If nothing else, the Bond franchise teaches us that consistency is overrated, but perhaps this is the best way to keep drawing an audience. Looking through the previous 17 films, it’s difficult to find two in a row that contain a similar tone or style. This, in part, could be blamed on the frequent change in directors, but John Glen, who directed four of the Bond films, offered varying takes from one film to the next. From Russian with Love is a much more serious endeavor than its follower Goldfinger, which, in turn, is much more farcical and comicbookish than its subsequent, Thunderball. Roger Moore’s first sting in Live and Let Die was a coup for Paul McCartney and only slightly shy of being classified in the Blaxploitation genre, but is nearly unrecognizable from the superior follow up, The Spy who Loved Me.
One would assume that Timothy Dalton would be immune to this trend given that he was only Bond twice, but his two films are markedly different from one another. The Living Daylights is his introduction, and while his silhouette and grittiness are more profound and apparent than Connery or Moore’s, he is still the champagne and martini drinking Bond. However, in License to Kill, he is a renegade and a badass.
Pierce Brosnan is no different from his predecessors. Goldeneye brought Bond back to the mainstream and introduced him to a nineties-centric audience. Each scene moved with precision and the action was meticulous. Tomorrow Never Dies, its sequel, does neither. The premise is certainly interesting, shying away from the stealing of nuclear warheads and centering more on the influence of media on our perceptions of the world.
To be fair, this theme that had been visited in the early Bond films, wherein SPECTRE came across as a more neutral entity that was just trying to expose the United States and Russia as equally stubborn, narcissistic countries bent on mutually assured destruction. Sure, they were always pilfering weapons and such, but the end game was to show the superpowers the folly of trying to be the only superpower.
In Tomorrow Never Dies, the media mogul Elliot Carver (Johnathan Pryce) is bent on techno-terrorism and desires only exclusive broadcasting right in China. Granted, these rights are worth a few billion dollars, so the narrative is not as silly as it might seem.
The downside of this film is that it relies much more on action and explosions than Goldeneye had. This doesn’t make it worse, but it certainly sates the contingent who rejected Goldeneye because it was more serious than some Bond fans might like. Gone is the seriousness, but present is the contemporary relevance. In 2013, we can look back on 1997 and think that perhaps the news creating the story is not as far-fetched as it once seemed. We need to remember that, while CNN existed, the breaking news era created by the OJ Simpson chase, trial, and verdict, was relatively embryonic. Fox News and MSNBC were launched in1996, but the competition was not nearly as fierce as it is today – and that’s because it was not as widespread. In 1997, there were about 171 cable channels available, and only about half of the households with cable had 50 channels. Today, there are more than 2000 channels available on Time Warner Cable alone – and this is not considering the hundreds of channels available via satellite.
Now, I’m not suggesting that Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner are behind the scenes creating headlines or feeding lines to all of their anchors. However, much like the team behind Tomorrow Never Dies wanted to change up the tone set by Goldeneye in order to draw people in, those behind the news need to keep their viewership happy.
