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Dia Another Day. If I was the kind of person who used the word ‘awesome’ I could probably find a sentence to fit it in.

Of course, when you’ve seen it it’s obvious that it was going to be good, as it’s basically a collage of the best bits of every Bond film there has ever been.

* Dr No had mechanical hands. So does Die Another Day baddie Gustav Graves.
* Bond’s little underwater breathing device from Thunderball crops up again.
* In Octopussy Bond gambled with the head baddie for a piece of damning evidence. In Die Another Day Bond… erm… gambles with the head baddie for a piece of damning evidence.
* The space-weapon in Diamonds Are Forever is pretty much the same space weapon from Die Another Day.
* There’s more or less a low-budget replica of Scaramanga’s fun house from Man with the Golden Gun, in a Cuban clinic in Die Another Day.
* In Moonraker, Bond’s watch houses a small explosive pin. In Die Another Day, Bond’s watch houses a small explosive pin.
* In Octopussy the main protagonists are a splinter group of the military hell-bent on European domination. In Dia Another Day the main protagonists are a splinter group of the North Korean army hell-bent on domination of the whole Korean peninsula.
* In Dr No the Bond girl is first seen rising up out of the water like a slender bikini-clad godzilla. In Die Another Day it’s the same.
* The Spy Who Loved Me opens with Bond skiing off the edge of a cliff and using a parachute to get safely away. In Die Another Day, Bond’s vehicle drives off the edge of an icy cliff and he uses a parachute to get safely away.
* The most rediculous scene in A View to a Kill involves surfing in Iceland (although it’s supposed to be Siberia). The most rediculous scene in Die Another Day involves surfing in Iceland.
* Q’s workshop is jammed full of gadgets from the old films, including the Thunderball jet pack and the fold-up plane from Octopussy.

There’s plenty of new stuff in there too, though, including holodeck-esque stuff from Star Trek, surf scenes that could have been taken from Point Break and a command centre on a jumbo jet that could have come straight out of Air Force One (including what the plane went through).

Two and a bit hours of mindless fun that I’d happily sit through again. Can’t help wondering how it will fare up over time, though. It looks great at the moment, but there are some dodgy effects here and there, and perhaps once you look past the spectacle and the NOISE the plot won’t stand up to close scrutiny, but then which Bond film ever did?

So, it was a fun evening, made all the better for the fact the film was free, tacked onto the end of a press-launch party with vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred), roulette tables and a James Bond quiz that I won. The prize was a flat panel monitor, which is handy as my screen is on its last legs.

It was the most valuable prize on offer, and the most practical, but I can’t help feeling the box-set of every Bond DVD would have been more fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 27th, 2002 at 10:17 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.