Tomorrow Never Dies

The last favourite of mine to be released, Tomorrow Never Dies is the underacknowledged masterpiece of the Architect's oeuvre. In this prescient movie, James Bond must defeat the most evil and loathsome enemy of his long and storied career: a news network.

IDK if these graphics look dated in the States. In the UK news still looks like this crap.

Elliott Carver, who is the most fun villain since Christopher Walken if not Jaws, plans to start a war between China and the United Kingdom, to crown a career spent fabricating news stories like CNN on vitamins (not steroids, let's not get carried away here).

The look of an absolute lunatic who takes great pride in his work.

While the geopolitical balance might be way off, everything else about this scenario is dead on for today. Carver's dorkish megalomania is far more interesting than the fairly humourless villains of License and GoldenEye. It's easy to imagine him today tweeting pseudo-messianic banalities of the "orange man bad #resist" variety, inventing 8-year-old sons to provide him with profound soundbites on why antivax is worse than murder (but murderers are Good, Actually) and conspiring with the Zuccs and Jaccs of the world to save us peasants from our own stupidity and bigotry.

"So then I said to him, 'you know who else didn't like The Last Jedi? Mussolini.' And then everybody clapped."

Is trying to start war with China such a stretch? Well now it is, but just China specifically. Consider that the real-life mass media basically started a still ongoing race war off the back of such fabrications as "hands up don't shoot". This James Bond movie nailed the problem with the 21st Century better than any thinkpiece. Besides which, it was just entertaining as hell.

The prog rock acid trip visuals in the opening credits are strangely on point while being totally irrelevant to the movie.

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin, the Bond Girl, who is a Chinese agent. Sadly he doesn't sass off to her about Tiananmen Square (Moore's Bond zinged Major Triple X about the Gulag) but they have a fun dynamic anyway and spend a chunk of the film riding a motorcycle while handcuffed, which calls to mind the logistics of The Chase's sex scene in a moving car. The Chase was good as hell.

Everything better on moving vehicles.