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Die Another Day
2002 · Film · 133 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Lee Tamahori
James Bond is sent to investigate the connection between a North Korean terrorist and a diamond mogul, who is funding the development of an international space weapon.
1 negative8 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
The two co-writers on No Time to Die that you keep praising were the people responsible for such trash as Johnny English, Die Another Day and The World is Not Enough, which says pretty much all you need to know about their screenwriting "skills" and their contribution to Bond history.
For all of the Craig Bond films, other writers had to be brought into to make their scripts filmable (Oscar winners Paul Haggis for Casino Royale and QoS and John Logan for Skyfall and Spectre, Emmy winners PWB and Fukunaga for NTTD).
They didn't bring her in to salvage the script at all. They brought her in to do polishes of dialogue and to give them some ideas about how things could go and they'd take what they wanted. What about this reads salvaging?
The WGA has strict rules about screenwriting credits. If she got screenwriting credit for a major blockbuster, she didn't just "polish" a little bit of the script, she wrote significant portions of the script that made it into production. And given their historical backgrounds, it's clear that she and Fukunaga were responsible for the serious elements of the film, since that's not a capability that Purvis and Wade have demonstrated in any of their prior films.)
except its about lesbian/bisexual bait so it wins awards. in my opinion because they were looking to add female writing credits
And suddenly your agenda becomes clear...Most people aren't so open about being misogynists.
The article talks about Moonraker. It is imo the best Flemming Bond book, and in the running for the worst movie. The plot of the movie and book are not related.
If you want an idea of the plot of the book, you can watch "Die another day" which is the same. I wont spoil it, but read the book and watch the movie and you'll see what I mean.
I don't know how much Fleming's script differed from the book (and Die another day transposed the whole thing into a "modern" world with North Korea and the bad guy) but in a sense the Fleming book version had been made
I don't really see these as examples of bad CGI. But I noticed that I rarely notice "bad CGI". Maybe it's because I play a lot of videogames so I am more used to computer generated graphics? I keep reading online and my friends tell me how "the surf wave in Die Another Day looked horrible and I can't watch this movie because of it", "how fake Smiths look when Neo is fighting them in Matrix Reloaded" and I never really notice those things.
I haven't read James Fleming's book but would like to. I'm glad that the review does not explicitly claim that James Bond fights the Communists, something so often asserted by people who don't know what they're talking about. Ian Fleming created SPECTRE because he thought that the Cold War might end soon, and so wanted a nonpolitical opponent for Bond.
In the films, the USSR is Bond's opponent only in For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the silent backer in Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, but Auric Goldfinger and SPECTRE are the real enemies, and Thunderball establishes that SPECTRE is willing to work for anyone (including Western powers). Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Orlov in Octopussy, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day are explicitly rogue agents.
There was a submarine cave in the James Bond movie Die Another Day
Films have been speeding up for a century, in two ways. Editorial geography disappeared in the 1960s. Editorial geography example (not mine): Bogart gets phone call. Bogart gets up, walks out door. Bogart walks out door of building, gets into cab. Scene of Bogart in cab. Bogart gets out of cab, pays cabbie. Bogart walks into apartment building lobby. Pushes elevator button. Shot of elevator indicator coming down. Doors open. Bogart gets in. Shot of elevator indicator going up. Elevator doors open. Bogart gets out, walks down hall, rings doorbell. Lauren Bacall opens door. Bogart goes in. That's editorial geography. At one time, it was felt that audiences would get lost without such a sequence. Today, writers and directors would skip directly from the phone call to an interior shot of the apartment. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960) is said to have put an end to that.
Related to this is average shot length as a metric.[1][2] "2001" has an average shot length of 13 seconds. At the other extreme are the Bourne movies, which are now down to around 1.1 seconds per shot. James Bond movies have sped up over the years, with "Dr. No" at 7 seconds and "Die Another Day (2002)" at 2.4 seconds. This is an industry-wide trend.
Trailers are insane. Trailers routinely break the 1 second barrier today.
So there's been a speedup in two dimensions - removal of unnecessary context, and shorter shots. To a modern viewer, 2001 looks quite slow-paced.
With enough short shots, films can conceal the lack of a plot. (This is a problem with effects-heavy movies. After you leave the theater, you realize the plot made no sense. But it was a great effects demo reel.)
[1] http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php [2] http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2007/01/average-shot-length.html
Bond film tech is supposed to be slightly better than what we have. In the 1963 "From Russia with Love", Bond had a car phone. In Moonraker, Drax has a hidden space station. In "Die Another Day", the fight scene use robots with lasers that are powerful enough to sear steel and drill a hole through a head - in a fraction of a second.
I'm with Double0Seven in saying that the the server uses fan-less machines.
Interestingly I think that anti-government paranoia in the US is largely itself fed by all those movies in which some corrupt US government agency turns out to be the villain.
As a fun exercise, count the number of movies and TV shows in which the CIA is shown in a positive light. The FBI often is, the military usually is, the CIA almost never. Heck, the CIA has such a bad name in American movie land that on the odd occasion they want to show a good American spy (e.g. Die Another Day) they'll put 'em in the NSA instead despite the fact that the activities depicted are much more CIA-like than NSA-like.
You may be onto something here.
I remember reading somewhere that Bond gadgets become true after something like 30 years, however I suspect that this pace of development will be speed up dramatically as time goes on. Some examples off the top of my head: GPS - there's an old Bond movie with a analog 'homing device', weapons on cars, cars that can drive on the road and fly also, 'stealth technology' like in Die Another Day (in development).
Getting back to movie inspired OSs, the guy who designed the amazing gesture interface behind those in 'Minority Report' started a company and has prototype UI in development:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-report-computer-interface-makes-a-real-life-debut-20100217/