A silver-haired eccentric in something resembling a black turtleneck and glasses stands tall on a stage. The gathered crowd of privileged invitees hang on his every world, looking up with rapt attention as he spells out his vision for the world. “What do I expect in return? Worldwide domination. Complete, utter, total worldwide domination,” he bellows to confused looks. “But not over governments or religion or ideology. Over tyranny and isolation and ignorance. I promise to report the news without fear or fervor. I promise to be a force for good in this world. Fighting injustice, crushing intolerance, battling inhumanity, striking a blow for freedom at every turn.”
No, it’s not Steve Jobs going a bit megalomaniacal at an Apple launch. Nor is it Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner at a Fox News or CNN event. It’s not even some guy named Ted at a TedTalk. It’s Elliot Carver – a Bond villain played by Jonathan Pryce in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. Words are his weapons; satellites his artillery, or so the film’s screenwriter Bruce Feirstein argued. Prior Bond villains wanted the gold in Fort Knox, atomic weapons, control of the oceans, even control of outer space – Carver just wants bigger ratings, and he’ll secretly provoke WWIII just to get them! Plus, he demands exclusive access to the Chinese market.
In 1997, that might have seemed a tad alarmist, overly cynical, or just plain weak compared to the franchise’s more typical big bads. Today, it plays as almost uncomfortably prescient. How does the rest of the film hold up? Well….
A Truly Golden Touch
That was Pierce Brosnan’s cheeky reply when asked by a magazine writer on the set of GoldenEye how they planned to update Bond for the 90s. It’s not that he wasn’t worried about how to do a Bond movie in a post-Cold War world nor was he completely blind to the changing cultural whims of the time. Quite the contrary. Bond, however, had to remain distinctly Bond, and if they could update him just enough for the PC 90s without resorting to radical reinvention audiences would probably go along with it. “I would love to be responsible for revving up the Bond engine internationally again. Bond is a homegrown British product, and it would be great if I could make him a worldbeater again,” Brosnan said.
Audiences couldn’t get enough of the film and an entire new generation of fans was about to be hooked by the instant-classic video game tie-in, which didn’t hit the N64 until 1997. MGM understandably wanted more, but patience was not an option.
Great! Now, More of the Same But Quicker and More Expensive
MGM was preparing a public offering for just two years down the line, and the next Bond movie had to be out by then to help boost the company’s valuation. As a result, Tomorrow Never Dies got a release date before it even got a start date.
When would filming start? Who’s going to make it? What’s it even about? / No idea – it just has to be out by the end of 1997. Work backwards from there.
In the words of a character from another 1997 film about big brother:
Those probably aren’t the exact words GoldenEye director Martin Campbell used when he turned down EON’s offer to return for a sequel with no script, no ideas, and an inflexible two-year-timeline. After all, I am exaggerating just a little bit for effect here. Campbell did politely pass, though, moving on to The Mask of Zorro instead. His actual reason: “I felt after I’d done GoldenEye, maybe mistakenly, I didn’t want to repeat it.” His replacement, Roger Spottiswoode, was Sam Peckinpagh’s old editor who had transitioned to directing projects like And the Band Played On, Turner & Hooch, and Air America. Spottiswoode’s big challenge was simply getting Tomorrow Never Dies done on time without anyone killing each other.
Ripped from the Headlines
Tomorrow Never Dies was greenlit six months before GoldenEye hit theaters, giving EON and MGM ample time to solicit story ideas from The Hunter novelist Donal E. Westlake (“What if we start off in Transylvania?” was one of his pitches) and GoldenEye co-writer Bruce Feirstein. They each independently looked at Britain’s looming return of Hong Kong to Chinese control (set to happen July 1, 1997) and saw an opportunity for the first ripped-from-the-headlines James Bond movie. Westlake’s ideas were ultimately rejected and later published as the standalone novel Forever and a Death. Feirstein, meanwhile, plowed forward with his first draft and outlined the following story:
“Media tycoon, Elliot Harmsway, is enraged by Britain’s cowardice in returning Hong Kong to China and intends to destroy the colony before the handover, while his media empire will benefit from worldwide coverage of the disaster.”
For the record, “Harmsway” is so on-the-nose that it feels kind of perfect for a Bond movie. I wish they’d kept it. I’m not sure when that was changed to Carver, but the Hong Kong Handover plot was dropped the moment the script was sent to a consulting agency headed by Henry Kissinger. Jeff Kleemen, MGM/UA executive vice president of production at the time, recalls the script was vetted by Kissinger “so you don’t have a situation like we had on GoldenEye where we are a few days into shooting in London and the Militsiya comes out and we have to go back to London.”
