BEFORE: I've got a slight cold, so staying up this morning might be a challenge - but I went to a beer dinner last night that had some spicy food, so I'm hoping to shake it that way. Once the beer wears off, I should be able to stay up for a while. This is Brosnan's second outing as Bond (out of 4) and the support staff carries over from the last film as well.
THE PLOT: James Bond heads to stop a media mogul's plan to induce war between China and the UK in order to obtain exclusive global media coverage.
AFTER: This week's Entertainment Weekly had an article about the negative effects of binge-watching - the method by which some people are now watching entire seasons of television all at once. There are no cliff-hangers this way, or week-to-week suspenseful moments - and on a larger scale, I'm suffering from my binge-watching of the Bond series. Ian Fleming only wrote a few Bond books, and once those had been all adapted into films, screenwriters wrote original stories, but ones that needed to feel like they were part of the Bond universe.
Which means that they cribbed bits and pieces from some of the books, and some of the previous films. This meant more than one Bond villain kept a pet shark, and in the case of "Tomorrow Never Dies", there are at least three villains who hijack naval vessels to gain nuclear missiles. Most prominently this was done in "The Spy Who Loved Me", but it's sort of a common theme. At least in tonight's film there was a new motivation - instead of holding the world hostage and demanding ransom, the villain wants to start a war so his news empire can report on it. The obvious reference is to William Randolph Hearst kickstarting the Spanish-American War, but it's not too hard to see a connection to how CNN and FoxNews benefit from the excitement of wartime reporting.
It's an interesting idea, only it's hard to imagine someone in the media business, Robert Murdoch for example, getting into the military weapons game. It needs to happen here to make him a threat to world peace, but I just didn't find it that believable.
LOCATIONS: Russia, Hamburg, Saigon
VILLAINS: Elliot Carver, Henry Gupta, Stamper
BABES: Paris Carver, Wai Lin
ALLIES: M, Q, Moneypenny, Jack Wade
PASTIMES: Skydiving (HALO jump)
CARS: BMW 750iL, BMW Cruiser R1200 C motorbike
GADGETS: Remote-control car
THEME: "Tomorrow Never Dies" by Sheryl Crow
Also starring Judi Dench, Joe Don Baker, Desmond Llewelyn, Samantha Bond (all four carrying over from "Goldeneye"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "Hysteria"), Teri Hatcher, Michelle Yeoh (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 2"), Ricky Jay (last seen in "The Great Buck Howard"), with cameos from Vincent Schiavelli (last seen in "Lord of Illusions"), Gerard Butler (last seen in "Mrs. Brown").
RATING: 5 out of 10 headlines
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