Tomorrow Never Dies

Sunday 26th April

We start in a rather chilly terrorist base neat the Russian border being watched by agents equipped with the latest periscope recording equipment (surely with inbuilt VCR) which is streaming to an intelligence base giving M and the British army a who’s who of the terrorists in the overly detailed style of a 90s Saturday evening family entertainment show.  Amongst all this Bond has taken it upon himself to promote the dangers of smoking, proving how a single cigarette can trigger several unwanted missiles and torpedoes to destroy a whole basecamp.

The Carver Media Group, if only they’d had twitter, the whole thing would have been much simpler for them. Undercover as a banker James infiltrates the kick off party and rather unsurprisingly has Mrs Caver leaving her husband for him within a matter of hours and even less unsurprisingly like all of James’ conquests turned clingy she also dies within a matter of hours.

Like all good Bond films James has a new lady friend in this instalment, this time she has a german accent and four wheels; it would appear Q has outdone himself, providing 007 with a female version of knightrider – I was never a fan so no idea who is ripping who off here but for me the Mario Kart style car chases in this defiantly gives this version the edge.

In essence Elliot Carver is taking advantage of the pre-facebook ages where people still read newspapers to manipulate the news to cause world war three starting between China and the UK. Lucky then that Bond befriends a Chinese agent during his adventure so together they can try to warn their homelands that they are essentially being played by the middle man.

Once again we’re into the last twenty minutes of the film when everything starts kicking off, and once again we’re on a secret underwater base and it’s the five minute countdown until missile launch; surely by now someone has created a device which can launch a missile without the incessant countdown which may as well be called “countdown to being deactivated with less than 5 seconds to spare by some extremely unlikely and unplanned by Bond’s part”.  With two minutes to go James has just crawled out of another explosion and it’s time for the one to one between Bond and the main villain, with him dead it’s time to defeat Elliot’s main henchman, save the girl from drowning and disable the missile – all with forty seconds to go.  The obvious answer, allow the missile to explode, just don’t let it launch; leave the henchman trapped next to the missile then jump into the sea to give the girl mouth to mouth underwater under the explosion is over – simple really.

I quite liked this; I think mainly because it was almost a clever play on how easily manipulated we all are by the media; send a British missile hurtling into China and it won’t take them long to decide who sent it – or maybe I’m thinking too much into this… erm…. Cars, bikes, explosions yeh!