bond era twenty-five years ago, with GoldenEye. 


It can be difficult to appreciate what a deal this was back then, properly relaunching the world's most famous martini-chugger into the nineties. Timothy Dalton's outings--while actually not half bad watches in my view--did progressively worse at the box office, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was not unjustifiable murmurings about people not being that interested into spy stuff anymore. And that's before we get into the matters of this new politically correct era, which perhaps wasn't going to take to a character that thirty-odd years ago didn't think twice about grabbing butts in Goldfinger.


Fortunately, this likewise precious metal themed title managed to land on its feet thanks to a few mitigating factors. Firstly, we had the casting of sexy television heartthrob Pierce Brosnan--who had already done his suave romancer part in eighties series Remington Steel, and dabbled in spy flicks with The Fourth Protocol. Secondly, the film embraced its awkward position in the post Cold War, by making it an upfront theme starting with the title sequence (featuring Tina Turner's theme song, easily in my top three of Bond themes). Thirdly, it just kicked ass--as with the best Bond outings, it simply offered unapologetic over the top action with enough new sprinklings to entice new viewers; in this case, it involved that brand new concept the nineties was catching onto known as 'computer hacking'. 


But how does the film hold up? Pretty darn well for the most part. It hits the ground running with its opening titles set in Cold War Soviet Russia, with an iconic sequence that gives us a dam, bungeeing off the dam, and Pierce Brosnan immediately taking to the fine art of one-liners cheesy enough to become brilliant. More importantly, it sets up Sean Bean as Bond's partner Alec Trevalyan, who...well, sigh, it's not much of a spoiler to say he becomes the bad guy, seeing as the trailers happily gave it all away back then.


After that, it's into the nineties for Bond, contending with a new --gasp--female superior, in the form of Judi Dench's M, who kept the role even into Craig's role. Understandable, as it established her immediately as a boss that takes no shit, delivering one of the film's more famous lines about Bond being a 'sexist, misogynist dinosaur'. Appropriate then that one of the first people Bond meets here is henchwoman Xenia (Famke Janssen), in a casino sequence harking back to Doctor No, right before we get introduced to her...means of dispatching people. That light touch of irony is sprinkled throughout, with Alec at one point breaking down Bond's vices pretty directly--though the film doesn't dwell on it as much as a modern take on this would. 


It's then that we meet Bond's companion for the flick with Natalya (Isabella Scorupco), who quickly gets estranged from brilliantly hammy villain collaborator Boris (Alan Cumming) once we get into the eponymous GoldenEye satellite, and how it makes a bit of a mess to say the least. The film then goes to Bond having to contend with more Russian bad guys lead by Gottfried John's General Ourumov. Considering that the film is trying to touch on a more delicate post-Cold War world, it does feel like you have soldiers of his who might not even know of his plan get dispatched a little too easily...but such questions disappear when Bond is crashing through walls after him in a commandeered tank. At that point, you're just grinning.


That sort of balance of the over the top and the grounded is also something GoldenEye does right; compare to future Brosnan piece Die Another Day, which has North Korean officers turn into English dudes by having their bone marrow sucked out, somehow, and diamond-powered death ray satellites shooting at sports cars with more missiles than could possibly fit inside them. Here, we still have Soviet superweapons and lunatic chases...but there's enough real world injected to keep it grounded, like Alec's rather grim motivations, and the fact that something like a satellite EMP bomb feels very much like something that could've bene proposed in the Cold War. Even his scheme resonates somewhat in our age of digital fraud and mass-scale hacking.


Speaking of Trevalyan, I do feel that the film could've played his 'dark mirror' to Bond up a bit more; but as Sean Bean character deaths go, at least he goes out with a good one by having a satellite dish dropped on his head in the climax. That leaves GoldenEye as still a satisfying experience; not as revolutionary now, but fun nevertheless. Sure, it does ironically date itself somewhat with a distinctly nineties-era setting and approach, but that just makes it more interesting in my view; the same goes for followup Tomorrow Never Dies, even, with its topics of mass media and fake news. Those touches of the zeitgeist do show how even pop culture illustrates how we get from here to there. 


But there's one more thing we have to discuss--and that's the videogame! These days, movie tie-in games are largely relegated to exploitative mobile schlock--but in times gone by, they were infamous for clogging up console libraries with shovelware. Not so with GoldenEye's N64 tie-in--which actually took its time, coming out two years after the film itself. It not only accurately recreated sequences and settings from the film, but gave the player actual agency with pretty open levels. Did you go in guns blazing with an AK, or snipe people off going around the sides? Did you throw the controller for that damn escort mission with Natalya, or merely slam it against the sofa?


What was more important was the game solidifying shooter games on consoles--previously relegated to the realms of personal computers, like Doom. And above all, giving things a multiplayer scene that would lay the groundwork for lucrative circles dedicated to killing imaginary pixel people. Anyone in my age bracket or more can tell you of fine times playing as Oddjob just to present a more difficult target, writing obscene things with the game's very prominent bullet holes, or one too many self-immolations with a rocket launcher. Sure, it might look blocky and weird to today's Fortnite-addicted generation, and you have to twist your hand into unnatural shapes to properly use an N64 controller, but I have no doubt some of you are nodding along nostalgically. 


GoldenEye N64 set a pretty high standard for many a tie-in shooter that was unfortunately tossed away like a used tuxedo before too long, but Bond games themselves gave it a good try for a while. I have even fonder memories of Nightfire on the Gamcube, with an even better cinematic-style campaign and versatile multi that lead to hours of fun with buddies on the couch. After that, Everything or Nothing took things third-person with an innovative control system that laid the ground for titles like Gears of War, even if its plot was insane nonsense about nanomachines and Willem Defoe invading Moscow with an army of platinum tanks (I kid you not).


But that's enough nattering about that--bottom line is, GoldenEye was a fun film and a treasured game, and though the Brosnan Bonds eventually themselves needed rebooting after descending into nonsense, they gave us their share of solid entries. Next up, we look to the end of another Bond era, with awkwardness and Walkenness galore... 





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