GoldenEye

This is rather wonderfully geared up with an overture from Thunderball, a fine feint out of Blue Thunder, and a key transition from Three Days of the Condor, after which it really begins to elaborate the theme suggested by the surreal title sequence, all nudes (one of which extrudes a pistol from her mouth) and toppling Soviet statues.

Its elegance might be expressed as the delicacy of its punchlines in relation to the grandeur of its setups. Bond bungee-jumps off that gigantic dam hundreds of feet high, and when at last he reaches the end of his tether, he shoots a small anchor into the base of it, and there you are.

Campbell copes with John Glen’s accelerations, and bestows a South Seas vastness on his Caribbean vision.

Jack Wade the CIA man is carefully calculated to pay back Brannigan, but then he tears out in 007’s BMW.

Significant allusions are to Cat People and North by Northwest.

One would not presume to call Rémy Julienne’s tank-car chase his best work, but it seems unprecedented in the monumental delicacy of its destruction.

If it were possible to isolate Campbell’s specific construction identifiably, it might center around two scenes of Bond awaking from unconsciousness, first dramatically to a woman screaming as both are trapped in a helicopter rigged for demolition, and then impressionistically after the plane crash as a commando descends from a helicopter above him.

Grishenko’s resemblance to Harry Potter is not the least amusing thing in this delirious cinematic defense of harmony in contemporary international relations—and there is little to be compared with Famke Janssen’s delirious variant of Barbara Carrera’s utterly mad villainess in Never Say Never Again.

Bond’s rebuke from M is a tribute to her predecessor in Never Say Never Again.

“Siberian separatists” are the fall guys of the raid on Severnaya, but the real villain is a son of a Cossack. A certain offshore island (cf. You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me) is to receive the contents of Threadneedle Street by electronic transfer, all records will be obliterated.

One brief shot in the Severnaya raid has a handheld camera quick as Katzin or Russell. The manticore puts in a rare film appearance.