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This James Bond film from 1995, reissued for its 30th anniversary, is named after Ian Fleming’s own “Goldeneye” estate in Jamaica – though perhaps oddly, the film’s only Caribbean location is supposed to be Cuba. There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, although perhaps it’s best experienced on TV over Christmas in a Quality Street stupor. GoldenEye was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as 007, the first to see Judi Dench as M, and the first film to challenge its own franchise identity. As M crisply says to Bond: “I think you are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the cold war” – although her criticism of her star agent begins and ends with that description.
The film gamely attempts to reposition itself in the new post-Soviet world, with a key scene (and some of the opening sequence) taking place among the discarded, crumbling statues of Soviet heroes. Perhaps even more gamely, it revives the memory of the Lienz Cossacks who were chillingly repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war by the British to be slaughtered by Stalin.
There are other historical points of interest: like many 90s films, it is waking up to the possibilities of the online world, with blocky computer graphics of Microsoft Internet Explorer vintage and quaint Chicago font. Alan Cumming plays a figure who was to become an almost indispensable staple of drama-thrillers for decades to come: the geeky, nerdy computer hacker who can conveniently perform near-magical feats inside a plausibly realist scenario. And yet from the current vantage point, this film, not yet entirely dominated by digital effects, looks like a 1960s-vintage second world war film.
The story begins as Bond infiltrates a Soviet military facility in the 80s alongside fellow agent 006 (Sean Bean), an adventure which ends in spectacular disaster. Fast forward nine years to the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Bond finds himself up against a rogue Russian mob planning to steal a Soviet space weapon called GoldenEye and use it to destroy the banking system, after removing all the money from it … or something. In fact, the exact point of stealing the GoldenEye system seems a bit sketchy. James comes into contact with super-sexy dom Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), sweetly romantic Natalya Simonova (Polish-Swedish star Izabella Scorupco) and corrupt Russian General Ourumov (Gottfried John). Robbie Coltrane could have been given more to do as Russian spy turned gangster Valentin Zukovsky, or indeed entrusted with the actual villain role, and Joe Don Baker is good-ol’-boy CIA man Jack Wade.
In truth, I was never quite persuaded of Pierce Brosnan as 007, personable though his post-Bond career has proved to have been; he seems to be very close to the Roger Moore model, with elaborately tailored suits and self-aware cuff-shooting sophistication privileged over fisticuffs and action, and yet he is not given much actual on-screen humour. There is in fact a very funny initial scene with Desmond Llewelyn as Q, although the weaponry in the new BMW goes unused.
