GREEN LANTERN: In Soulless Day, In Dullest Night

Green Lantern (Extended Cut, 2011) – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Temuera Morrison, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jon Tenney, Jay O. Sanders, Clancy Brown, and Tim Robbins.

GREEN LANTERN is a major disappointment, but not because it’s awful. Rather, it’s a disappointment because it’s so darn mediocre. Despite the action-directing acumen of Martin Campbell and the earnestness of Ryan Reynolds, LANTERN is a dull, lifeless movie that fronts so much heart it doesn’t notice it’s completely lacking in any kind of soul.

Green Lantern has always been my favorite DC character (I was a Marvel kid, but because of Steve Englehart’s writing and the awesomeness of the Green Lantern Corps, GL was my way into the DC Universe), Martin Campbell directed one of the greatest action movies of all time (Casino Royale), and I’ve liked Reynolds going back to his Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place days. Stars seemed to be aligning for Green Lantern to deliver an amazing cinematic experience: there’s the steady hand of a veteran director, a rising star looking for a franchise, the state of CGI film making has never been better, and there is no hero in comics more tailor-made for CGI than Green Lantern. Add to that the fact that both Campbell and Reynolds were genuinely stoked to be working on the film, with Reynolds taking great pains to assure longtime GL fans that this would be a film that respected the comics, and I was firmly behind the attempt …

Until that first trailer came out, and there was the dorky suit and the crappy CGI and I decided to stop looking at trailers and reading reviews. What I said about the trailer was this: “I do leave convinced that Reynolds is going to be great in this movie and I’m sure the CGI renderings will be cleaned up between now and then. [...] What we ultimately get in the first GREEN LANTERN trailer is the reassurance that the movie won’t suck without the promise of it actually being any good.”

Look, sometimes you watch a trailer and they’re deceiving, and sometimes they are exactly right, and in this case, it was pretty spot-in. My take on the LANTERN trailer is much more right than wrong; after seeing the film, I’d say Reynolds is very good instead of being great but LANTERN is a movie hits that forgettable middle.

GREEN LANTERN is a bit unique in that it’s not the trailer that’s deceptive – it’s the poster. Most of the movie posters and the Blu-ray/DVD packaging emphasize the Corps, but stare at the cover for 15 minutes and that’s just about as much Corps as you get in this movie. Astoundingly Earthbound, GREEN LANTERN’s visual packaging does everything it can to play up the Corps and outer space, yet the film does everything it can to stay AWAY from OA and the Lanterns. It’s a horrendous choice and speaks to just how confused Campbell, Reynolds, and the rest of the production and marketing staff are over what they want to do with this film.

Take Hal Jordan. He’s endearing because he’s a kid who sees his dad get blown up. Then he’s a scoundrel because he grows up, sleeps around and doesn’t take his job seriously. Then he’s a brilliant pilot. Then he’s a dick who screws up a test and ruins the company. Then he’s a great uncle. Then he’s whisked across the universe. Then he runs away. Then it turns out he didn’t ruin the company, after all. Then he saves lives. Then he’s dressed down by the woman he loves for being a coward. Then he admits he’s afraid. Then he’s all heart. I mean, all heart. He’s so all heart that he runs back to Oa and makes an impassioned appeal to the Guardians, and then he’s so all heart that he goes back to earth and makes an impassioned plea to Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) to not be mean, and none of it – absolutely none of it – feels like anything more than a random set of attitudes. It’s not character development as much as it is character contrivance.

And here’s the thing – Reynolds is good at all of it. He’s been doing snark for years but he does a surprisingly decent job doing heart, too. The problem is they push it too far, turning him too earnest too fast so that it just rings false. It’s compounded by having Hal be such a convert to earnestness that Reynolds comes off in the back-half of the movie as naive, or even brainwashed.

There’s a naive quality to the whole movie, like we’re trying to shoehorn the contemporary Green Lantern concept into some old-fashioned throwback idea. The good guys are super gorgeous and the bad guys are super ugly. The whole opening with Hal as a kid, and Carol Ferris as a kid, and Hector Hammond as a kid … it just doesn’t work. Especially since the big payoff is that Hal watches his dad (a test pilot for Ferris Industries) crash his jet and then, as Hal runs to the scene of the accident, beating everyone else, the jet blows up just as daddy is climbing out of the cockpit. It’s unusually cruel and, more damningly, there’s no effective payoff for it. (We even get to watch it in flashback about 15 minutes after we watch it the first time.)

