‘Die Another Day’ is back in UK cinemas this week as the 60th Anniversary train clatters closer to its destination in October. The film has suffered a lot of revisionist history from Bond fandom. With all the mocking of the film, it’s easy to forget that, in its day, it was one of the most successful ever at the box office, and many fans initially spoke highly of it - only to revise their opinions later. One of the criticisms that is usually lodged against it, other than the sub-par CGI of the Bond figure on the infamous para surfing sequence, is that it strayed way too far into science fiction territory. Have these folks seen ‘You Only Live Twice’ or ‘Moonraker’?
The inconvenient truth is that a lot of the ‘Spy-Fi’ elements of ‘Die Another Day’ were actually rooted in real-world proof of concept technologies. Here are a few of them:
The Invisible Car. Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade wrote the car to have adaptive camouflage - a technology that the US government was investing in at the time and British defense tech firm BAE Systems had protoyped. Although cost prohibitive, it could hide a tank on a hillside. Other applications involved an invisible cloak that was demonstrated before the film came out. Unfortunately, director Lee Tamahori ran with the idea too far and made even the rubber on the wheels invisible. Purvis & Wade took a lot of flack for this, unfairly, although the duo does have a witty retort in their defence: “There have always been invisible cars in Bond films, you just haven’t seen them.”
Space Mirrors. Decades before the film was produced, Russia was funding research into a giant space mirror to reflect the sun’s energy onto an area like Siberia to turn the desolate landscape into something more habitable and suitable for agriculture. A system was launched and successfully tested in 1993. However, the cost of the full-scale program was ultimately deemed too expensive, and the prototype system met its untimely end when it collided with Mir. This is a great example of writers taking a benign piece of technology and twisting its use for nefarious purposes, by having Moon use Icarus as a weapon for his political ends. This was the 2002 film adaptation of Hugo Drax’s rockets in Ian Fleming’s ‘Moonraker’ novel.
Dream Machines. Fatal familial insomnia is a real but poorly understood genetic disease that impacts a tiny number of the world’s population and, as the name suggests, leads to early death. Sufferers cannot sleep. In the film, it is a side-effect of gene therapy. The solution? A dream machine that can induce REM sleep. Sure, the production department’s use of fiber optics and flashy lights did not convince many, but 20 years later, that’s exactly what is happening now. Four venues in the UK opened ‘Dreamachine’ experiences this summer. Flashy lights included.
News
Sir Sean Connery’s widow, Micheline Roquebrune (93) was joined by family and close personal friends to mark what would have been his 92nd birthday on Thursday last week. The mourners gathered at the Dalmeny Estate overlooking the River Forth neat South Queensferry shortly after arriving in Scotland in a chartered luxury train to visit secret locations to scatter the Bond star’s ashes.
Congratulations to Youtuber @Graslu00 for winning the GoldenEye World Championships held at the Centre For Computer History in Cambridge last weekend. The event was held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic Nintendo 64 game.
Listen
To coincide with its return to UK cinemas this week (and its broadcast by ITV primetime on Saturday) the James Bond & Friends podcast turned its attention to the 40th-anniversary adventure with a positive mindset to push against the commonly held opinion that this film is one of the worst. We went deep on a few of the most contentious topics and did not get to cover everything, so this is one film that we will likely revisit in depth again as it hits its 20th anniversary in December.
Watch
Visual effects artists Nigel Blake and the late, Bill Pearson talk about their miniature work for ‘Die Another Day’. With these amazing models and the tradition of the Bond series, it’s a shame that they were augmented with CGI in the final film. This video is a segment from ‘Sense of Scale’ documentary.
MI6 Archives
Did you know ‘Die Another Day’ had an award-winning marketing campaign? For the Japanese release of ‘Die Another Day,’ EON and Fox wanted a fresh and vibrant poster campaign that would pivot away from the more traditional output of the UK and US designs, especially as local fans would have to wait three months longer than most of the rest of the world. A New York City-based agency was hired and they produced some stunning concepts for the film that would end up landing them a Yomiuri Advertising Award that year.
Exit Through The Gift Shop
‘SPECTRE: The Board Game’ is available to purchase now in the USA and pre-order in the UK (it comes out on September 17th). You can order it through Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
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Hmm... none of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies should be considered in the "worst". It was a different era, a bit silly but he had charm to spare!
A Bond board game but only of the villains? Wouldn't they have more success if they included the "good guys"? (especially the Bond girls)