his review of Die Another Day, the 2002 James Bond film, was written before I invented my categorized rating system, so there aren't any numbers from the time, just a lot of comment on the silly stuff, with a follow up the next day about some of the cool stuff that wasn't ruined by being silly. I can't remember the movie well enough to review it now, over 1.5 years later, but to recreate a quick categorized listing from memory:

Die Another Day
Script/Story: 3
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 7
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Replayability: 3
Overall: 4

The Action score is open to debate, since while there is a ton of action, and some of it is interesting, every action sequence is completely chock full of ridiculous and impossible things. Does a cool car chase deserve a good score if there are two things in the middle of it that are so fake and stupid they take you entirely out of the movie?  If you don't mind physical impossibilities in your movies, you might give the action in this movie a 9 or a 10. If you can't get over them, you'd give it a 1. I'm sort of in the middle, but I'm giving it a point of two bonus just for trying hard and looking good.

December 6, 2002

Well, sort of a review, more like a free association discussion.  There are a few minor spoilers here, but it's almost a spoiler-free movie, since there's nothing to spoil.  The plot is almost non-existent, there aren't any character-based surprises, and you know it's going to wind up with a huge fight between Bond and the bad guy, and you know who is going to win the fight, and you know Bond always ends up with the girl.  Those are all conventions by now, so the only point is to have some nice eye candy along the way.  This film has a lot of eye candy, but most of it is so ridiculous along the way that I never felt involved in anything.  Mostly I'd try to keep from scoffing at one ridiculous stunt after another, and then when the action sequence was over I'd look at my dad and he'd look at me and we'd just sort of shrug.

There were a few laughs, but far more misfire one-liners.  Everyone is a joker.  Bond, his cohort Jinx, even the bad guys.  I think the whole tone is meant to be entirely tongue in cheek, almost in a breaking the fourth wall way, since the action is so intentionally over the top that you aren't intended to take it seriously.  So the dialogue is just one big joke also.  Light and witty enough to move from scene to scene without anyone ever actually saying anything, in theory.  In actuality it's just one dumb remark after another. Sort of like a really high budget bad sitcom. I'm surprised that they don't pay Tarentino about $1m just to punch up the script.  For less than the price of any of the smaller special effects they could have Quentin put in some actually funny and interesting dialogue, rather than 50% of it being point A to point B, and the other half jokes that die on their lips.  I did laugh at a few comments, but there were at least 50 attempted one-liners or other jokes, so the hit/miss ratio was awful, nailing just enough jokes successfully to keep discerning viewers from simply walking out.  No one was laughing, it's not like I was the one person who didn't find them hysterical.

I didn't want to write anything about it immediately after seeing it (which was all off oh, 6 hours ago) since I was somewhat dismayed by it.  I figured I'd just do a few quick paragraphs and move on.  And I may yet, but right this instant I've got a number of thoughts about it, so I'll run and see how far they take me.

This movie, the 400th James Bond film, was almost like a new form of entertainment.  I'd never seen an action film like it. There are perhaps a dozen major action sequences in the film, and at least ten of them are either entirely improbable, or at least filled with improbable or impossible things.  You would need a crane to suspend your disbelief through the entire film.

The actions the people take are either ridiculously dumb, or they defy physics, or the special effects are really bad, or there are several incredible coincidences.  While I was watching it I thought of The Matrix a few times.  In that film almost everything that happens in terms of an action sequence is very realistic in setting, but often they have impossible events.  What I mean is that in The Matrix it's two guys fighting in a subway, or a chase across city rooftops, or through the streets and up a fire escape.  All things that could certainly happen in real life, and probably do on your average TV cop show.  During those scenes in ordinary places they do impossible things due to being inside of a computer program; punch through walls, leap over subway cars, stop bullets, etc.  But they're not doing it while standing on the wing of a 747 that's in flight, which would be impossible, for instance.

In Die Another Day, it's almost the opposite.  The actions in the scenes aren't totally outside the realm of possibilities, but how they get into and out of the scenes is just ridiculous.  The amount of rockets and bullets fired that never hit anyone important is just astounding.  Well on second thought most of the action scenes in Die Another Day are as impossible during as the ones in The Matrix.  It's just that in Die Another Day they aren't supposed to be fake and inside of a computer program.

If I were to write up a detailed list of all the ridiculous things that could never actually happen, it would be twice as long as my actual review.  Virtually every action sequence is full of things you simply can't see and not chuckle at.  I don't think there was any serious effort by the director and script writers to make a realistic film.  They had numerous involved action scenes, and they were going to work them in.  The movie didn't feel as lacking in plot or growing tension as Harry Potter 2, but it was similar, and felt even more pre-ordained.

There is a plot, but it makes almost no sense.  Bond was betrayed by another agent, but we don't know who.  There is some half-hearted attempt at suspense, but being as there are only five characters in the film; two bad guys, Bond, Jinx (Halle Berry), and a female British agent, and we know the betrayer is someone on the British side, it's not exactly Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with a pipe wrench.  When there's only one main character who might have done it, the guessing game is narrowed down a bit.