There’s no effective payoff for anything in GREEN LANTERN. Hal watches his dad blow-up and then tries to live up to his dad’s legacy by never being afraid of anything. Of course, as Carol (Blake Lively) tells him, his dad was afraid, he was just good at hiding it. When Hal admits he gets afraid, too, that frees him up to become a hero. It’s a nice transitional moment but Hal’s transformation to Mr. Earnest just sort of happens instead of feeling like a breakthrough.

Another issue with the film is that the CGI is for crap. Almost all of the events in space (the few times we actually go to space) look completely phony. The opening sequence of the film introduces us to Parallax (voiced by Clancy Brown) looks like a cut sequence from a Halo knock-off, not a major motion picture. When Hal goes to Oa, it doesn’t look much better. Tomar Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) is the same. So’s Oa. It all looks incredibly cheap, stilted, and phony, and these ridiculous uniforms the Corps wears smacks of someone on the movie end deciding they could do it without wondering if they should.

The CGI does work in regards to the ring effects. Parallax looks good, too, once he gets to Earth, menacing Coast City like some alien Cthulu, but it’s not enough.

I realize it is a bit hypocritical of me to complain that the film doesn’t spend enough time in space at the same time I’m arguing that the space CGI looks cheap, but as I mentioned, it’s a conflicted film.

Back to the lack of payoffs: little ever comes back around to be worth our time in the first place. We see Hal, Carol, and Hector as kids and then see them as adults, but there’s no emotional connection between them. Hector reveals that he’s always been in love with Carol but that Hal got in the way, but it’s just a line. I don’t ever feel that Hector really loves Carol; I feel like his fascination with Carol is more a reflection of his general unhappiness at how his life turned out.

Which, to be honest, seems to be a general dissatisfaction with his own ugliness and awkwardness and failure to be loved by daddy (Tim Robbins).

Which brings me to Carol. I’ll say this for Blake Lively, she’s the only actor in the film who wholly belongs in the film. While everyone else is busy playing superhero or politician or intergalactic soldier (the GLC don’t do any cop things in the film) or crazy-head-expanding scientist, Lively seems to realize this is an absurdist story about a little boy in a man’s body struggling to please his absent father. Carol is a daddy’s girl pilot-slash-businesswoman (with no daddy issues) who’s into Hal yet continually frustrated/disappointed by him. I say “into” and not “in love with” because Hal and Carol demonstrate all the chemistry of two really good looking people who decided one day that they were always going to be the two most good looking people in any room they were ever going to be in, so they might as well have attractive person sex together. After Hal tells her about Oa, she doesn’t ask him, “Are you stoned?” She just accepts that he’s now part of an intergalactic police force and then scolds him for running away, yet again. The alien space cops don’t matter – running away does.

Lively delivers the best line in the movie; when Hal-as-GL shows up after he’s saved her life, Carol recognizes him. “How did you …?” “I’ve seen you naked,” she answers, “you think I’m not going to recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones?” It’s a good line, but there’s not enough of them. Reynolds delivers a few early on when he’s in jerk/snark mode, but the film is so interested in getting him past that personification that there’s not enough of it.

Another big problem with LANTERN is that it doesn’t properly set-up its villains. We have a binary with Hal and Hector (the two little boys in adult bodies) but Hector’s not a real threat. He gets infected by a bit of Parallax’s yellow energy and gains the ability to hear other people’s thoughts. Then his skull starts expanding, turning him horrendously ugly. It’s so childish and old-fashioned and it doesn’t work because Hector’s not the real bad guy. He’s just the cinematic patsy to get Parallax to Earth.

Parallax as the villain doesn’t work, either, because the film spends loads of time telling us he’s the Big Bad and the biggest threat the Corps has ever faced, but then the Corps and the Guardians are all like, “You got this, Newbie,” when Hal comes and asks them for help. They decide they’ll make their stand someplace other than Earth and they’re completely willing to sacrifice Earth in the process.

No, really, that’s what they do.

Seriously, how does this make us like the Corps or the Guardians? Why would we want Hal to side up with these elitist space pigs?

I kept waiting for the Corps to realize the error of their ways and show up at Earth anyway to help take down Parallax, but apparently the film makers are more interested in showing that now that Hal admits he’s afraid of things he gets to be the Greatest Hero Ever. When Sinestro (Mark Strong), Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan), and Tomar Re show up it’s just to stop Hal from falling into the sun, not to actually help defeat Parallax. Kilowog crows about how he knows how to train Lanterns and Sinestro tosses some compliments Hal’s way at a meeting of all Lanterns (as I said, the Lanterns don’t police, they soldier with Oa as their base), but it all rings false since none of them were there to help. It’s like the cool kids in high school making a show of liking the uncool kid because they find out the uncool kid has a car and free access to booze.

The only time all film when I became emotionally invested was in the epilogue when Sinestro tries on the yellow power ring. As his costume turned yellow and the best villain in the DC Universe was born, that gave me chills, but only because of the fanboy in me. The film doesn’t make Sinestro a compelling character; it just makes him look like a small-headed weirdo.

On the whole, GREEN LANTERN is a truly frustrating movie. Neither good nor horrible, with some parts that work and others that don’t, with bad CGI, a truly horrific score by the usually solid James Newton Howard, LANTERN never gets up and running. It’s the kind of film that’s always searching for what it wants to be, and while Reynolds is game for all of it, he never embodies an actual person.

CASINO ROYALE (2006): The World’s Gonna Know You Died Scratching My Balls

Casino Royale (2006) – The 21st James Bond Film; The 1st Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Simon Abkarian, Jesper Christensen, and Judi Dench.

When I first watched CASINO ROYALE back in 2006, the first thing I said to someone about the movie was, “That’s the Bond movie I’ve always wanted to see.” Combining a global plot with an intimate character arc, CASINO reboots the Bond franchise by taking us back to the first days of James Bond (Daniel Craig) as 007. Largely gone are the gadgets, Moneypenny, Q, shaken-not-stirred, the signature theme music, the ridiculous henchman, the comedic ally, and the Hollywood-ized casting that came to the fore in the Pierce Brosnan films. In it’s place we have a straightforward action/espionage film with a villain whose interest lies in making money far more than ruling the world.

And it’s brilliant.

CASINO ROYALE is not only my favorite James Bond film, not only in the pantheon of all-time action movies, but it’s also flat out one of my favorite movies of all time.

Clocking in at almost two-and-a-half hours, CASINO ROYALE manages to tell a large story without losing sight of the character arc of its protagonist. This is the first Bond film with a Bond still finding himself as a man and an agent. While he’s still cool, he’s not unflappable. He makes mistakes but he doggedly keeps pushing forward. He is very much the “blunt instrument” that M accuses him of being while dressing him down for an act that causes the British government public discomfort.

The movie opens in black and white, as we see Bond waiting for Dryden, an MI6 section chief in his office. Dryden tells Bond he isn’t worried because Bond doesn’t have “double-O” status because you need two confirmed kills to gain it. Intercut with the Dryden-Bond showdown is an incredibly physical fight between Bond and Dryden’s contact in a bathroom. Bond kills the contact for kill #1 and then Dryden for kill #2. Smartly, the film moves from the assasination of Dryden, back to the final killshot of his contact, which becomes the famous “barrel sequence,” then we’re into the titles, and when we come out the other side, we see a computer screen telling us that he’s “007 status confirmed.” It’s smart filmmaking that rewards you for paying attention. This isn’t to suggest that CASINO ROYALE is Memento or Mulholland Drive, but it will reward you for paying attention to the craft that went into its production.

When we next see Bond, he’s in Madagascar and working with a much greener agent to capture a bomb maker. We get this huge parkour chase sequence (with the bomb maker being played by Sebastian Foucan, one of parkour’s founders) through the city that winds through a construction site and ends at the Nambutu foreign embassy. It’s a fantastic sequence that highlights the raw physicality of Craig’s Bond. His target runs over obstacles and squeezes through tiny holes while Bond runs through them, combining his power with his intelligence to continually close the distance on the target. At the embassy we see that his intelligence has limits; far from being invincible, Craig’s Bond makes plenty of mistakes, like he does at the end of the sequence when he kills the bomb maker inside embassy grounds and in plain sight of a security camera.