Kissinger’s take: what are you going to do if something bad actually happens during the Handover? You don’t know the answer, and that’s why you shouldn’t try to fantasize an event that will only be a few months old by the time you hit the market.
Fair point. Also, shit, now we need a page one rewrite, and Harmswell needs to become more of a Robert Maxwell type – a Murdoch competitor who once ran a media empire that included, among others, the Daily Mirror. That was but the first of many, many setbacks.
Define “Troubled Production”
Bond and one of his Bond girls (Teri Hatcher, cast over Brosnan’s preferred choice Monica Belluci) didn’t get along. They kept firing and rehiring Feirstein, becoming one of the first Hollywood blockbusters to employ a writer’s room only to then discard most of their ideas. (One idea that stuck: changing the film’s second Bond girl into a female Asian agent on par with Bond.) Spottiswoode got into shouting matches with seemingly everyone and eventually wasn’t on speaking terms with Judi Dench. A significant chunk of the production schedule was thrown into chaos when the government of Vietnam ripped up the country’s agreement with the studio while the director and his department heads were literally at an airport about to board a flight to Ho Chi Minh City.
“It was awful. We were stuck at the airport with sixty people and we were supposed to start shooting in three weeks. A third of the movie was on locations we no longer had,” Spottiswoode later recalled. Thankfully, Spottiswoode and several of his crew had made Air America in Thailand seven years earlier. Based on that experience, they diverted their flight to Bangkok and promptly scouted Thailand locations that could double for Vietnam. “Between us all, we said this is the only way to keep the film going, makes our dates, and keep moving.”
MGM had planted the film’s flag on Christmas Day 1997. Spottiswoode’s late stage plea to delay to 1998 was shouted down. Christmas 1997 or bust! What else is coming out that day, anyway?
“Bond must beat the boat and save the lion” read Variety’s concise summation of the latest Bond adventure’s need to somehow topple Titanic AND save MGM.
A Movie About Fake News Beset by Fake News
Through it all, there was the press reporting on every little rumor. “All the problems were fabricated by the `wonderful’ British press,” Jonathan Pryce lamented while promoting the movie. “We would phone and say, `You’ve got it wrong,’ and the falsehoods would continue,” If not, ironically, for Titanic’s historically troubled production Tomorrow Never Dies probably would have been the film media’s favorite whipping boy of 1997.
Not all of the little accidents along the way were so drastic. Take, for example, the title. Originally called Tomorrow Never Lies after both the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the name of Carver’s fictional newspaper, a secretary at the studio accidentally typed it up as Tomorrow Never Dies but everyone thought that sounded better. It’s probably the lesser of the two titles, but at least it’s not a “Vietnam just tore up our contract”-level headache.
Looking back on it now, Feirstein is sanguine. “You were in the heat of it back then and you think this has never happened to anybody before in the whole world. It was a movie that was rushed into production. We all had guns to our head and there was a lot of tension,” he told the authors of Some Kind of Hero. “The truth is, this happens on a lot of movies. [Producers] Michael [Wilson] and Barbara [Broccoli] never panicked. 20 years ago, I would have used the over-wrought description that it was like ‘changing engines on a Concorde mid-flight’ but since then I’ve been on a number of movies that have been exactly the same.”
Yeah, But Is the Movie Any Good?
Out of all that chaos came a…really divisive movie. Though initially liked by critics and greeted to a box office cume basically on par with GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies has since been kicked around by Bond fans. Mark A. Altman and Edward Gros, for example, wrote an oral history book – Nobody Does it Better – about every Bond film, and their Tomorrow Never Dies chapter opens with the following admission: “Even the authors of this book have diametrically opposing opinions of the finished film. Gross considers it a high-water mark for the Brosnan films; Altman despises the movie.”
I started out an Altman and ended up a Gross. That sounds weird. Let me try that again.
On first watch, I wanted to like Tomorrow Never Dies more than I did. For all of its “media moguls are the new Bond villains” prescience, it still felt somehow undercooked. Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver – the answer to “What happens to a Bond girl when he’s done with them?” – just didn’t work for me, too little-seen and under-explained to matter. Upon rewatch, however, I settled into a deeper appreciation for the pure fun of Tomorrow Never Dies as a super efficient, two-hour action movie.
