After a six year break, GoldenEye became the rebirth of the Bond franchise, this time featuring Pierce Brosnan as 007. While License to Kill marked the end of an era with Bond’s shift from Mi6 agent to rogue vigilante, GoldenEye marks another shift in the tone of Bond films. Perhaps entry into the 1990’s predicated a change in tone. Long gone are the montage-filled 1980’s where every villain is an archetype with a mustache and ominous music. Here to stay are the nefarious inner workings of familiar governments.
Brosnan as Bond was a fine choice. He looks more Dalton than Moore or Connery, so there’s a ruggedness that coincides with a new decade and a generation of viewers already familiar with the grit and grime that came with the grunge generation.
In addition, this Bond avoids – at least in GoldenEye – the temptation of cheesiness. This enters a bit later in the Brosnan run, but the first one is much more of a spy thriller. Puns are thrown here and there, but they’re said in unfamiliar moments. Bond’s snark is more apparent en media battle that it is post-battle. There’s something in his eerie condescension that makes us want to dislike him even though we root for him.
Judi Dench as “M” also aides our distrust of the new Bond. She knows he’s rogue and she seems much more forceful than the previous “M,” whose threats – License to Kill accepted – are empty and really just a way to get Moore or Connery to smirk.
Regardless of the reasons why we both follow and dislike this new Bond, the story also helps keep us entertained. As with most Bonds, the fear of a nuclear device is present, but in this go-round the villains are much more flushed out and a bit less transparent. The beginning of GoldenEye finds Bond and his partner Alec, 006 (Sean Bean), caught in a lion’s den as it were. As Alex is executed, Bond seeks his unslaked vengeance against General Ourumov (Gottfried John).
Nine years pass before Bond can seek his revenge on Ourumov, but when we soon learn that the ultimate villain’s codename, Janus, is hardly coincidence. To spit in the face of her Majesty’s secret service and country, Alec faked his death nine years before and has since been a global menace.
Dual agents are not necessarily new to the Bond franchise, so this is not shocking, but the reasons for Alec’s turning are intriguing. Many of the Bond narratives involve the present: a current crisis between two states, the imminent threat of nuclear war, two opposing countries vying for the same technology. Here, Alec’s modus operandi is centered in the past: he is seeking revenge for the British treatment of his Cossack ancestors. For one of the first times, it feels that the past catches up with the present, and there is less worry about imminent fate or future.
Also of interest in GoldenEye is the introduction of Famke Janssen as the entendre-laden villain Xenia Onatopp, a desublimated vixen whose specialty is killing men by crushing them betwixt her luscious, powerful thighs. She had a few small roles before GoldenEye, and this film was not necessarily a catapulting breakthrough, but as I look back over the last twenty years, I see the woman who went on to play Jean Grey cum Phoenix and realize that I’ve never said, Wow, Janssen was the worst part of that movie. Despite the cartoonish nature of her character here, she’s charmingly believable as a villain.
The same might be said for Izabella Scorupco, the actress who plays the female protagonist Natalya Simonova. Like most other females in the Bond franchise, she and James hook up perfunctorily, and while this is a bit annoying inasmuch as it occurs pretty much out of nowhere and for no particular reason whatsoever other than to follow a Bond trope, Scorupco is moving as the Russian technician torn between country and friendship.
For what it’s worth, GoldenEye is one of the more believable and fun Bond film to come along since The Spy who Loved Me.
