Yes, this is Pierce Brosnan’s debut as James Bond, but just as importantly it marks the arrival of director Martin Campbell (who would go on to make two Zorro films and the even better Bond installment, Daniel Craig’s Casino Royale). This is a real action film, from its opening sequence of Bond’s infiltration of a chemical-weapons facility (the first aerial shot of a massive concrete dam is a beauty) to the vicious, sexually tinged fight scenes between Bond and Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp (playing a Bond girl and henchwoman rolled into one, as if Jaws and Anya Amasova, from The Spy Who Loved Me, had a baby who grew up to be a supermodel). Brosnan is excellent, wearing Bond more lightly than any of his predecessors. Yet unlike, say, Roger Moore, he still demands to be taken seriously. At this point, so did the series. By bringing in Judi Dench as M (she calls Bond a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur … a relic of the Cold War”) and hinting at the darkness in Bond’s past, this sets the stage for the rough-edged, real-world 007 we would eventually get in Casino Royale (albeit after some sillier Brosnan adventures). GoldenEye is about the passing of eras both on the screen (Cold War spy games evolving into something even trickier; spy reputations no longer carrying the same cachet) and off.
