Die Another Day
Directed by Lee Tamahori, starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Rosamund Pike, Rick Yune, Toby Stephens, Michael Madsen, Will Yun Lee, Judi Dench, John Cleese, Samantha Bond, Colin Salmon.

A great crowd supported the Castlebar Rotary Club premiere of the new James Bond Film last Wednesday night (20 Nov 2002) at Mayo Movie World. But was the film any good? Of course having been fed and offered a glass or two of wine it may not have mattered too much whether the film was good or bad! In fact, however, it was as good as any of the 19 or so previous Bond Films and better than most. Great gals, great gadgets, great locations and exotic sets including a bizarre ice hotel in the shape of what looked like multiple MacDonald signs!

Outdoing Ursula Andress!

A fast car chase on ice with the baddies car just as well-equipped as JBs for a change - rockets, auto-fire machine guns, etc. I would have loved to have had a go at driving an Aston Martin at speed across the expansive Icelandic ice safe in the knowledge that a skid wasn't going to put you in the ditch. Always keeping up to date too, the film style of this scene used cutting edge editing technique, modern as would be expected. Some complaints about dodgy SFX though in places and indeed in the parachute/water-skiing scene the suspension of disbelief was pushed a little bit as the computer generated graphics started to take over.

And what about Halle Berry's entrance? Cue music, cue bikini, cue the gorgeous Halle emerging from the deep, cue awful double entendre jokes - or maybe they are just single entendre jokes? She outdid Ursula Andress in fact. And if you are a lady of course you will have scene after scene with the bould Pierce Brosnan looking handsome as always including a long intro piece where he grows his hair long.

The movie DAD has a few references to past bond films including Brosnan switching on the old jet pack that Q still has stored in the gadget room. Cleese is great in the Q role and gets to apply generous dollops of his Fawlty Towers sense of exasperation to the errant 007 with some great one-liners. The other reference to a previous bond is the catfight between the main two ladies - it looked like the writers had really trawled back through the archive to From Russia with Love. Move the scene from a gypsy campfire to a burning aircraft and hey presto there you are.

The story? You ask? Lots of explosions…conflict diamonds… satellite burning holes in the ground… traitors… underwater scenes... just all the usual stuff.

Peter Jordan's photos at the Castlebar Rotary Premiere Night

© Copyright 2006 by the author(s)/photographer(s) and www.castlebar.ie

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