7 / 10
Official trailer
A Villain Who Aged Well
Tomorrow Never Dies has a villain who looked silly in 1997 and looks alarming now.
Elliot Carver is a media mogul who owns newspapers, television channels and satellite networks around the world. He plans to start a war between Britain and China so that his news empire can cover it exclusively, and so that a friendly new Chinese government will give him broadcasting rights to a billion people. It was a joke about Rupert Murdoch then. It feels closer to the truth every year.
Roger Spottiswoode directed it, the follow-up to GoldenEye, and it came out in December 1997, the same weekend as Titanic, and still made a great deal of money. I give it a 7. It’s a fast, loud, entertaining Bond with two great action sequences, a first-rate co-lead in Michelle Yeoh and a script that was plainly being written while the cameras rolled.
It’s also the film where Pierce Brosnan’s Bond settled into its groove, for better and worse: confident, charming, efficient and rarely surprising. GoldenEye had to prove that Bond still mattered after the Cold War. Tomorrow Never Dies simply had to be a good time, and for most of its running time it is.
I have a soft spot for this one. It’s exactly the kind of Bond I want when I’m in the mood for noise, gadgets and a villain who talks too much, and Michelle Yeoh makes it better in every scene she’s in. My gripe is the script, which runs out of ideas halfway through and hides the gap behind explosions.
The Plot
A British warship, HMS Devonshire, is sailing in international waters off the coast of China when its navigation system is secretly tampered with, sending it into Chinese waters.
It’s sunk by a stealth ship with a drill-like torpedo, and the survivors are machine-gunned in the water. Chinese jets appear to have attacked a British ship. Britain sends its fleet.
Carver staged the attack. He used a stolen military GPS encoder to send the ship off course and his own stealth boat to sink it. His newspapers report the sinking before anyone else knows it has happened. M, suspicious of the timing, sends Bond to Hamburg to investigate Carver, who is holding a party to launch his new satellite news network.
The setup is clever and timely, and the opening act, with the war room in London counting down to conflict while Bond investigates, has real tension. The ticking clock of two nuclear powers edging toward war gives the film a sense of urgency that many Bond plots lack, and a newspaper owner inventing the whole crisis is a clever twist.
Elliot Carver
Jonathan Pryce plays Carver as a smug, witty, faintly ridiculous megalomaniac who quotes his own headlines and considers himself an artist of the news. He writes the stories before the events happen, and his dream is to be the first media mogul in history to control the news by manufacturing it.
Pryce is clearly having fun, and some of his lines are very funny. I just wish he’d played it about twenty percent quieter. He’s so broad that Carver never feels dangerous, and I think that’s the film’s biggest missed chance, because the idea is scarier than the man playing it. His henchman Stamper, a huge blond German played by Götz Otto, provides the physical threat. Carver provides the speeches.
Watching it now, Carver’s scheme is the most interesting idea in any Brosnan Bond. A man who owns the news and uses it to start wars, rewrite reality and gain power over governments doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it did in the age of fax machines. The film’s satire is broad, and its target is real, and it’s the part of the film that has improved with age.
For Writers
Carver writes the headline before the event happens. His villainy is built on controlling the story as well as the weapons.
When you write a villain, a scheme built on information or perception can feel more modern and more frightening than one built on force.
Give your antagonist control over what other characters believe is true, and let the hero’s first challenge be proving what really happened. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on why villain motivations fall apart.
Paris Carver
In Hamburg, Bond meets Carver’s wife, Paris, a former lover of his, played by Teri Hatcher. Their brief reunion stirs up an old romance, and Carver, realizing she knew Bond, has her killed. It’s the film’s attempt at an emotional thread, a woman Bond might have loved, killed because of him.
It doesn’t really work. Hatcher has little to do, and the film sketches the relationship too quickly to carry much weight. The production reportedly had tensions between Hatcher and Brosnan, and the scenes never quite spark. One of the film’s most memorable villain scenes follows her death, when Carver’s assassin, Dr. Kaufman, played by Vincent Schiavelli, waits for Bond in her hotel room, discussing his skills as a professor of forensic medicine.
The Car Park
The first great action sequence takes place in a multi-storey car park in Hamburg. Bond’s new BMW is fitted with a remote control, operated from his mobile phone, and he drives it from the back seat, lying down, while Carver’s men chase and shoot at it. It’s funny, inventive and brilliantly staged.
The car has machine guns, rockets, tear gas and tyres that reinflate themselves. Bond drives it down the ramps, through a barrier and finally off the roof, sending it crashing into a car rental shop across the street. It’s pure gadget fun, the kind of thing the series does better than any other, and it’s among the best car chases of the Brosnan era.
That car park sequence is the most fun I have in the whole movie. Bond steering a BMW from the back seat with his phone is silly on paper, and on screen it’s pure delight, the kind of gadget gag I wish the series still had the nerve to try.
It’s also a sharp piece of product placement, and the film is full of it. BMW, Ericsson, Omega and several others paid for their products to appear, and the film sometimes feels like a very expensive commercial. The car park chase is so good that nobody minds.
Wai Lin
Michelle Yeoh plays Wai Lin, an agent of Chinese intelligence who is investigating Carver at the same time as Bond. They meet at Carver’s party, clash, and end up working together, and she’s the best thing in the film. She arrives as a supposed journalist, and within minutes it’s clear she’s more than a match for everyone in the room, including Bond.
