Which one is this? The CNN one.
Who’s who in this one? Brosnan (Bond); Dench (M); Llewelyn (Q); Bond (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? I never saw this in theatres in 1997 – I caught up with it months later on TV.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Jonathan Pryce as Elliot Carver, omnipotent news magnate who wants to preemptively cause news stories instead of just reporting on them – so he starts a war with China.
Who are the Bond girls? Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin, a Chinese superspy, and Teri Hatcher as godawful Paris Carver, who – thankfully – is the death-bait.
Opening number? Sheryl Crow’s off-key caterwauling in one of the most intensely unlikeable title tracks in the franchise, set against computer circuit boards becoming ambulatory women in a hail of signal noise.
What’s memorable about this one? Michelle Yeoh. Helicopter vs. motorcycle. kd lang’s closing ballad, “Surrender,” which would have made a better opening title track than the opening title track. How much fun it is to sneak up behind someone and whisper “Tomorrow never dies–!”
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 8. A substantially better series relaunch than Goldeneye.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? 6. Slight and ineffectual, but a marked improvement over the bloat of its predecessor.
Tomorrow Never Dies is very late-‘90s in a very comforting way. I grew up here. The back half of that decade, perhaps directly due to the perceived void in the James Bond marketplace, saw a flourish of spy-related content – The Saint, Mission: Impossible, Sneakers – and after the franchise relaunch with Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies fits that temporary sub-genre of cyber-age espionage movies to a T. Its gleaming, neon-bright cinematography (by Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular collaborator, Robert Elswit) displays a heavy Tony Scott influence, and anticipates John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2 and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days. Hunting and pecking for a workable threat in the post-Cold War world, Tomorrow Never Dies skips clean over terrorism (the prologue is set at a “terrorist arms bazaar on the Russian border”) to land on mass media, a great idea. The film’s choice of villain – Rupert Murdoch/Ted Turner amalgam Elliot Carver, a berserk news baron out to control the world – is so very peculiar to the decade in which he was created. Broadcast television has died, and the internet is in its infancy; in the meantime, here’s Cable News, and the belief (quite correct) that spoon-fed media will shortly become the only relevant “truth” to a society no longer enfranchised to seek its own complex answers. “Words are the new weapons,” Carver quips to our old-fashioned secret agent, and he’s disturbingly prescient.
This, of course, makes Tomorrow Never Dies sound significantly more interesting than it actually is. The movie is still a James Bond movie, and it is now painfully transparent in its satire, pushing Carver onto the screen with a paper-thin series of villainous doings which include a new software release filled with intentional bugs to drive future sales (ooh, you evil Bill Gates, you!) and threats to blackmail sitting presidents with video of sexual indiscretions (ooh, you evil Monica Lewinsky, you!). Tomorrow Never Dies is about as dimensional a take on ’90s media as The Net, but I give it credit for chutzpah nonetheless. If the film never quite fuses the James Bond universe with, say, Citizen Kane, at least Carver isn’t another SPECTRE megalomaniac trying to ransom the world. He’s topically interesting and systematically unique, and at the tail end of From A to Bond, that counts for something.
Tomorrow Never Dies sure moves like a Bond movie; it’s just not a terribly good one, largely because Pierce Brosnan isn’t a terribly good Bond. The film would fare far better without his glib portrayal, which – in its efforts to alienate absolutely no one – never pulls us into the story. There’s that particularly Brosnan-ish manner of delivering a quip – the long pause, the cut away for emphasis, the cut back, and the delivery of the line – which, at the quality of “They’ll print anything these days,” seems programmed to demonstrate that the Bond one-liner has seen better days. From the title on down, Tomorrow Never Dies can be accused of striving towards a notion of “Bondishness” as a simulation rather than an earned set of tropes; thus, the hysterical scream of a cameo from Vincent Schiavelli as expert marksman/torturer Dr. Kaufman, or the appearance by a now terrifyingly old Desmond Llewelyn as Q. Perhaps the best bit of Bond pastiche in Tomorrow Never Dies takes place in the end credits, where kd lang’s “Surrender” belts it to the rafters, and succeeds far more directly as a Bond theme than any of the other music in the picture. The song is cliché through and through, certainly, but lang knows who she’s singing to.
The best part of Tomorrow Never Dies remains Michelle Yeoh as Chinese agent Wai Lin. Her appearance comes just enough at the forefront of Hollywood’s emerging fascination with Hong Kong cinema to qualify as genuinely current. Yeoh is substantially more credible as a secret agent than Pierce himself, and if her (obligatory?) kung fu sequences aren’t a patch on her better work in Asian-language cinema, well, they’re still a damn sight better than anything this franchise has seen so far. If there is a problem with Yeoh’s casting, it’s only that she seems completely asexual, a fate frequently ascribed upon Asian characters in Western cinema. Wai Lin’s romantic beats with Bond lack tension – which might be beside the point anyway, when Bond and Lin are handcuffed together on the back of a motorcycle, facing down a helicopter in the streets of Saigon.
The cuffs/bike/chopper set piece is Tomorrow Never Dies’ signature sequence, and is as delightful now as it was then. It’s a movie-movie moment of the type that the ’90s, with its precise balance of emerging CGI and tried-and-true practical effects, did well. When the stunt team jumps Bond’s bike over the whirring blades of the hovering helicopter, it’s worth a held breath – a big screen moment of the kind the Bond films have been delivering for decades. Swallowed into the wake of Titanic, Tomorrow Never Dies never quite got the fanfare it deserved upon release, and if it’s now more dated than many other entries in the franchise, I’d almost call it a strength. I do, on rare occasion, miss the ’90s.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Tomorrow Never Dies is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on November 29. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.