3 / 10
Official trailer
A Promising Start
The first twenty minutes of Die Another Day are strong, maybe the best opening of Brosnan’s run. Bond surfs into North Korea on a huge wave, infiltrates a military base posing as a diamond smuggler and is betrayed. After a hovercraft chase through a minefield, he’s captured, and the title sequence shows him being tortured for fourteen months, beaten, half-drowned and stung by scorpions.
That’s a bold, dark idea for a Bond film.
Those twenty minutes make the rest of this film harder for me to forgive. They prove the people involved knew how to make a tough, serious Bond, and then they spent the rest of the running time making a cartoon. A 3 is what I give a film that shows me what it could have been and then throws it in the trash.
When he’s finally released in a prisoner exchange, he’s bearded, filthy and disowned by MI6, who think he’s talked. He escapes from their custody, walks into a luxury hotel in Hong Kong in his hospital gown and orders room service. For a few scenes, it looks like the series is heading somewhere new and serious. A Bond who’s been broken, suspected by his own side and cut loose to find the traitor alone is a really interesting idea, close to what Casino Royale would do so well four years later.
Then the film forgets all of it. Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors, directed, and within half an hour, the promising premise has collapsed into the silliest Bond since Moonraker.
For Writers
Bond’s torture and release in the opening promise a darker, more serious story. The film abandons that promise within half an hour, and never returns to it.
An opening makes a promise to the reader about what kind of story they’re about to read. Breaking that promise, especially by becoming sillier or shallower, feels like a betrayal.
If your opening sets up a serious premise, follow it through. The consequences of a strong beginning should shape everything that comes after it, long after the plot gets moving. Fourteen months of torture should leave marks on a man, and a reader who’s been shown that pain wants to see its cost. I cover this in more depth in my piece on opening pages that hook readers.
Diamonds in His Face
The villains are a problem. Colonel Moon, a North Korean officer Bond apparently kills in the opening, turns up alive, transformed by experimental gene therapy into Gustav Graves, a smug British billionaire played by Toby Stephens. His henchman, Zao, has diamonds embedded in his face after an explosion.
The gene-therapy premise is ridiculous, and Stephens, though energetic, plays Graves as a sneering brat. Zao, played by Rick Yune, looks like a fancy-dress costume with his diamond-studded face. Neither is remotely frightening, and the plot built around them is a tangle of conflict diamonds and satellites that makes no sense at all. A silly Bond villain can still be fun. I found these two tiresome, and every scene built around them made me miss the bearded prisoner from the opening.
Jinx
Halle Berry plays Jinx, an American agent, and her introduction is a deliberate homage to Ursula Andress in Dr. No: she walks out of the sea in an orange bikini with a knife at her hip. The scene nods to the fortieth anniversary, and it was a huge publicity moment.
Berry is charismatic and game, and the studio clearly hoped Jinx would be popular enough for a spin-off.
But the character is thin, mostly a series of one-liners and action poses, and her chemistry with Brosnan is weak. The spin-off was developed, and then MGM cancelled it in 2003. Berry deserved a better character.
The Invisible Car
The film’s most notorious gadget is an Aston Martin Vanquish that can turn invisible, using tiny cameras and screens to project its surroundings. John Cleese’s Q introduces it, and Bond uses it in the finale, driving it across a frozen lake in a chase with Zao in a heavily armed Jaguar.
The invisible car is where many fans gave up on the film, and it’s where I gave up too. It’s exactly the kind of absurd gadget the series had been trying to avoid since the eighties, and it turns Bond into a cartoon. The ice-lake chase is fun in places, but I can’t take a car chase seriously when one of the cars isn’t there.
The Ice Palace
Graves’s base is a huge, glittering ice palace in Iceland, a hotel carved from ice, full of blue lighting, frozen sculptures and glittering walls. The design is bold and beautiful, and a perfect sign of the film’s excess: gorgeous to look at, completely empty of meaning. The palace eventually melts, thanks to Graves’s giant space laser, a satellite called Icarus that focuses sunlight into a beam of destruction. The laser is a straight lift from Diamonds Are Forever, no less silly thirty years later.
The Tsunami
The film’s lowest point comes when Bond escapes the laser by building a makeshift parachute and kite-surfing on a colossal wave created by a collapsing glacier. The wave, the surfing and Bond himself are all computer-generated, and the effects look terrible, like a cheap video game.
It’s the moment the film gives up any pretense of danger. Bond stops being a man in peril and becomes a cartoon riding a digital wave, and the audience can feel it. It’s widely regarded as a low point for effects work in any major film of the era. I’d have cut the whole sequence before a frame of it was rendered. I laughed at it, and I doubt laughter was what anybody was after.
For Writers
Bond kite-surfs a CGI tidal wave, and all sense of danger vanishes. Spectacle without believable peril becomes cartoonish, however much money is thrown at it.
Readers need to believe, at every moment, that a character could be badly hurt. Once the action becomes impossible, the stakes disappear, however spectacular the scene.
Keep your action within the limits your story has established.