Like a lot of modern video games or Marvel blockbusters, they wrote backward and came up with action scene ideas for the crew to work on for months before they actually had a story. Sometimes, that lack of depth shows. Most of the time, however, it ensures the film zips along from one impressive and practical stunt to another while always being anchored by Brosnan’s commanding central performance. I get a particular kick out Bond using his latest Q gadget to remote-control drive his BMW around tight cark park corners as his pursuers fail to keep up.
Like a lot of the Brosnan films, however, Tomorrow Never Dies is ultimately ruled by its attempt at a modern Bond girl. Hatcher’s ex-girlfriend character was Brosnan’s request to give Bond a love interest with a shared past, a way to peel back the layers of the dramatic onion and deepen the character, but the pair ultimately fizzle together.
Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin, however, is so competent, self-assured, and generally badass you get the sense that if she was in the film any longer they’d struggle to come up with things for Bond to do. The film flinches at the end and forces the pair into a traditional Bond-Bond Girl kiss, but the concept of a Chinese Bond with her own gadgets – and even, in a sadly unfilmed scene, her own Q – certainly risks coming off as trend-chasing. You could certainly see this as a creaky old franchise trying to glom on to the emerging Hong Kong action genre, but all I really see is two actors – Brosnan and Yeoh – with great chemistry and a small army of stunt people somehow making something as astoundingly awesome as this:
With sequences like that, no wonder this franchise’s tomorrow – wait for it – truly never dies.
The Marathon Notes
- Thoughts on the Bond Women: Paris Carver is a better character in theory than execution and suffers considerably from – spoiler! – created-just-to-die syndrome. Wai Lin, on the other hand, is a far better take on “ female Bond” than what they tried again several years later with Halle Berry. After the film’s release, they reportedly kicked around the idea of a Wai Lin spinoff movie. I would have watched that.
- Ian Fleming Connection: The first Bond film to have no story or title connection to Fleming.
- Bond Song Thoughts: As with many modern Bond flicks, Tomorrow Never Dies actually has two songs, one for the intro and another for the closing credits. Between the two, I prefer K.D. Lang’s big band ballad – “Surrender” – with its John Barry, brass section, throwbacks over Sheryl Crow’s tamer “Tomorrow Never Dies.” In truth, I dig both.
- Coolest Scene: Brosnan and Yeoh on a motorbike built for two.
- Favorite line: Carver: The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
- Biggest regret: They could have had Monica Belluci in 1997 and didn’t cast her until 2015.
- Little Known Fact: According to the director’s commentary, Ricky Jay asked Spottiswoode if he could have a little speech prior to his death scene since his control room henchman character had been so underdeveloped. The director agreed to let Jay – who was mainly hired based on his magician’s ability with cards, an ability that translated poorly to screen and ended up cut from the film – write a little something. They ran it past Pryce, who nodded politely. When it came time to film the brief speech, however, as soon as Jay opened his mouth Pryce pointed the prop gun at him and shot, as had been the original plan. Jay – stunned, but still a professional – fell straight to the ground. Pryce’s explanation: “I didn’t like the first few words I heard and shot him. What, I’m staying in character!”
- Box Office: $333 million worldwide ($532.7m adjusted for inflation)
Sources: Nobody Does it Better, The Ultimate Guide to Bond, Some Kind of Hero, Cinefantastique, DVD Director’s Commentary
Tomorrow: GoldenEye
We Minored in Film 
Well, I guess the villain is what aged the best in this movie.
I just noticed…this one might have been the weakest start of all the Brosnan movies. Because I actually can’t remember how it starts at all. the other three, they one thing I remember the best is the start. But what I remember from this one is most the giant satellite dish…or whatever it was.
Juli and I actually hit a similar gap the other day when were discussing the Brosnan openers. I had just watched Tomorrow Never Dies for the first time ever a day earlier and couldn’t totally recall what happens in the first scene. Even after watching the film a second time, I struggle to remember every little beat of the opener, certainly more than I do for the other Brosnan films.
The gist of the opener is this: James is MI6’s eyes on the ground for their surveillance of an arms deal happening on the Russian border and involving terrorists. Over M’s objections, the leader of the Royal Navy orders a missile strike to wipe out the entire area, but if only he’d waited a minute longer he would have seen that Bond has discovered one of the Russian planes on the ground is loaded with nuclear missiles. It’s now up to Bond to pilot that plane away from the site before the missiles arrive.
Spoiler: He accomplishes his mission.