That's really it for the plot, in terms of non-action scenes.  Most of the movie is action sequences, and they are all pretty well done, but almost always full of flaws.  I didn't see XXX, the Vin Diesel starring Bond rip off, but there's no way the action sequences in that could have been any more absurd than the ones in DAD.   When the things happening are so obviously impossible, or there is no reason for them to be happening, it precludes me from developing any emotional attachment to the characters or events. It's just a sort of video game, rather than a movie with characters I care about.

Spoilers follow, in the form of plot stupidity.

Taking a page straight from Austin Powers, both the good guys and the bad guys have their hated enemies in their sights, ready to kill several times.  Every single time they talk and explain until their enemy finds a way to escape, or they get interrupted by other people.  Either that or they lock them in a room and leave them to die.  They invariable escape, of course.

Apparently all that's stopping North Korea from invading South Korea are a bunch of land mines.  While I'm sure that helps, there are tens of thousands of troops stationed there, as well as lots of walls and fortifications and tanks and such.  In the movie it looked like a stretch of abandoned oil tanks with some barbed wire, and about 10 US Marines were all that stood between the free South and communist devils in the North.

They have a fake diamond mine, in part of a huge geodesic done, on a frozen lake.  No earth moving equipment whatsoever, nothing to fool anyone, since anyone would notice the lack of the millions of tons of earth he'd require to find anything.  Yet they have a weird robot arm the size of a car jack at the oil change place, and a bunch of purple laser-firing robot arms, all of which wave around madly during a fight scene, never quite hitting Bond.  When one finally does it just burns his back.  While the bad guy he was fighting gets it through his head like an ice pick through a cup of yogurt.

The bad guy had a satellite that could focus a death ray on the earth, incinerating anything within about a fifty foot swath.  The satellite could also turn and face incoming rockets and cook them, plus it apparently had a smaller satellite orbiting it, since the bad guy's TV would always show the main satellite from a distance, as if there were something else up there to watch it.

A bad guy gets diamonds embedded in his face by an explosion early in the movie.  Two years later he still has them there, with almost no medical attention having been given to the huge scars around them.  The diamonds are just sitting atop his skin, anyone could remove them with their bare hands, or at worst a pair of tweezers.  Yet the movie acts like he's stuck with them forever.

When you blow up TV cameras, they don't send an explosive wave through the cable back to the spy HQ, there to blow up all of the monitors and send everyone ducking in proper cinematic form.  Plus you don't house your entire brain trust in a poorly-shielded bunker just feet from the border, where hostilities are sure to break out.  Especially when the HQ has no windows to see out, and you're doing everything on monitors.  Which could just as well be done 500 miles away.

The main question I had was who the North Korean son became.  There are two bad guys, both North Korean. One the son of a general, the other his muscle.  The son appears to die early on, while the muscle lives and is eventually prisoner-exchanged for Bond.  Bond tracks him to Cuba and discovers he's there to get a new face, with some ridiculously unscientific DNA replacement thing.  Whatever, just play along.

Soon after that a guy who is obviously the head bad guy shows up.  He's weasely and white and English, and is a billionaire, a guarantee of being the evil mastermind in any Bond film.  He turns out to be the Korean general's son, post new face/DNA switching, and is world famous, about to be knighted, owns a diamond mine in Iceland, never sleeps, is a scientific genius, etc.

But the Korean guy looked his ethnicity 14 months previous.  So who was the white guy all along, when he was building his fortune and reputation? He couldn't have been Korean for his whole life and then switched races suddenly without anyone noticing. One of the "plot" twists was that he was in the Oxford fencing class with another British agent, years before.  So was he Korean all along and changed?  Or did he steal the DNA of the white guy and kill him and take his place?  There was no explanation of this, and my inclination is that it got cut out, or they just never thought of it, since there's no way to reconcile what happens with how people looked at various times in the movie.

December 8, 2002

One thing I forgot to mention about the James Bond movie was that it wasn't all bad.  The car chase over the ice was quite cool.  Unfortunately it was all edited to death so you could hardly see what was happening.  For obvious reasons, since it's the same two cars in the same small area, and long shots would let you see the tire tracks they were driving over.  You could a couple of times, as they hit huge power slides through corners and the tracks on the ice showed where they're already done it in previous attempts.  Funny all the bad special effects in other places, and no bother to erase the skid marks across the ice.

The whole chase was too long and nonsensical, but one thing I liked about it was that the bad guy's car was better than Bond's.  Bigger machine gun, more missiles,  and he could drive too.  Nice to have an equal to battle against, rather than just a bunch of hapless minions in normal cars that Bond could easily pick apart.

The chase was full of dumb stuff; Bond flipped over at one point, and while sliding upside down opens his sunroof and used the ejector seat to flip him back over.  Landing perfectly on his wheels as a missile almost hit him.  There was no sign of the seat going up, or how Bond didn't have his head smashed into the roof, or how the seat remained in the car firmly afterwards.  Or how he was going to pop out of the sunroof anyway, since it was about the size of a 10-gallon aquarium.

After that they end up in the ice building, which has somehow become entirely navigable by automobiles, and looks suspiciously like a circular drive in a parking garage, with a few foam ice sculptures here and there and lots of water running down it.  They do at least four or five circles around inside this thing, which was designed for people and full of steps previously.

As I said a couple of days ago in my semi-review; it's best if you just don't think about it while watching, since almost nothing makes any sense.

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