lapis molari said:
TM2YC said:
...a mini-version of the film re-dubbed with the N64 game soundFX:
I love it. The N64 game sounds fits this '90s Bond! This is the first time I enjoy Serra's score in Goldeneye (I really don't like his score in the film).
The car chase music is bad but otherwise I'm a fan of the film and game music. I recently discovered these two fans marathoning Bond too, they just posted their GodenEye review (they are slightly behind my schedule). At 18.00 they show the car chase scene rescored with David Arnold and it works pretty well. Their reviews are super nitpicky, in a good way.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
I remembered
'Tomorrow Never Dies' as pretty good but a bit lackluster after
'GoldenEye', so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it this time. The pre-title sequence is a stone-cold classic. M and a bunch of government officials are nervously watching over satellite as Bond spies on a terrorist arms deal. An arrogant old Admiral (played by
Judi Dench's 'As Time Goes By' sitcom co-star
Geoffrey Palmer) wants to just nuke the site but Bond is refusing to leave and he rounds on M
"What the hell is he doing!?!" and she snaps back
"His Job". It's such a badass moment for the character, Bond has clearly earned the respect of the new M. Then 007 guns everyone down, commandeers a jet, blows everything else up with missiles, takes off just in time to rocket out of a giant fireball, has a dogfight while being strangled, drops some one-liners and flies off. Awesome!
The scene where Bond rescues himself using his new tricked-out, remote-controlled BMW is brilliantly shot and edited. It's full of danger and surprises and
Pierce Brosnan plays it like a big kid having fun with his new toy. The problem is that that scene and the cold-opening are never really topped in the 2nd half, including at the end. The final action-sequence takes place aboard a hi-tech stealth-boat but the interior set makes it look like a big metal shed (which I imagine it was). Despite Brosnan and
Michelle Yeoh running around generally kicking ass (including her duel wielding MP5s!), it really lacks pizazz. Especially when you compare it to the kind of imaginative and outlandish interior sets that
Ken Adams created for the
Roger Moore films. It was a masterstroke to cast Hong Kong action-star star Yeoh as 007's Chinese counterpart, she's certainly no damsel-in-distress during the fight scenes. She shares a fun moment with Brosnan when the familiar Q gadget scene is flipped to show Bond discovering all her spy tech.
Jonathan Pryce chews-the-scenery as villain Elliot Carver, a media mogul trying to trick China and the UK into a war. The character is inspired by real-life dubious media players
Rupert Murdoch and
Robert Maxwell (a line by M makes a close reference to the latter). CIA operative Jack Wade returns (but hasn't appeared in a film since) to aid Bond in doing a HALO-jump into Chinese territory. There is a lot of talk about the jumps in
'Mission: Impossible - Fallout' and 2014's
'Godzilla' but is Bond the franchise that did it first?
David Arnold's excellent score sounds like an updated yet classic
John Barry style job. The decent song he had written for the titles by
K.D. Lang called
'Surrender' (and woven it in to the orchestrations) was dropped in favour of
Sheryl Crow's weak theme song and the dodgy 90s CGI titles that accompany it haven't aged well. I remember being very disappointed when I saw the film in '97 because I was a huge
'Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman' fan and
Teri Hatcher isn't in the film very long (despite being all over the marketing). Watching it now when that TV show has faded from the memory, she is in the film just the right amount and makes a real impact in the role. This is the first film where Bond's iconic Walther PPK is replaced with the big, chunky and ugly new P99. The reason Q-branch gave him the gun in
'Dr. No' is because it was compact, slim and easy to conceal... no chance with the P99! Thankfully 007 got it back in the
Daniel Craig era. Overall, I'd now rank this in the top tier of the franchise, even if some of the energy dips in the last act. In future when I want to watch a Brosnan film, I might just reach for this one over 'GoldenEye'.
Moby's "Re-Version" of the Bond theme hit the UK top-10 in the weeks before the film came out. I bought it on cassette single and distinctly remember listening to it on a loop on my Walkman on the drive down see my relatives at Christmas. One of the all-time best versions of the theme IMO: