Goldeneye was the last real James Bond film

I wrapped up watching the Pierce Brosnan films recently and wanted to come up with some controversial and incendiary thread . . .

Just kidding. Brosnan's Bond films are really a curious thing. They were designed to drag Bond into the 21st century basically. The stories were tech savvy, the Bond girls were generally tougher, to some degree, Bond was even beat down a bit on the gender front from M.

Mostly I say "so what" to a lot of these. The franchise has to evolve or die, just like everything else on this planet. But what I do want to point out is that Goldeneye really has a classic feel to it. It's possible to accomplish a lot of the classic element Bond checklist and still be in the modern era. It succeeded in moving Bond into the post-Cold War world where the others failed.

After Goldeneye, we seem to get a lot of flaccid villains and from there, the stories devolve. I tended to enjoy Tomorrow Never Dies more than not but that was mostly because of Michelle Yeoh. Michelle's role was also really bucking the trend. At least it was in a good way though.

Things really fell off the map with The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day. Brosnan was good but gosh those are sloppy films.

I don't want to say too much because this is turning into a sloppy post already and I'm curious to see what others think about the Brosnan era and his canon of Bond films in the franchise.

In short: Good Bond, bad set of films except for Goldeneye




P.S. Famke Janssen and her line during the train derailment scene in Goldeneye might just be one of the single greatest villain moments in all Bond films.

 

I wouldn't go so far as to write them all off (or even co-sign on the thread title. yikes.) but Goldeneye is certainly the best of the Brosnan bunch.

Plus, the villain plot stands out.

Evil media moguls?
Something vaguely related to oil?
Looming threat of WWIII because of petty family feuds?
Been there done that.

A rogue satellite squashing all technology in the heart of Europe? Now that's scary.

And then there's the tank.

And, you know, it also spawned one of the greatest video games of all time, never mind video games based on a film. Just to sweeten the pot.

 

Imho, The Feirstein penned Tomorrow Never Dies is close to Goldeneye quality.

And then...two hacks took over.

 

Goldeneye is my fav. Brosnan Bond movie.

OHMSS was the last real Bond film.

 

Remington Steele was, by far, the worst Bond.

Agree.

Agree. (Although The World Is Not Enough had some great eye candy. Still a terrible movie though.)


Sean Connery was the best Bond.

Timothy Dalton was the most underrated Bond.

Casino Royale (2006) was the last real Bond film. (However, I am not looking for a debate as to whether Connery’s last Bond film, was the last real Bond film.)

 

Some would argue License to Kill was the last one, which borrowed ideas from Live and Let Die.

 

I think Goldeneye was the best Brosnan Bond picture. But I don’t dislike the later ones he did

That said I enjoyed the Craig Bonds overall more than the Brosnans

 

No.

 

Yes. Shame he only did a couple. Nearest to Connery I reckon.

 

Saw Goldeneye in the theater with my Dad and High School friend when it came out, and we all enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed Casino Royale and Skyfall with Daniel Craig as well. Hope the new one holds up, if the “one good, one lousy” rule still applies.

 

Goldfinger was the last great Bond film. lol



but true! Thunderball Is a bore.

 

When I think of James Bond, I think of Sean Connery. Still, I enjoy Daniel Craig as Bond, and plan to see the new Bond film this weekend. I like both Timothy Dalton's and Pierce Brosnin's work in various projects, but I never connected with them as James Bond. The remaining-even Roger Moore-just never got in my head as Bond.

 

Yes, I love that film, although I think it was the first one to not take its title from anything written by Ian Fleming? (If we don't count Never Say Never Again in the main series).

 

I think Brosnan was a fine Bond. He incorporated enough Connery and Moore mannerisms while also adding a sprinkling of his own charm to the films. Overall I think the films let Brosnan down.

Tomorrow Never Dies is my favourite of the bunch, with Goldeneye not far behind.

The World Is Not Enough is quite good but suffers from a terrible Bond girl in Denise Richards and I feel like they missed a trick by not making the final showdown between Bond and Elektra, who could've been positioned more effectively as the true villain of the film.

Die Another Day starts well enough and then goes in the toilet.

I imagine people's favourites will depend on which generation they grew up in. I was born in 1985, so Brosnan's films wer on my cultural radar. I nostalgically favour those because they remind me of being a kid and watching movies.

Daniel Craig has been great but I'm glad he's moving on now. The new film is ok, but far too long. A fitting send-off though.

 

I enjoyed Goldeneye a lot and it is Brosnan's best Bond film. Unfortunately he was handed some awful scripts and storylines and I don't blame him from stepping away. The last great James Bond film was Casino Royale and I'm honestly not a fan of Daniel Craig. I'm intrigued to see who will end up being his replacement, I'm in the camp that they should have replaced him before No Time To Die, he looks just as old as Roger Moore did in 'A View To A Kill'.

 

I agree that Goldeneye was the best, but I also really enjoyed Tomorrow Never Dies. TND might have been a bit of a mess, but it still felt like a classic Bond film (it reminded me of the likes of Moonraker or Live and Let Die).

Tomorrow Never Dies was probably the last Bond film I enjoyed. The Craig films feel like a bad Bourne Identity knock-off.

 

The first half of Goldfinger was good, but I think the second half just looks like an Irving Allen/Matt Helm cheesefest.

 

I would say the first Casino Royale was the last Bond film, since it's the last one to properly reflect the intensity and realisticness of the novels.

 

Goldeneye was a fantastic film and Brosnans best outing, but Tomorrow Never Dies comes pretty close. If not for Denise Richards, World is Not Enough is ok. Die Another Day....dumpster fire.

 

Licence To Kill draws a lot from the Live And Let Die novel. The novel had mostly nothing to do with the LALD film other than character names and behaviors.

Goldeneye seemed to be the first film without any obvious Fleming elements.

 

Apparently I still struggle with verbalizing this.

If you watch Goldeneye, stylistically it is very much in the old vein of Bond. The Aston, his clothes, the camera work, the look of the sets, the feel of the film. All of this "feels" more like a classic Bond film to me.

After Goldeneye, the style really diverted to a whole new thing. It felt like to me the last vestiges of old Bond were gone.

Tomorrow Never Dies is great in all aspects except for the villian. Totally a weinie of a villian. It was also an extremely slick film stylistically. Bond somehow seemed out of place. Like he was just pasted over the scenery. Brosnan does well and I like his style. I've already mentioned my love for Michelle Yeoh. Supercop!

The World Is Not Enough contains another dopey and unthreatening villian. Unfortunately the other aspects of the film don't make up the difference. The ski scene was good but everything else was redundant, needlessly protracted or just plain boring. Sophie Marceau is wasted on the role. That Bond girl/villian is blindly ineffective yet she thinks she's all that and a bag of potato chips. Denise Richards is nothing more than eye candy (yes this is sexist to prove my point) and is miscast as we needed something more like a Holly Goodhead.

Die Another Day. What a crock. I kind of was half getting into the fencing scene but the rest is another fine Pierce acting moment lost in a crap film. Did two junior high boys write this because there more sexual one-liners in this film than every Benny Hill episode rolled into one. Gustav Graves is the type of twerp I'd probably give a wedgie to and push over if he ever tried to pull any of the macho crap on me. And I've never bullied a single person in my life. The falsely superior bad girl like with Sophie Marceau's character returns in a seriously wasted Rosamund Pike. She is too good for this frost queen turned yappy dog. And sadly Halle Berry delivered a few lines well but felt even more miscast and out of place than Denise Richards.

And the Daniel Craig films? Well, that's a future thread, but like I said . . . Goldeneye was the last real Bond film.

 

I would say the last two good bond films are Goldeneye and Casino Royale.
And the common bond between those two films is the director Martin Campbell (Who I met once while he was directing No Escape)
Frankly I wish he did more James Bond FIlms

 

IMO, From Russia with Love was the only real James Bond film.

 

I think this thread is already going off the rails partly because the OP muddied the waters as he admitted. The only interesting issue the OP is expressing is the degree of stylistic continuity between Goldeneye and later films with the earlier Bond films. It has nothing to do with whether someone likes this or that Bond movie. However the OP confused this clear statement issue by conflating stylistic non-continuity with what he didn't like. So the OP stated that in his opinion Goldeneye was the last film with clear stylistic continuity. That seems to me more interesting than rehashing the Bond film by film thread on who likes what.