Greenlit after the positive public response to the trailer for GoldenEye, the success of that movie put even more pressure on Pierce Brosnan to perform well in his follow-up outing. Long term series producer Cubby Broccoli had passed away and the story would go through many iterations, with filming commencing using an unfinished script – was disaster looming, or could the franchise continue the momentum created by Brosnan’s debut?

In the internet age, we are all too used to stories of films having ‘troubled’ productions, with tales of unfinished scripts, on-set disagreements and the like just forming part of the modern critical discourse. Similarly, the idea of a media mogul using widespread disinformation and media technology to manipulate global events might have seemed more than a little far-fetched in 1997, whereas today, maybe less so.

GoldenEye had successfully reinvigorated the Bond Brand by basically harking back to its ancestors, and Tomorrow Never Dies would continue that trend, albeit with the sort of plot that more suited a modern day setting. But would it make the same fumbles as its predecessor from a modern standpoint? Well, sort of…

Starting with the pluses, the women of this film get a much fairer shake than in the last one, or at least 75% of them do. Teri Hatcher, three months pregnant at the time of filming and riding high as Lois Lane in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman gets the short straw as Paris Carver, wife to the movie’s villain and ex-lover of James Bond (once again bringing Bond’s past into the plot as with GoldenEye, in an interesting trend for this new era of the franchise). Paris is presented as someone who knows exactly who Bond is and what he does, and doesn’t much like him. Then she sleeps with him anyway, and winds up dead. So very Bond. Perhaps what’s worse is that the character never really gets given a chance from her first mention, as M and Moneypenny – 50% of the Female Character Count in this outing – jibe Bond about ‘pumping’ Mrs Carver for information. Ho ho ho. Rumours of on set issues between Brosnan and Hatcher may or may not have been exaggerated but it can’t be ignored that the brief love scene the two share is very… bitey.

Anyway, I said pluses. M here gets to actually be a competent office holder, who backs her agent thoroughly and is never intimidated by any of the swinging dicks in any room in which she happens to be. Her back and forth with Geoffrey Palmer’s Admiral Roebuck is quite wonderful, as he tells her he doesn’t think she has the balls to do the job and she replies ‘Perhaps, but the advantage of that is I don’t have to think with them’ (an exchange lost in the recent ITV showing!). It’s nice that the movie at least gives the character a proper sense of being in control instead of just an outsider to the boys club who doesn’t understand, though it comes with the caveat that the movie still has the male characters around her treat her position as a novelty rather than just a qualified professional doing her job. Baby steps…

Moneypenny doesn’t really get much to do beyond the ‘pumping’ joke and an early exchange with James over the phone as he romps with his Danish teacher (the Austin Powers movies seeming less and less like parody by comparison) but once again Samantha Bond gives us a version of the character who’s happy to flirt with Bond but really not here for his shit, and certainly not wasting her life pining away for him, so again, baby steps.

The big plus of the movie though is Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin, an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and ever bit the competent ally and equal of Bond himself. Yeoh was already a martial arts star of some renown by this point and the movie makes excellent use of this, with several extended fight scenes in which she and Bond look out for one another. Unlike previous ‘kickass’ girls in the franchise, there’s never a sense that Lin has to suddenly surrender her agency or become situationally less competent in order to let our hero shine, and that is a very welcome change of pace. What’s similarly fascinating is the way in which the movie portrays both Lin and her country – whereas usually Bond movies would take some small delight in portraying English exceptionalism and making out other agencies to be inferior (see for Example M’s cutting remark in GoldenEye about MI6 preferring to get their intelligence live rather than from CNN) but here the Chinese government is shown to have not only an agent every bit Bond’s equal but also resources and equipment to match.

Stunt wise, it’s clear that the budget had been increased for this outing, with the FX being far more impressive and standing up better than those of the last movie. The opening sequence, which does sterling duty both in showcasing M’s more enhanced status and the relationship she has developed with Bond, is perhaps a little derivative and obvious (once again Bond ends up flying a plane from an explosion while the Bond Theme triumphantly plays) but it’s well shot and far more convincing than the last opening. The sequences elsewhere do show creativity, with highlights being the remotely driven BMW 750, which manages far better than previous attempts in the genre to be convincing combining the tech used to achieve the effect and very judicious use of camera angles. The other main highlight is the motorcycle chase through Saigon, with Bond and Lin handcuffed and Lin having to repeatedly switch from behind to in front of Bond on the bike while in motion.

Other sequences like the drill used to sink the HMS Devonshire recall older entries to the franchise in conception – sinking naval vessels with sinister gadgets recalls The Spy Who Loved Me, while the hulking and mysterious presence of Carver’s ‘Stealth Ship’ recalled – for me at least – vibes of the ship used in You Only Live Twice to capture NASA and Soviet spacecraft.

That sort of callback seems particularly apt to the movie’s villain, Elliott Carver, played with some apparent relish by Jonathan Pryce. Carver is an old-school Bond Villain, a self-proclaimed genius with a large empire (in this case media) and a desire to control as much of the world as possible for his own personal gain. His ambition is matched only by his apparent sociopathy, happy to order the murder of unarmed sailors and even to manipulate events to start World War Three as long as it means he can get the exclusive coverage for his papers and news channels. I do have to question whether or not this is the sort of villain that the audience really needs to see – obvious parallels have been suggested between this character and real-world media moguls, notably Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, but, like the old school villains of the Connery era, Carver lacks any sort of subtlety or nuance in his portrayal. There’s no real reason for him to do any of what he’s doing bar pure ego. There’s no inciting event in his life or background of which the movie makes us aware that has driven him to this point. A conference with his various divisions merely serves to cement the cartoonish level of villainy the character has, with one director stating that yes they’ve released the new software and as Carver requested it’s riddled with bugs so that users will be forced to upgrade for years. Cue cartoonish villain cackle. When he has his wife killed, it seems merely on a whim, similarly his decision to take on Bond. And his stated goal – of getting dominant media position for his company in China for the next 100 years – seems outlandish and odd: he’s a man the wrong side of middle age with no children we are aware of, and he exhibits no particular desire to share, so what is the point, beyond a weirdly two-dimensional portrait of a mad tyrant?

Carver’s Number Two is Mr Stamper, a henchman whose story goes off in odd directions as the movie progresses as if it was being written on the fly (which of course was partially the case as the movie entered its second half). Stamper is basically, as the actor who portrayed him memorably said when introducing himself and his qualities to the casting directors, ‘Big, bad and German’. He seems to relish in the cruelty he employs on his employer’s behalf even more than Carver himself, and is broadly shown as competent, though surrounded by lesser men in Carver’s employ. Then midway through the film it transpires that he’s a keen student of assassin Dr Kaufman, killed by Bond in an earlier scene, and that the late doctor had been training his protégé in ‘Chakra Torture’, at which he had become quite proficient. What’s odd here is that the movie goes on to portray Kaufman as having been some sort of father figure/mentor to Stamper, despite there being no real indication of this when the former was actually alive (for his one brief scene) – indeed, from the exchange they do have, it seems that the two are mildly irritated by one another, if anything, and Kaufman comes off more as comic than sinister in any event. Odd.

Ricky Jay rather steals the show on the villain side as Henry Gupta, an American ‘techno-terrorist’ in the employ of Carver. Jay was always brilliantly understated in his onscreen performances, one suspects as a hangover from his many years as a skilled stage magician, and though his part is relatively small, he’s easily the most believable bad guy because he doesn’t have to be an out and out sadist and is basically a laconic smartass who wants to get paid.

Plot wise, the movie perhaps seems a little more prescient in hindsight than it might have at the time. The idea that a media empire could sufficiently distort reality to manipulate large scale political decisions and even foment crises would have seemed the stuff of far-fetched genre fiction in 1997, but in the years since with the growth of cable networks like Fox News and the various political and social events of the last decade, it’s easy to see how such a plot is plausible, with enough sinister folks in the right places. Unlike GoldenEye, whereas the plot is a little loose, it at least doesn’t feel like it’s merely a device to push the movie from one explosion to the next. It’s coherent, starting with the opening incident of Devonshire’s sinking and following a through line to the revelation of Carver’s ultimate intent to cause war between the Chinese and the British while covertly helping to install a government friendly to his requirements in China so he can expand his global empire. Carver is a cartoon character of a villain, and elements of the plan are ludicrously far-fetched, but it does all follow on logically within its own structure.

As for Brosnan himself, certainly he seems more at ease within the role in this instalment. There’s less of the showiness of the GoldenEye portrayal with the tics like adjusting the tie in the middle of heated moments of action. The script does continue to push pun after awful pun on the poor man, which he delivers with an appropriately detached, sardonic edge, almost as if to say he knows its bad as well as you do but that’s the point. His action credentials are certainly not in question, and he does genuinely here come off as ‘tough enough’ to be Bond. Thankfully, though Paris is introduced as a former lover and then killed, the script avoids too much of the oddly placed ‘soul-searching’ bits for our hero – his emotion at seeing Paris dead feels genuine without being overwrought and the fact Lin shows no romantic interest in him until the mission is done saves Yeoh from having to deliver the same kind of disjointed nonsense inflicted on Izabella Scorupco’s Natalya.

In terms of tone, it’s inescapable how this and the previous film have altered Bond in one key way and that’s in terms of how he participates in gunplay. Previous Bonds tended to stick almost exclusively to the trusty pistol and occasionally a sniper rifle as required. Brosnan’s Bond, by contrast, seems happy to pick up any random automatic weapon and spray away. These kinds of guns tended to be reserved for the ‘baddies’ in previous incarnations, and it makes this Bond feel a little scrappier, less ‘elegant’ in his fights, like he’ll use whatever he needs to get the job done. It’s almost a sense of disdain towards the weapons he’s using rather than a fetishization of them, and even though he does get a new Walther here for the first time in the P99, he doesn’t seem overly fussed with it.

Gadgets mostly focus on the car and the accompanying phone that drives it. We do get a bit more Q than in GoldenEye which is always nice to see, even though by this point Llewellyn is clearly struggling with the dialogue he’s expected to reel off. There’s a greater sense of an actual established relationship between him and Bond here though, and the sass is as strong as ever.

All things considered, though Tomorrow Never Dies makes a lot of the same decisions as GoldenEye, it does them better, and so inevitably feels in hindsight like the stronger movie, despite reviewing less favourably overall and making less at the box office. Brosnan feels more comfortable as the lead, the Bond Girl actually gets to be a competent agent with no ‘but’ moment as with previous movies and the plot is coherent if a little retro. It may not be the best entry in the Bond canon, but it’s certainly not a bad one.