When a character does something that breaks those limits, the reader stops worrying about them, and a thriller without worry is just noise. The best action sequences in the Bond series, from the Meteora climb to the Casino Royale stairwell fight, are memorable because the audience believes a man could die in them. For a deeper treatment, try Action Writers’ Phrase Book.
Everything at Once
Die Another Day was made for the fortieth anniversary of the series, and it’s stuffed with references to earlier films: the bikini from Dr. No, the laser from Diamonds Are Forever, gadgets from past movies hidden in Q’s workshop and endless winks at the fans. On paper, it sounds fun. In practice, the film feels like a scrapbook with no story.
The action is loud, frantic, noisy and overedited, with slow motion, speed ramps and computer effects everywhere.
It’s exhausting, and it often looks cheap, despite the huge budget. Some shots are sped up, others slowed down, in the middle of the same fight, and the effect is less exciting than disorienting. Tamahori seems to have believed that more was always better.
For Writers
The film crams in references to forty years of Bond, and it feels like a scrapbook. Nostalgia replaces story, and the audience notices.
Callbacks to earlier works can delight fans, but they can’t carry a story on their own, however affectionate they are. Too many references make a book feel like a collection of tributes instead of a living narrative.
Use references sparingly, and only where they serve the story you’re telling now.
A single well-placed echo is worth more than a dozen winks. Fans notice the one that matters, and new readers aren’t left out of the joke. The story you’re telling today has to stand up without the old ones propping it up.
Madonna
Madonna sings the theme song, a jittery, heavily processed electronic track, and appears in a brief cameo as a fencing instructor.
The song divided audiences sharply. Some liked its modern, experimental sound, and many found it the worst Bond theme ever recorded. I’m in the second camp. It sounds to me like a demo nobody got around to finishing.
The fencing duel between Bond and Graves, which Madonna’s cameo introduces, is one of the film’s better scenes: a vicious, escalating sword fight through a London club that destroys half the building. It’s the kind of old-fashioned, physical action the rest of the film should have had more of.
Miranda Frost
Rosamund Pike, in her first major film role, plays Miranda Frost, an MI6 agent and Olympic fencing champion working undercover in Graves’s organization. She’s cool, clipped and glacial, and she turns out to be the traitor who betrayed Bond in North Korea.
Pike is good, and the character has potential, but the twist is signposted early and her fight with Jinx in the finale is a clumsy sword-and-knife brawl that goes nowhere. Pike went on to much better things, including Pride and Prejudice and Gone Girl, and this film barely hints at what she could do.
Brosnan Deserved Better
Pierce Brosnan is good in the opening scenes, bearded, gaunt and furious after his months in captivity, and his escape from MI6 custody shows real anger and pride.
For a moment, you glimpse the harder, more wounded Bond he might have played in a better film. That glimpse is what stings most for me. I’d have happily watched two hours of that man hunting the traitor, and the film hands him a surfboard and an invisible car.
He was a very good Bond, charming, physical and a little haunted, and GoldenEye showed what he could do with the right script. His era ended with this, and he reportedly would have liked to make one more. It’s a shame his last outing was one of his weakest.
Q’s Workshop
John Cleese takes over as Q, having played the old Q’s assistant in The World Is Not Enough, and he’s funny in his brief scene. The best part of it is the workshop itself, cluttered with gadgets from earlier films: the jetpack from Thunderball, the crocodile submarine from Octopussy and Rosa Klebb’s poisoned shoe, first seen in From Russia with Love.
The workshop is a lovely treat for fans, and a sign of the film’s problem. It’s full of memories of better films, and the film seems more interested in them than in its own story.
The End of Brosnan
Commercially, Die Another Day was a huge success, the highest-grossing Bond film up to that point. It was also Brosnan’s last. The producers decided the series needed a reset, and four years later, Casino Royale brought Daniel Craig and a harder, more grounded Bond.
In that light, Die Another Day looks like the end of an era, the moment the franchise’s excess finally went too far. The Bourne Identity had come out the same year, with a grounded, bruising style of action, and next to it, Bond suddenly looked old-fashioned and silly. The next film threw out almost everything this one did, and the series was better for it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
It starts with a bold, dark premise and then drowns it in gadgets, callbacks and computer effects. It shows how spectacle and nostalgia can overwhelm a story.
More rarely means better. Excess can bury whatever made a story worth telling.
When you revise, look for the elements that are there only to impress, and ask whether the story would be stronger without them.
Is Die Another Day (2002) worth watching?
My score for Die Another Day is a 3: a Bond film that opens with a bold, dark idea and then collapses into invisible cars, ice palaces, space lasers, a man with diamonds in his face and a computer-generated tidal wave.
It was a hit, and it still sits near the bottom of the series. The 3 is for the opening, the sword fight and Brosnan, who deserved a far better send-off. Everything else irritates me, because the film had a great idea in its hand and chose gadgets and winks over it.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Die Another Day, Box Office Mojo
- Die Another Day, Wikipedia
- Die Another Day (2002), IMDb