If I recall correctly, the scene is a modified version of an unused idea from the GoldenEye production, and the second unit director and crew actually filmed the majority of the scene 3 months before Pierce Brosnan’s first day on set. When I said they had to come up with several action sequence ideas before they had a script because at least that way the crew could get to work, this opener is a prime example. Feels more like a video game level than a true fully fleshed out movie opener. Still, has some decent action filmmaking. It’s just so disconnected from the rest of the movie, and, unlike GoldenEye, it doesn’t really have a “holy shit, how’d they do that?” action moment that ends up seared in your brain.
“Well, I guess the villain is what aged the best in this movie.”
He certainly resonates more now than he probably did back then, and he does have some great lines. I feel like they could have done better with him, though, particularly his relationship with Hatcher and what he ends up doing to her. Plus, there’s this one moment where Yeoh and Brosnan are brought to his lair and at the sight of the former, he does a series of mock kung-fu kicks and noises before segueing back into Bond villain speechifying. Only happens for maybe 20 seconds, but it’s a really weird moment. Shows its age today, sure, but it just doesn’t even feel right for his character.
For me, the thing that has maybe aged the best is actually the scene I included in the post. James and Wai Lin handcuffed together on a motorcycle while a helicopter pursues them through Vietnam is one of the coolest scenes I’ve seen during this marathon so far. His hand on the left handle, her hand on the right handle, veering through alleyways and across rooftops as the ground falls out from under them and at one point actually Fast & Furious-style jump over the helicopter across two rooftops…so impressive to my eyes. Also, grounded nicely in character because at the center of it all we’re watching James and Wai Lin navigate the practicalities of how to work together on the fly, and failure means a very bloody death by helicopter.
Yeah…the others have a better opener. Frankly, I remember pretty little of most of those movies, but the opening scenes of the the other three Brosnan movies, they stuck with me. What I remember most of this one is the chase scene in the garage, but mostly for the end when the car ends up in the Avis (was it Avis?) window….
You remember correctly. The bad guys need a MacGuffin Bond has in his special tricked up BMW and he remote control drives it from the backseat as they struggle to keep up. In the end, he exits the car without them seeing and sends it straight off the roof and into the Avis store across the street. In a deleted scene, he walks over to the car as a small crowd – including a very attractive but very confused Avis employee – gathers to inspect the damage. Bond jokes “Left the keys in the car” and hands the employee some money to pay for the damage. Even without that particular button, the scene is pretty memorable. The film’s opener, on the other hand, not so much.
I guess the money for the product placement paid off….
You’re not wrong. Brosnan was quoted in articles from around the time Tomorrow Never Dies came out as guessing that around a third of the film’s budget came from product placement. “In addition to BMW, Ericsson and Omega, MGM approved Bond ad campaigns for Smirnoff vodka, Heineken beer, Avis rental cars, Visa credit cards and L’Oreal cosmetics,” read one Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article. In the film, the Smirnoff product placement especially jumped out at me. The Avis placement is actually not a bad visual punchline to the scene, but during a dramatic moment in the film when Bond is seated in a hotel room with his chair facing the door as he expects the villain to send either a woman to seduce him or an assassin to try and kill him (or both) the camera has to make sure that the Smirnoff bottle next to him has its label facing the audience. It recalls the full-fledged commercials Daniel Craig would later film during his era where they invented little fake Bond scenarios and stunts and then at the end it turns out it’s a TV commercial, not a trailer for the new movie, and he’s hawking some product.
Started out as an Altman, ended up as a Gross is about right; it’s the best of the Brosnan series, in terms of pacing, action and a decent bad guy. But the Brosnan films have dated worse than evene the Moore films, and are barely watchable by today’s standards.
I would push back on your assessment of the Brosnan era just a little bit. I’d never seen any of them before doing this marathon and apart from Die Another Day I’d say I enjoyed all of them. The criticism I’d heard going in is that his era has one good movie – maybe not even good movie, but good half of a movie – with GoldenEye followed by three follow-ups that were chasing that dragon with increasingly diminishing returns. Beyond that, I read lots of arguments that the Brosnan films try to do this strange thing of mixing the Roger Moore camp and one-liners with the grit of early Connery, which is just the perfect recipe for distraction and weird tonal shifts.
Having now watched all 4 of his films through modern eyes, I’d say the former argument is too harsh and too quickly dismissive of Tomorrow Never Dies and the appeal of Sophie Marceau’s Bond villain turn in World is Not Enough.
As for the latter argument, I see some truth in that. The moment in GoldenEye, for example, where Bond and the Russian computer programmer he doesn’t really know at all barely escape an exploding train car and then almost instantly pivot toward romantic embrace, seguing the film into a brief love story section with the two of them in love in Cuba – so, so weird compared to everything in the film prior to that point, but also, it’s something that wouldn’t be entirely out of place in a Roger Moore movie.
That’s just one example. All of Brosnan’s films have moments like that where you can see them trying to change with the times but only so much because, come on, Bond’s gonna be Bond. The Roger Moore films, by comparison, – the ones I’ve seen at least, For Your Eyes Only, Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill – might be more forgivable because at least you can mount a “they didn’t know any better” or “these are basically live-action cartoons” argument. However, I adjusted to Brosnan’s occasional tonal inconsistencies and found plenty to like, even in the first 28 minutes of Die Another Day, but I get those who struggle with the Brosnan era movies since they’re so damn inconsistent and maybe lacking in the villain department.
Tomorrow and Goldeneye are the only two Brosnan films I could look at again from that era, and I’ve even spent a holiday weekend in the Daltons. These tonal shifts you describe can be traced back to the Connery era, and no Bond film really got the right grip of this until, well, Skyfall. But it might be worth having a look at Live and Let Die, which attempts to tone down the series from the extravagant, overblown highs of You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever. They tried to re-kindle the Ian Fleming flame to ground a new star in the lead role, and the result feels better than most of the Moore era. It’s got a supernatural theme, mainly through the genuine spooky powers of Jane Seymour’s Solitaire, the first real extended action sequences (the boat chase), a riff on Blaxploitation that repositions the notion of Bond as adventurer into an urban NYC context, and a whole lot of other arresting notions. For me, the Brosnan films rebooted the character with the rather stodgy Goldeneye, and then immediately snapped back to the episodic gags, girls and gadgets Moore template established from 1977 onwards. Die Another Day and World Is Not Enough are two of the weakest films in the canon for me, and the half-life of the series just diminishes with each film. The CGI ruins any attempt at grit, the villians are unmemorable, the stories rote and the casual substitution of off-brand items (Cleese as Q) just makes them a farce for franchise fans.
Fascinating article. I had heard something about the troubled production of this film but didn’t know much about it. I generally like TND even though it’s quite inconsistent. No mention in your review of Vincent Schiavelli’s bizarre performance, or the henchman Stamper…for me, both were ridiculous but added some richness to the film. I also disagree with some of the commenters on the pre-credits sequence which I think is one of the tightest and punchiest ones of the series. The lengthy and narratively choppy sequence from The World Is Not Enough is one reason I’m not really a fan of that one.
I left out Schiavelli and Stamper mostly because I felt the article was already running too long and there really isn’t much backstory to either of them. Schiavelli’s German accent, however, was so convincing that the BMW people visiting the set mistook him for a native German actor they simply hadn’t seen before. The guy who played Stamper, meanwhile, stood out in auditions when they gave him 20 seconds to introduce himself and he said “I’m big, I’m bad, I’m bald, I’m German. Five seconds, keep the rest.” There is also some reporting that after the film they briefly kicked around doing a prequel about Schiavelli’s character but quickly dropped it, just as they did with the proposed Wai Lin spinoff.
As for how they each contribute to the film, I like Stamper’s presence as the intellectual big bad’s inevitable physical presence, though there have been more memorable Bond henchman who fill the same role.
Dr. Kauffman’s scene is a true highlight as well as fa ine example of Brosnan’s acting. Those who say he lacks depth as Bond or was too close to the Moore version should re-watch that scene. A woman he loves has just died, her murderer has a gun pointed at him, but the scene is ultimately a comedy bit about an overly well-mannered assassin. Brosnan honors the comedy in the script without ever really losing the plot that Bond is angry in that moment, sitting next to Paris’ dead body.
The opening sequence is certainly well-made and, like much of the rest of TND, a super efficient bit of action filmmaking. In general, though, I struggle more with the Bond opening scenes that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie – not that I don’t enjoy them, just that when I’m looking back I can’t quite remember them unless there’s a true “holy shit, how’d they do that” moment like Moonraker’s opening jump without a parachute.
This was actually the first Bond movie I ever watched… and the only one all the way through (just never seem to see them beginning to end for some reason, or I manage to catch the same scene over and over again). Dad ended up getting this one on VHS and I thought it wasn’t that bad. Of course, I didn’t have anything to compare it to, I admit. But as far as PB and MY, oh yeah–I agree they had some chemistry. I’d heard a lot about Bond and the Bond Girls, but I just thought it was interesting.
