# Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

### reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen

I suppose it was inevitable. The end of the Cold War, and all the geopolitical change that entails, finally made its effects felt in a Bond film. The Cold War really is over.

Yes, "Goldeneye" was called the first post-Cold War Bond film, but it was only that way simply because it was made after 1991 and had the Russians as friends from the start. There was the self-conscious title scene with the usual sillouetted naked ladies, this time wielding hammers and sickles, but the film still had an old Bond feel to it, whatwith with supervillains and plots to take over the world with a big ray gun. Instead of SPECTRE and Blofeld, we have renegade Russian Army units; names are differnt, but methodologies are the same.

The new Bond film, though, is far more embedded in the late 1990s. Yes, there are nifty gadgets, impressive I-want-to-do-that globetrotting, beautiful women (Teri Hatcher needs something to do nowadays) and serious cars, but there are material changes in this installment. The Russians aren't even mentioned except in the pre-credits teaser. And, then, even that mention has a certain post-Cold War mixture of dreadfulness and decline, referring to loose Russian controls over their nuclear weapons. Not quite Russians as Keystone Kops, but certainly not Russia as fearsome superpower.

The main foreign country, in fact, is China, but this is really a minor point. The filmmakers simply pick the country that's vaguely threatening, certainly powerful, in a sort of fill-in-the-Great-Power way. Amusingly, at least to Americans, Britain is still shown having geopolitical weight. I suppose in this way, the new Bond film looks back to the Empire, or at least to a Britain that wouldn't have had a hard time taking on Argentina. Even in the Connery films, it was acknowledged that World War III would be fought out by the Americans and the Soviets, with Britian only as a supporting player. My guess is that this episode of imperial nostalgia was brought about by the handover of Hong Kong around the time the movie was released, a sort of schoolyard "we didn't really have to hand it back if we didn't feel like it" mood.

The real innovations of this film is the focus on Ted Turner as a Great Power. The historical reference is Hearst and the Spanish-American War, but magnified by satellite TV. Missiles, warships, and all the other tokens of military power are subservient to almighty broadcast news. That CNN logo in the lower right corner, so indelibly etched into our memory of the Gulf War, of NATO airstrikes, of any situation that potentially means war, has, in this Bond film, been elevated to superpower status. (I would have been amused to see "logo burning" legislation before the Congress.) Great Power conflict has been morphed into ratings wars and sweeps week. While not exactly a new concept -- CNN, I think, caused America to send troops to Somalia and ultimately Kosovo, and I'm sure there have been scads of academic papers being shed on this subject -- I suppose the idea achieves a certain pop culture status by its inclusion into a Bond film.

The Bond Girl in this installment happens to be Michelle Yeoh, who we know is more than capable of kicking Pierce Brosnan's ass. A minor issue: we can safely assume she's not on the motorcycle that's jumping over the helicopter, whereas in the Jackie Chan movies, she really, really is on the motorcycle jumping on the moving train; the blooper outtakes shows her missing a number of times. The thrill isn't quite the same.

Oh, yes, the self-referential toss-offs. There's the one that was on the TV ads: "Bond... you know the rest": Bond, as entirely embedded in popular consciousness. He doesn't even utter his tagline "martini, shaken not stirred". Teri Hatcher does this; she knows what his favorite drink is as well as the rest of us.

A more interesting Self-referential Moment is near the end. Yes, the big bad guy has once again explained his secret plan before attempting to kill the good guys (at least there's a motive for this peculiar, recurring stupidity: "I like an audience"). Just before Bad Guy gets waxed, Bond tells him that the most important thing in the media biz is to "give them what they want." The bad guy then expires in a very ouch, very messy way, giving all of us what we expect to see finish a climatic mano-a-mano at the end of an action movie.

One oddity is Teri Hatcher as a previous love interest/entanglement. Seeing her again is sufficient to drive Bond to drink (more). I don't believe he's acted like this before (that whole marriage thing excluded, though that's immaterial since that's forgotten with this Gen X Bond). This is a change from the autonomous independent Bond, perhaps an attempt to give him a new past. It's a half-hearted effort, and the filmmakers drop it without much issue. I don't think it works -- our image of Bond is already fixed.

Bond, thankfully and entirely unlike Ethan Hunt in "Mission Impossible", does not have a Macintosh laptop and does not even mention the Internet. This saves us from having to mock the movie for a really bad depiction of retrieving e-mail or that the Mac has powers to upload a virus into an alien mothership (thereby saving the world). Think Different.

Perhaps one thing that isn't there to give it a truly late 1990s spin is the lack of conspiracies in smoke-filled rooms, UFOs and maybe new, exotic plagues. But that may be a peculiarly American way of thinking. Or, maybe, something to put into 1999's Bond film.

Oh, at the end of it all, I liked the movie. It's fun, perhaps not the best Bond film, but up there.

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