Tomorrow Never Dies

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) is about a media proprietor trying to start a war. Elliot Carver runs a broadcasting empire. He wants transmission rights in China and cannot get them. His plan is to provoke a confrontation between the British navy and China and report it first. He sinks a ship, brings down an aircraft, and each side blames the other. This time Bond's opponent is not a state but a corporation, and its weapon is news. The idea was early for its moment: news is used as a weapon, and Carver manufactures events and then reports them. In one scene he has a headline written for something that has not happened yet. Michelle Yeoh plays an agent of Chinese intelligence and is among the first women in the series to work as Bond's equal. She did her own fights and brought technique from Hong Kong cinema into the film. Jonathan Pryce plays Carver. It is Pierce Brosnan's second Bond. The car park sequence in Hamburg is the best of it: Bond drives from the back seat using a telephone. The screenplay was unfinished when shooting began; it was written during production and it shows in the gaps in the plot. It opened the same week as Titanic and was overshadowed commercially, though it still did well. It runs 119 minutes. Good for: Bond, nineties action, and espionage. Less good for: the plot is thin and the villain's scheme is over complicated.