I was wondering when you were gonna tackle this one. And if they could’ve developed TH’s character a little more, maybe had him about to get her out in an action scene and then she dies, but nope. Of course, wasn’t a major fan of TH anyway. Didn’t care much for her other projects at the time.
“This was actually the first Bond movie I ever watched…”
My first was License to Kill when I was far too young to understand why the mean British man was so mean and why the bad guys hunted down a man named Sharkey and displayed his dead body like an actual shark on their boat. All these years later, I now admire the film’s grimness, but not the best first impression back when I was a wee lad too young to be watching such a violent movie.
“the only one all the way through (just never seem to see them beginning to end for some reason, or I manage to catch the same scene over and over again)”
Apart from License to Kill and three of the Daniel Craig movies, I had never really seen any of these Bond movies before last month, but like you, I’d caught bits and pieces over the years. Somehow kept seeing the same exact You Only Live Twice scene.
“Dad ended up getting this one on VHS and I thought it wasn’t that bad.”
You’d be surprised…or maybe you wouldn’t…how many Amazon and Walmart and other online reviews of the various James Bond Blu-Ray boxsets open with “I got this as a gift for my dad/husband/brother and he loved it” with “dad” coming up more often than the others.
“I was wondering when you were gonna tackle this one.”
We’re doing every one of the movies in reverse-order. Yesterday was Tomorrow Never Dies, today is GoldenEye. We are taking a break tomorrow because I have something planned about the GoldenEye video game, not movie, but not too long after that we’ll resume with License to Kill one day, Living Daylights the next, A View to a Kill after that, and so on.
“And if they could’ve developed TH’s character a little more, maybe had him about to get her out in an action scene and then she dies, but nope.”
Agreed. There is a nice symmetry, I guess. The first time we meet Pryce’s character he is already writing the headlines for an artificial conflict he created and nobody else knows about yet, and when Bond walks into the room to find Paris’ dead body there’s a TV in the background detailing how the cops found her dead in a room with a British agent. Plenty of villains frame the good guy for murder; only this movie’s villain has his own TV network to help spin the story how he wants so that the good guy can essentially hear his own public obituary before he dies. But, you’re right, it’s not as effective as it should be. The connection and tragedy could have been improved by an action scene that ends in TH’s death.
“Of course, wasn’t a major fan of TH anyway. Didn’t care much for her other projects at the time.”
I enjoyed Lois & Clark at the time and Hatcher’s “they’re real and they’re spectacular” Seinfeld episode is a classic, but I never got into Desperate Housewives and when I look at Lois & Clark now I don’t think it’s aged particularly well. Until watching this movie, I hadn’t thought about Teri Hatcher in a long, long time. Looking up her Wikipedia page just now, apparently, she was on Supergirl for 8 episodes as recently as 2017.
funny that you’re gonna talk about the goldeneye videogame, considered the best of N64. I always tried to get it (still have a working N64), but the price was ridiculous. Perfect Dark was always available, and I had so much fun playing that one… but I’m still looking for a good price on Goldeneye, that’s for sure. Watched a walkthrough on YouTube and it looks like it was worth the hype.
P.S.–the other aspect of “TND” that I forgot about that I thought was dumb was the Sea Drill. Yeah, I think the water pressure from it cutting into the hull would’ve led to a lot of problems and probably buried that dang hole. I’m a navy nut, so remembering that scene kinda rankles me a bit. I’m sure other people that are physics-minded cringed at the silliness, but oh well. I sure didn’t think that at the time, I know that–just found it weird.
Michelle Yeoh is my absolute favorite Bond woman, who unfortunately was in the same movie as my least favorite Teri Hatcher (actually she is tied for worst with Denise Richards).
Wow. Real yin and yang situation for you with this movie. I get that. Yeoh is fantastic. She may eventually get her Star Trek: Discovery spin-off show but they could have had her as the face of a Bond spin-off film franchise back in the day, right before she broke huge with Crouching Tiger. Missed opportunity. Sigh.
I’d personally rank Hatcher above Denise Richards since by comparison she’s really not in Tomorrow Never Dies that much whereas Richards becomes a major player in World is Not Enough. Plus, Richards line readings are just so, so bad, like she’s speaking phonetically half the time.
As a Star Trek fan, I am excited about the possibility of Yeoh getting her own show! As for Hatcher and Richards, while I thought Richards role was more ridiculous, Hatcher remains low on my list because I’ve heard she is so difficult to work with and that can’t help but effect my opinion of her.