Yeoh was already a major action star in Hong Kong, and she did most of her own stunts. Wai Lin is Bond’s equal in every way: a better fighter, a more resourceful agent and completely unimpressed by his charm. The film gives Wai Lin her own action scenes, including a fight in a bicycle shop where she takes on a room full of Carver’s men alone.
It was a significant step for the series. Bond had worked with capable women before, but rarely one presented so clearly as his partner and not as his conquest. Yeoh has said she wanted Wai Lin to be a match for Bond, and she is.
Yeoh is the reason this sits above the average Brosnan outing for me. She’s quicker, tougher and funnier than Bond in half her scenes, and I’d have happily traded the whole Paris subplot for ten more minutes of her.
For Writers
Wai Lin is Bond’s equal, a better fighter and completely unimpressed by him. The film gains a new energy the moment she arrives.
Give your hero a partner who is better than them at something important, and who isn’t impressed by their usual charm. Let the respect be earned on both sides. As a partner for your hero, a sidekick who admires them adds little. A partner who challenges and matches them adds friction and fresh possibilities.
The Motorbike Chase
The best action sequence in the film is a motorbike chase through the streets of Saigon, filmed in Bangkok, with Bond and Wai Lin handcuffed together on a single motorbike. They’re pursued by a helicopter and Carver’s men, and they have to cooperate to drive, steer and fight at the same time, arguing all the way.
The action choreography is brilliant: they swap positions on the moving bike, ride across rooftops and through a market, and escape the helicopter by driving under it. The comedy of the handcuffs, and neither of them willing to let the other be in charge, makes it the most purely enjoyable sequence in the film. That’s a dangerous piece of stunt work too, filmed on real streets with real vehicles.
It also works because by now the audience likes both characters. The chase is exciting because it’s a scene about two stubborn people learning to work together, under pressure, at eighty miles an hour. By the time they escape, they’ve become a team, and the rest of the film depends on that.
For Writers
Handcuffing the two leads together turns a chase into a character scene. They must cooperate, and neither wants to let the other lead.
Pick your next action scene and add one physical limitation that forces two characters to work together. Let their personalities show in how they cope with it. For a deeper treatment, try Action Writers’ Phrase Book.
In an action sequence, adding a physical constraint that forces characters to interact can make it funnier and more revealing.
The HALO Jump and the Stealth Ship
Before the chase, Bond makes a high-altitude, low-opening parachute jump into the South China Sea to reach the wreck of the Devonshire, and it’s an impressive sequence, filmed with real skydivers dropping from a great height before opening their parachutes near the water. It’s the kind of practical, dangerous stunt the Bond films have always done better than their rivals, and it looks spectacular.
The final act takes place on Carver’s stealth ship, where he plans to launch a missile at Beijing to trigger the war, and it loses me. It’s a standard Bond finale, gunfire and explosions that could have come from any entry in the series, and after the car park and the motorbike it feels like the filmmakers ran out of invention. Carver meets a fitting end, shredded by his own sea drill, and Bond gets a good line about giving the people what they want.
The Troubled Script
The film was made under heavy pressure. The release date was fixed before the script was finished, and the writers were reportedly still rewriting scenes during filming. Several drafts were discarded, and some scenes were shot without a finished ending. Brosnan and others have spoken about the stress of filming scenes whose place in the story was still being decided.
It shows. The first half, with Carver’s scheme, Paris and the car park, is tighter and more interesting. The second half, once Wai Lin takes center stage, becomes a series of action scenes with less connecting story. It’s still very entertaining. That’s a reminder of how much a Bond film can get by on its action set pieces when the story runs thin.
The Music
David Arnold wrote the score, his first of five for the series. It’s excellent: modern, driving and full of affectionate nods to John Barry’s classic Bond sound. Arnold was a huge Barry fan, and his music helped the Brosnan films feel like proper Bond films.
Sheryl Crow sings the title song. It’s fine. The better song, Surrender, sung by k.d. lang over the end credits, was originally written as the title song and was replaced. Many fans prefer it, and its melody runs through Arnold’s score, so the film’s real theme is heard even though its title song is someone else’s.
Where Tomorrow Never Dies Falls Short
Where it falls short is the script’s second half, Carver’s broadness and a generic finale. Paris is underwritten, the clever satire of media power gets lost in the action, and the script rarely challenges Brosnan, who is charming as always. It does everything competently and little exceptionally, and in a series with twenty-five films, competence alone isn’t quite enough to stand out.
On the other side: the car park, the motorbike chase, Michelle Yeoh and a villain whose scheme has aged into something unsettling. It gets a 7, a fun, fast Bond, and better than its reputation. It’s often overlooked between GoldenEye and the more ambitious films that followed, and it deserves another look, especially for its villain’s startlingly modern ambitions.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Tomorrow Never Dies gives its villain a scheme about information. Carver manufactures the news, and the film’s best ideas come from asking what a man who owns the story could do with it.
For a thriller, the villain’s plan defines the story’s stakes. A timely plan gives your story a relevance that outlasts its action scenes.
Look at the power structures around you today, and build your antagonist’s plan from one of them. Push it one step further than reality, and then make the reader believe it.
The Verdict on Tomorrow Never Dies
Yes, watch it. It’s a 7 because I have a great time with the car park, the motorbike chase and every minute Michelle Yeoh is on screen, and it stops short of an 8 because the second half runs on stunts and a script nobody finished. Carver’s scheme feels more relevant now than when the film came out, and I wish Pryce had played him with enough menace to match it.
