- Looking back, it's not immediately apparent why GoldenEye, the seventeenth entry in the practically infinite James Bond film pantheon, is so widely revered by Bond fans of both the casual and obsessive varieties today. Video game tie-ins aside, I think the key to understanding this phenomenon is simply to recognize that things could have been, and sometimes were, far, far worse. There is never any question that this film absolutely pales in comparison to any of the canon Sean Connery films, with the possible exception of Diamonds are Forever. It is also less impressive than one or two of Roger Moore's efforts, which starts to seem like a rather low bar indeed. Still, GoldenEye captures the spirit of Bond better than most of his adventures from the preceding fifteen years and probably seemed like quite the tasty morsel to legions of starving spy action junkies back in 1995.
- As Bond, Pierce Brosnan is the closest the series has yet come to recapturing Sean Connery's good looks and physicality, even if his interpretation of Bond distinctly lacks most of the original version's charisma. Nonetheless, he is a perfectly adequate hero for this tale of a presumed dead agent named Trevelyan (Sean Bean), a sex assassin possessing the perfectly natural name of Onatopp (Famke Janssen), and various Russians of a variety that includes maniacally evil (Gottfried John), nerdily evil (Alan Cumming), sleazily evil (Robbie Coltrane), and, in an odd departure, rather nice (Natalya Simonova). Of these, the most convincing are John's ugly general and Simonova's noble scientist, the latter of whom is easily one of the most intelligent Bond girls ever to grace the screen. Oh, and it would be remiss of me not to mention that some of the recurring characters have new faces, like Dame Judi Dench's appropriately sour "M" and Samantha Bond's lackluster Miss Moneypenny. Thankfully, Desmond Llewelyn reprises his role as the weaponsmith "Q," providing the audience a modicum of continuity with previous installments.
- Although the film gets off to an exciting and explosive pre-credits (and pre-collapse of the Soviet Union) start, it unfortunately allows the momentum to slowly drain away as Bond and his hayseed CIA counterpart (Joe Don Baker) conduct a series of rather mundane investigations into EM pulses, stolen helicopters, and spy satellites. Sure, there's the occasional encounter with Onatopp, who is entertaining enough albeit rather one-note even by Bond villain standards, and a climactic battle on Arecibo Observatory that is sure to please any astronomers in the audience, but the film's hidden fortresses, exploding pens, and maniacal badguys aren't anything a Bond fan hasn't seen a dozen times before. I suppose one should congratulate the writers for finding a way to make the Russians the enemies even after democracy had officially arrived in the former Soviet Union. For my part, I'd rather just watch the old Bond films where the villains were just as Russian but their movies were better directed, better plotted, better scored, and, of course, more original.
