Bond Films: Tomorrow Never Dies

I don't know how, but I seem to have overlooked writing about Tomorrow Never Lies. Rest assured, readers, I've been watching the Bond films in order of release. Somehow, this essay hadn't made it to public yet.

Tomorrow Never Dies is probably the Brosnan Bond I think of most often; perhaps its ubiquity on cable, or its straightforward plot. Jonathan Pryce plays a villainous mashup of Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs, using a stolen satellite kerjigger to orchestrate violations of Chinese sovereignty and lead o war between the West and China. Co-starring Michelle Yeoh as the sort-of girl, sort-of rival, Tomorrow Never Dies is in many ways a rehash of The Spy Who Loved Me - not a bad Bond to rehash, and with just enough gloss to make it interesting.

The basic plot of Tomorrow Never Dies is: the villain has gotten hold of some satellite thing that can give false information to ships hat rely on satellites for positioning. He sends a British warship into Chinese waters, attacks wih his stealth ship and drill-torpedo, and then steals a nuclear weapon. Bond is dispatched to investigate the villain, who owns a news conglomerate with surprisingly prescient headlines (the original title was, "Tomorrow Never Lies"). Bond learns of the orbital duplicity and seeks to recover the device used to fake out the satellites, and along the way meets the girl, who is a Chinese agent working towards the same ends. For most of the film, they compete to outwit the villain and count coup for the respective governments, until they later run into each other diving the lost British ship, where they are waylaid by the villain's henchmen, but of course escape. After that, they are able to determine where the villain's stealth ship must be, but before they can infiltrate it they are captured and must escape by fast-roping down the Petronas towers and then running an amazing stunt-escape on a motorcycle - all while handcuffed to each other. They do infiltrate the ship, all while China and the UK are on the brink of war, and destroy it after the usual endgame shenanigans.

Tomorrow Never Dies has one of the better Bond villains, a mega-wealthy industrialist along the lines of Auric Goldfinger or Hugo Drax. It also continues the Brosnan Bond's move into more modernized fight sequences, and genuinely exciting stunts. It executes well on the details. However, I couldn't help feeling underwhelmed by the plot, and while I admit this might be because this is the twenty-first or so Bond film I've watched, I think it's also a sign of the franchise's long-term creative slump. Bond works in a formula, but a little flash only goes so far.

Tomorrow Never Dies is a good Bond film. It makes more sense than the ones that follow, and does what it does well. It just doesn't do much that is new.