journal features

movie review - Goldeneye

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Nichinan, Miyazaki, 2022.01.07

I watched this Bond flick with my son as part of our ongoing series. We're watching one per actor that portrayed Bond, and today's outing welcomes Pierce Brosnan. This story spans the end of the Cold War, partially set in the period of the Soviet Union, and partially set nearly a decade later in the chaotic '90s. Focusing on Russian organized crime and its ties to the Russian political elite, it deals with a plot to create a massive EMP in London. The EMP is designed to cover the tracks of a larger cybertheft but also to scramble electronic records of all sorts. This overlooks facts such as the financial world still largely running on media such as tape drives that would be unaffected by an EMP, but so it goes. It's Bond, one suspends disbelief.

This Bond differs from previous incarnations by being extremely physical: he's always running, leaping, and so on. This makes the considerable action scenes more believable but that only goes so far. In fact, there's an extended scene in which a British intelligence agent uses a small armored unit inside a Russian city - nothing can excuse this kind of insanity. It just pulls you out of the story.

This movie has its moments. But a senseless ending where inexplicable things pile up in a hurry (like the heroin appearing in a helicopter somehow) buries all the good that the movie does in a finale of facepalm. Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton