GoldenEye

We're finally into the Bond movies I've definitely seen all the way through. The gap between the last film and this one was the longest in the series' history, and they even talked about rebooting it like they would end up doing 11 years later. They probably should have, because there's no reason it had to be tied to the existing continuity. Desmond Llewelyn as Q is the only returning actor, and the hiatus between films did him absolutely no good. He's always been an old guy, but he never looked like this. Pierce Brosnan is a solid Bond, but it's weird how the opening sequence supposes something that happened nine years earlier, when the character was in transition between Moore and Dalton. Judi Dench takes up the role of M, with them needing to explain she's a successor to the old one thanks to the switch in gender, and it's weird how she refers to an actor 18 years her junior as a "dinosaur of the Cold War". Despite these little things, it's a good film, the best in the series in a while.

It's in a slightly weird position, stuck right before CGI really took off in films, and it's a little strange to see so much slightly obvious work with miniatures for the first time in the series, right before the shift into computer effects. As they enter the 90s, the sex scenes become more explicit, especially a scene where Famke Janssen (the only significant female villain in Brosnan's films that he doesn't bone) kills a guy in coitus. There's also an increase in violence; Bond's kill total jumps into the twenties as he is seen firing a machine gun wildly into a crowd as several go down at once for the first time. Robbie Coltrane is a cool Russian guy, and Sean Bean's character is interesting. I mean... yeah, he's the villain. He betrays 007. Sorry, the movie's 14 years old. It's cool to see him "die" in the beginning only to come back as an adequate, fairly rape-y antagonist. If you've ever noticed, Bean gets a lot of roles where he either dies or disappears early or gets fucked over in some way, to see it subverted before it ever became a thing is neat. Anyway, Brosnan's first Bond film was his best, and still pretty good.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "GoldenEye" by Tina Turner
Foreign locations: Russia, Monte Carlo, Cuba
Bond, James Bond: 20:25
Martini shaken, not stirred: 20:05
Ladies seduced: 2
Chases: 2
Kills: 26, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 7