The Brosnan Bond films did a solid job of plugging the Bond franchise into the contemporary political scene and CASINO continues this trend. Bond’s killing of the bomb maker causes all sorts of grief for M (still played by the awesomely bad-ass Judi Dench) as his assassination makes the papers back home. M is furious at the duplicitous nature of the lawmakers who want results and purposely don’t ask about their methods, and furious at Bond for being so stupid.

The relationship between M and Bond is different than it’s ever been this time around. With Brosnan’s Bond, Dench’s M was also a bad-ass, but there was always the sense that, relative to their fields, they were both at the top of their profession. Dench’s M actually has to prove herself to Bond in GOLDENEYE but this becomes mutual respect as the series progresses. In CASINO, M is clearly the superior, and her admonishing of Bond is much more … I hesitate to use the word “maternal” because I think I want to use it just because M’s a woman and Bond’s a man, but her attitude towards Bond is one-part taskmaster, one-part shepherd. “They want your head,” she tells him sternly. “I’m considering giving it to them.”

“Next time I’ll shoot the camera first,” he tells her flatly. You can forget, I think, just how humorous CASINO can occasionally be if you haven’t watched it in a while because the film, as a whole, is so serious. Craig’s usually delivers his quips in a serious monotone, which helps to keep the film and character grounded.

M wants Bond to see “the big picture” in light of his actions in Madagascar but at the end of the film, after Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is dead and Bond coldly tells M he doesn’t need anymore time off because “the mission is over and the bitch is dead,” you can see a look on M’s face that says she’s a bit wary of what she’s just created.

CASINO plays with your expectations of what a Bond movie “should be” a bit here and there, both for comedic effect and to highlight how this film is going in a new direction. When Bond first meets Vesper, she tells him, “I’m the money” and he dryly replies that she’s “worth every penny of it.” Later, when a bartender asks him if he wants his martini “shaken or stirred,” Bond angrily snaps back, “Does it look like I give a damn?”

The main storyline in CASINO involves Bond playing in a high stakes poker game that bad guy Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) puts on to recover the money he lost when Bond stopped his agent from blowing up a jet in Miami. Le Chiffre short sells stocks and then hires people to do bad things to profit from rebuying the stock at a much lower price. When Bond stops the bomb, the shares of the jet’s manufacturer don’t fall, and Le Chiffre ends up being out $100 million. Give or take. The poker game is his chance to make his money back.

The problem with his scheme is that he’s investing other people’s money, and that’s where the real problem for him lies. He takes money from international terrorists and invests it and they’re understandably torqued when Le Chiffre’s “low risk” investing strategies cost them their money. A bunch of African terrorists show up in Montenegro to rough him up a bit and Bond ends up killing them when they recognize him as a threat. The fight between the men and Bond (with Vesper caught in the middle) is another rough, physical, brutal fight down a stairwell inside the casino. Bond kills both terrorists but the fight takes his toll on him. Where a previous Bond might be bothered most by the blood on his clothes, Craig’s Bond clearly needs time to come down from what he’s just done. Guzzling liquor as he undresses back in his room, Bond needs time to compose himself before returning to the table to continue the game.

Moving parallel to the poker game plot is Bond’s developing relationship with Vesper, an agent from the Treasury who’s been assigned to the mission. She’s authorized $10 million to go into Bond’s account for the poker game buy-in and she can authorize $5 million more if she deems it a wise investment. Craig and Eva Green have fantastic chemistry. The dinner scene aboard a high-speed luxury train is one of the best back-and-forths in the franchise. There’s a mutual attraction between them but Lynd makes a point to tell Bond that this will be a business trip. After they pop-psychoanalyze each other, Lynd asks him, “How was your lamb?”

“Skewered,” he answers with a droll smile.

Vesper ends up betraying Bond in the end. She’s a double agent, working for the organization that employs Le Chiffre. Her boyfriend was held hostage by the group and they coerced her into working for them to get the money. What’s nice is that because Lynd isn’t a professional at all of this, her tears are real when she sees Bond kill the two African terrorists. The filmmakers have managed to make all of her actions consistent with both her growing attraction to Bond and her ultimate betrayal. It’s a quiet but powerful performance by Green, and the relationship between Vesper and Bond grows naturally through the film so you feel her betrayal all the more when it comes (even if you know it’s probably coming).

At the helm for the first time since GOLDENEYE is Martin Campbell and once again he delivers stellar work. It’s top notch directing from start to finish from Campbell.

David Arnold is back to score his fourth straight Bond movie and once again he’s fantastic, too. He’s hamstrung a bit by the decision to not use the classic Bond theme until the end credits, but he co-wrote the title song, “You Know My Name” with Chris Cornell and uses an orchestrated version of the song throughout the film to serve as a substitute theme for Bond. It works extremely well and sounds reminiscent enough of the classic Bond theme that, unlike GOLDENEYE, you’re not constantly waiting for it to show up. It’s a great rock song, too, and the opening titles (designed by Daniel Kleinman) are spectacular. I love the colorful brightness of the sequence, which stand in contrast to the film’s muted (though well-lit) palette. Both song and title sequence are among the best in the franchise’s history.

CASINO ROYALE is a triumph from start to finish.

GOLDENEYE: Someday You’ll Have to Make Good On Your Innuendos

GoldenEye (1995) – The 17th James Bond Film; The 1st (of 4) Pierce Brosnan Films – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco, Famke Janssen, Alan Cumming, Judi Dench, Joe Don Baker, Robbie Coltrane, and Desmond Llewelyn.

M: You don’t like me, Bond. You don’t like my methods. You think I’m an accountant, a bean counter more interested in my numbers than your instincts.

Bond: The thought had occurred to me.

M: Good. Because I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though lost on me, obviously appealed to that young girl I sent out to evaluate you.

Bond: Point taken.

M: Not quite, 007. If you think I don’t have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong. I’ve no compunction about sending you to your death. But I won’t do it on a whim. Even with your cavalier attitude towards life. I want you to find GoldenEye, find out who took it and what they plan to do with it, and stop it. And if you should come across Ourumov, guilty or not, I don’t want you running off on some vendetta. Avenging Alec Trevelyan will not bring him back.

Bond: You didn’t get him killed.

M: Neither did you. Don’t make it personal.

Bond: Yes, ma’am. [turns to leave]

M: Bond. [Bond stop and turns to her] Come back alive.

(Taken from Wikiquote’s GoldenEye page.)

LICENSE TO KILL addressed fears that James Bond was ready to be put out to pasture by jamming him into a period-piece revenge flick. GOLDENEYE addresses the same concern head-on. The verbal sparring session between Bond and M quoted above is played brilliantly by Judi Dench and Pierce Brosnan, and it clearly lays out their positions – we have the older woman with the new age ideals on espionage versus the younger man with the previous age’s belief system. She doesn’t like him because he’s a reminder of what used to be and he doesn’t like her because she’s a reminder of what’s coming. The exchange nicely sets up who James Bond is in terms of the picture we’re watching.

The sequence does so much more, too, because it addresses that idea floating around out here in the real world that James Bond is no longer relevant in a post-Cold War world, and then spends the next 90 minutes proving that he’s as important as ever.

GOLDENEYE is a very good movie and it’s the first Bond film since THE SPY WHO LOVED ME that crackles with the kind of professional confidence that comes from having the right actor and the right director and the right script. Director Martin Campbell brings an assured hand to the helm that’s been lacking. Directors John Glen, Lewis Gilbert, and Guy Hamilton were all completely competent, but they all feel like house directors – they shoot competent movies in the preferred style and stay out of the way. It’s like they’re all shooting from the same playbook, which was probably the case. Obviously, they were all doing what the producers wanted because they all kept getting asked back, but Campbell is clearly a level or two above their skill set.

Unlike his predecessors, Campbell knows where to put his camera for maximum effect. A camera isn’t just placed HERE because it allows us to see everything important in this scene, but because this is the best place to give that next scene its biggest possible impact. I don’t mean to suggest that Campbell is channeling Sam Raimi’s Quick and the Dead style, either. There’s a term used to describe some players in baseball – “professional hitter.” The term means you’re not a superstar but you’re going to do what you’re supposed to based on the pitch and the situation. You’re not going to try to pull the outside pitch with a runner on first because that’s going to lead to a double play. You might do that with 2 strikes on you and a runner on 2nd or 3rd with less than 2 outs because that’s going to advance the runner.

That’s what Campbell is when it comes to directing – a professional. His camera is always in the right place. If a scene needs a simple shot, he gives it a simple shot. If a scene will be helped by putting a camera inside a Russian tank for a 2-second shot of Bond ducking inside the tank, then Campbell puts a camera there and gets that shot, too.

