Hacker Cinema
Tomorrow Never Dies
1997 · Film · 119 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode
A deranged media mogul is staging international incidents to pit the world's superpowers against each other. Now James Bond must take on this evil mastermind in an adrenaline-charged battle to end his reign of terror and prevent global pandemonium.
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14 comments on Hacker News
I mean, I take the comment about supervillains as mostly a joke, so I don’t really feel a need to strictly interrogate it for factual accuracy.
But also I do think it fits. Looking at super villains, they’re usually just powerful people with slightly unusual property, who also happen to be evil.
Lex Luthor’s company Lexcorp was an aerospace company. In the first Superman movie, Luthor was a pretty weird and relatively unremarkable guy. In the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies the super villain was just a guy with a global media company who created calamity and murder so that he could report on it first.
Nuclear power and radiation have often been themes for comic book heroes and villains. I think it’s reasonable to read the (misleading) headline and think “oh great now Bezos owns a nuclear power plant, he’s going to become a super villain” as the sort of non-serious comment prevalent on the internet. People say the same about Musk all the time.
I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally.
The phone in Tomorrow Never Dies does have full color HD streaming video from the car as it's remote controlled, look at your own link (and the one pointed out by a sibling comment). The monochrome green UI is just what you see on start-up.
Secondly, the Bond movies are set in the modern day (or close enough). So unlike say 2001 A Space Oddesey the gadgets Q comes up with aren't an attempt to foresee technology development in the distant future.
So the fact that it uses a UI in common use in the mid-90s is to be expected.
Generally speaking (there's some exceptions) no technology in the Bond universe is too outlandish to pass as potential modern day advancements in some top-secret MI-6 laboratory.
In "Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997) James Bond drives his BMW remotely via a cell phone. Now there are multiple instances of prior art.
EDIT: corrected which movie
> Yes this means that scene from the cheesy action movie (can't remember which one) where Arnold Schwartzenegger finds himself on the ground in the cockpit of a russian plane and proceeds to blow up all the badguys while on the ground couldn't happen in real life.
I think you meant "Tomorrow Never Dies" and the actor was Pierce Brosnan. Took me forever to find that, is it the right one?
Murdoch is portrayed in the James Bond movie "Tomorrow Never Dies" where he actually attempts to start a nuclear war with China.
> You also could never afford to piss America off, which is why every other protagonist in hollywood movies is some Tom Cruise lookalike who combats people who speak English in a broken Russian accent.
Michael Moore's documentaries get shown in theatres as do others.
Such movies about Chinese bad actors wouldn't get even a single showing in China. And would probably get the director placed in jail.
You can slag on America for lots of things. This isn't one of them.
And, by the way, one of James Bond's enemies was effectively Rupert Murdoch (Tomorrow Never Dies). So, even English enemies appear in Hollywood films.
GPS spoofing is a big part of the Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”. Funny that in a movie it seemed totally fake, something invented for the plot, and yet here I see it’s a real thing.
Interesting how truth can be too much for fiction sometimes.
Highly recommend the book National Security Cinema by Tom Secker and Matthew Alfred.
They trawled through FOI documents to uncover a lengthy history of US intelligence agencies having holywood scripts changed to suit their needs.
> the US government has worked behind the scenes on over 800 major movies and more than 1,000 TV titles.
> Vietnam is evidently another sore topic for the US military, which also removed a reference to the war from the screenplay for Hulk (2003)
> It seems that any reference to military suicide — even an off-hand remark in a superhero action-comedy adventure — is something the DOD’s Hollywood office will not allow.
> If there are characters, action or dialogue that the DOD don’t approve of then the film-maker has to make changes to accommodate the military’s demands. If they refuse then the Pentagon packs up its toys and goes home. To obtain full cooperation the producers have to sign contracts — Production Assistance Agreements — which lock them into using a military-approved version of the script.
> Strangely, Phil Strub denied that there was any support for Tomorrow Never Dies. But the DOD are credited at the end of the film and we obtained a copy of the Production Assistance Agreement between the producers and the Pentagon.
> changing the code name of the military operation to capture the Hulk from ‘Ranch Hand’ to ‘Angry Man’. ‘Ranch Hand’ is the name of a real military operation that saw the US Air Force dump millions of gallons of pesticides and other poisons onto the Vietnamese countryside, rendering millions of acres of farmland poisoned and infertile.
> They also removed dialogue referring to ‘all those boys, guinea pigs, dying from radiation, and germ warfare’, an apparent reference to covert military experiments on human subjects.
China and Russia really have no qualms about being explicit in their censorship ways, most the population are aware of it. The Americans generally stay coy and go to great lengths to hide or at least minimise knowledge of what they are doing propaganda-wise because culturally it's an embarrassment and would be politically unpalatable to a country where freedom of speech and freedom from government interference are expected.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-expose-direct-us-military-intelligence-influence-on-1-800-movies-and-tv-shows-36433107c307
Can still be jammed of course, but hacking GPS was the plot of the Bond Film "Tomorrow Never Dies", where Rupert Murdoch attempts to instigate a global war to sell more newspapers
I think it's a common thing in TV/cinema. The villain in Skyfall looked similar to Julian Assange. The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was pretty much Steve Jobs.
He chose to make a public statement, no one forced him to.
Also, the hostility directed at Zuckerberg and Facebook is not "irrational". His company uses the banner of "providing internet access to all" to try to create a stranglehold on how the worlds poorest people get access to information.
That's basically Elliot Carver from 007:Tomorrow Never Dies. In case you haven't seen it and the general concept of a single company having such a massive amount of control over access to information doesn't tip you off: Carver is the bad guy in the movie.
Sounds like the plot to this 1997 Bond movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_never_dies
>Actually spoofing GPS - which would involve masking the actual GPS signal and producing the precise nanosecond differentials from a simulated fleet of satellites needed to give a false location, seems highly unbelievable.
Literally the plot of the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies.
Pretend that
1. they jam the control signal and the drone goes into safe mode, tries to return to base.
2. Now, let's also jam the GPS signal with fake information to distort the earth's map so that it thinks that the base is somewhere inside Iran.
3. Show pretty pictures to the press with the intact drone.
I think I saw some movie about this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies