Die Another Day

The exceedingly recherché and complicated series of images which forms the plot boils down to a fraudulent parvenu billionaire who dreams of subjugating the Earth by means of a solar weapon called Icarus (this is directly taken from The Man with the Golden Gun).

From this point, it’s possible to admire the compression and alteration by surrealistic processes of his character, looking backward from the British adventurer and fencing master to the diamond smuggler and the ambitious North Korean army colonel. Tamahori’s fantastical direction may be said to have in view this grotesque, raw-boned conceit and feigned to heighten it with, for example, a “dream mask” for insomniacs evoking the robot in Lang’s Metropolis.

The scouring imagery of a Cuban DNA replacement therapy center, examined by Bond in the guise of a cigar exporter, and combined with the rival MI6 agent who has betrayed him because he is too forthcoming, makes not only for The Island of Dr. Moreau but a discreetly arranged idea from Thunderball put into the formulation.

The visual allusion to Dr. No is structural as well, etc.