Wednesday, March 24, 2010

GoldenEye

Continuing our glacial quest to watch all of the James Bond Films in order, we watched GoldenEye on Saturday night. GoldenEye is the seventeenth James Bond movie and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Released in 1995, the film is unrelated to any of the works of novelist Ian Fleming.

GoldenEye was released after legal disputes forced a six-year hiatus in the series. During this period, Timothy Dalton resigned from the role of James Bond and was replaced by Pierce Brosnan. M was also recast with actress Dame Judi Dench becoming the first woman to portray the character replacing Robert Brown.

In the film, Bond fights to prevent an arms syndicate from using the GoldenEye satellite weapon against London in order to cause a global financial meltdown. GoldenEye was the first Bond film made after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War which provided a background for the plot.

In addition to Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and Dame Judi Dench as M, the film stars Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan (an MI6 agent who fakes his death and establishes a crime syndicate), Izabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova (a programmer who helps Bond disarm GoldenEye), Famke Janssen as Xenia Onatopp (Trevelyan's henchwoman), Joe Don Baker as Jack Wade (a veteran CIA agent), Gottfried John as General Ourumov (a renegade Russian general) and Desmond Llewelyn as Q (head of research and development).

Llewelyn was the only actor to reprise a role from a previous Bond film.  Samantha Bond made her first of four appearances as Moneypenny.

GoldenEye was the first film bound by a three picture deal with BMW. Although used in a very limited role, the BMW Z3 was featured in the film months before its release.

This is one of the James Bond films that I remember seeing in the theater. At this point in the series, the stunts start to get a lot bigger. I distinctly remember several of the stunts, including the sequence where Bond skydives into a plane and scenes where he is driving a tank through St. Petersburg. The opening sequence of the film includes a 720 feet bungee jump shot at the Verzasca Dam in Switzerland.

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