Campbell knows how to mix his close-ups and long-shots to make action scenes really pop. Shooting the tank chase scene and the one-on-one fisticuffs between 007 and 006 require different techniques and Campbell delivers on both accounts. The tank chase constantly shifts from close to long, from facial shots to spinning wheels, while constantly letting you feel the power at play and appreciate the coolness of it all.

It’s a fantastic chase sequence – imaginative and fun and aided by a rare GOLDENEYE appearance of the Bond theme, it’s the moment where Pierce Brosnan really becomes James Bond as it shows off Bond’s ability to improvise on the run and never lose his cool.

And that’s really what makes GOLDENEYE an exciting movie to watch – Brosnan and the producers clearly know who they want this Bond to be and they go out and make a film around that idea of this alleged relic, live-in-the-moment, professional spy. They parallel Bond not so much with 006 but with General Ourumov, a Russian General who was clearly more happy being a Soviet General. He has a scene similar to Bond’s frank discussion with M but where Bond’s decision is to put the job first, Ourumov puts himself first and sides with 006 to steal the GoldenEye weapon that Russia has developed.

Sean Bean plays 006/Alec Trevelyan/Janus, and he’s got a semi-complicated backstory that’s fitting for this post-Cold War era. His parents were among the Cossacks that fought with the Nazis during World War 2, then blah blah blah. It’s nice of them to include an actual motivation but really what it comes down to is Bond’s condemnation of Alec: “A worldwide financial meltdown, all so mad little Alec can settle a score with the world 50 years on.”

“Please,” Alec fires back, “spare me the Freud. I might as well ask if all those vodka martinis silence the screams of the men you’ve killed. Or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women … for all the dead ones you failed to protect.”

I think GOLDENEYE would have worked better if the producers built around the 006/007 conflict a bit more, but it pulls the 006 is Dead!-Gotcha!-006 is the Real Bad Buy! card instead. Bean and Brosnan make good enemies and when they’re on screen together GOLDENEYE works better than when they’re not, but the film never really develops Alec’s character, preferring to turn him into the kind of villain that forces himself on a woman because he’s mad that she’s Bond’s girl.

They do the sugar and spice routine with the women but I didn’t find either of them overly memorable in a good way. Natalya (Izabella Scorupco) is the doe-eyed computer programmer who eventually melts for Bond and Xenia (Famke Janssen) kills people by squeezing them to death with her knees. I suppose the idea is that it’s a new day and age so we need a woman who’s sexually aggressive and likes to gun people down (her machine gun rampage is similar to Chris Walken’s gundown back in A VIEW TO A KILL), but it doesn’t totally work for me.

Joe Don Baker is back but this time around he’s playing a CIA agent and not an arms dealer. He’s here to provide some comic relief and he delivers a few chuckles without becoming overbearing. His line to Bond about him being “just another stiff-assed Brit” and the way he’s totally willing to help but nonetheless plays the “I’m not here” game works because the filmmakers don’t oversell it.

The playfulness with Moneypenny is back in full force although with a contemporary twist. As she and Bond engage in their usual banter, Moneypenny tells him, “Someday you’ll have to make good on your innuendos” a few lines after telling Bond that his behavior could qualify as sexual harrasment. It’s another subtle, but effective indication that it’s a new day and age and while we can’t really call Moneypenny’s behavior aggressive, it’s certainly a sign that she knows where all the lines are drawn and is letting Bond know she knows how to navigate them.

The Eric Serra score is atrocious, and apparently the producers knew it, too, because they brought someone else in to re-score the tank-chase scene. The Tina Turner theme song (written by the half of U2 you know) is really pretty good and the opening titles are some of the best in a long time.

As for Brosnan, he’s very good here, managing to be both confident in his own abilities and yet always aware that he’s standing on a continually shifting geopolitical ground.

Taken as a whole, GOLDENEYE is a very good action movie with plenty of innovate action sequences (the opening bungee jump is still cool even if we’ve all realized that bungee jumping isn’t) and a cool-under-pressure Bond. Instead of feeling like a relic, GOLDENEYE feels confident and assured. Where some of the recent Bond movies have felt like they were trying to fit into their contemporary cinematic landscape, GOLDENEYE simply feels like they set out to make a good movie that’s aware of the political landscape but not beholden to whatever was popular in the theaters the year before.