A Reappraisal of ‘Die Another Day’

There are plenty of reasons to like or dislike Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s unexpected and involuntary swan song to the franchise. Scroll into a couple of forums and you’ll find all the reasons to dislike it, most of the justifications use the words “invisible car” or “CGI” quite a lot. This is why, as if my books Beyond The Ice: The Case For and Against Die Another Day and a couple of articles weren’t enough, I have decided to write this article. Let’s be honest – the most obvious excuse is the 20th anniversary this week.

I will start by saying that the Lee Tamahori film went up and down in my rankings. I remember loving it when I first saw it on the big screen (January 2003 in my native Argentina) and then disliking it quite a lot as it reached home video. Yes, the slow-motion effects and speed ramps felt a bit too much for Bond’s subtlety, and then there’s the overload of CGI. Yet again, in hindsight, I feel all of these tropes were very characteristic of the productions released during the first lustrum of the new millennium, films like Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) and Swordfish (2001). In almost every big action film I can recall Hollywood toying with computer-generated graphics and rubbing all these new technologies in the audience’s face, perhaps as a way to make it very clear that we were in a new millennium and there’s more technology out there than your Compaq Presario 2100 PC or your Nokia 3310 cell phone.

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