TOMORROW NEVER DIES

Conservative fans of the JAMES BOND series had probably never been more scandalised than in 2006, when agent 007, through Daniel Craig, declared that he didn’t care whether his martini was shaken or stirred. Yet a decade earlier, for the Pierce Brosnan films, the producers had already broken one of the series’ most sacred rules – Bond no longer drove a sleek, elegant Aston Martin, but a German BMW.

The most outrageous example, however, comes in TOMORROW NEVER DIES, where Bond doesn’t take the wheel of a sports car, but an exclusive, bulletproof, remote-controlled Series 7 limousine, equipped with rockets, grenades, pepper spray, and self-repairing tyres. Filming the chase scene on a multi-level car park, with Brosnan controlling the car via a mobile phone from the back seat, took ten days of shooting and swallowed a lion’s share of the budget.

Yet TOMORROW NEVER DIES is notable for far more than just its cars. Following the huge box-office success of GOLDENEYE, the producers realised they could not afford to take a backward step. With the budget almost doubled, the instructions for screenwriters were to include as many gadgets and action sequences as possible -  especially after the viewers' ecstatic response to the GOLDENEYE scene in which Bond rampages through the streets of St. Petersburg in a tank. 

Shot across the UK, Germany, France, Mexico, and Thailand, with action sequences staged on a spectacular scale – let’s just name one, where Bond leaps a motorcycle over a helicopter and escapes in a jet, reminiscent of Tom Cruise in TOP GUN. Keep in mind that to prepare for the fight scenes, Michelle Yeoh collaborated with Jackie Chan’s own choreography team.

The result is the most extravagant and exhilarating Bond of the analogue era – and Pierce Brosnan’s final outing, before the series’ gadgetry and action sequences tipped into the more absurd (as they would in DIE ANOTHER DAY).

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Text: Grzegorz Fortuna