First Weekend At Number One: 11/19/1995
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
I will be so honest: I was way too old when I realized that the Goldeneye game was based on a movie.
When you grow up engrossed in the video game culture of the 2000s like I did, one of the games that gets brought up the most when discussing important points in the medium’s history is Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64. Released in 1997, the first person shooter is regarded by many as one of the most important titles of the era. In a time when the still nascent first person shooter genre was mostly centered on PC, Goldeneye was special on principle because of its status as a console exclusive.
For a whole half-generation above me though, what this game is most remembered for is its legendary split-screen multiplayer. The easy ability for up to four friends, siblings, or roommates to play hours upon hours of competitive Bond action ensured the Goldeneye adaptation a place in both gaming history and Millennial nostalgia posts. “Remember when you could just go to your friend’s house and play Goldeneye for hours and life was good?”
I’ve never played Goldeneye. I’ve only held a Nintendo 64 controller twice in my life, both when I was extremely young and barely had a grasp on what video games even were. I’ve long looked at nostalgia for this game and the era around it as separate to my own experiences. Once we start getting to children's movies adapted to Gamecube games, then we can talk halcyon days.
Still, the game’s cultural ubiquity meant that in my head, Goldeneye is a video game that many people love first and a major installment in a legendary film franchise second. So widely discussed in the gaming zeitgeist is the adaptation that I assumed the movie it was based on would just be a minor pop culture footnote by comparison. As it turns out, the movie version of Goldeneye is, for one of the biggest film franchises of all time, as important as the game it spawned.
I’m assuming I don’t need to tell you who James Bond is. Agent 007 is one of the most famous characters in all of fiction, largely known 25 films adapting the novels of Ian Fleming that date back to the early 1960s. Dastardly plots, cool gadgets, beautiful women and locales to match. With new actors, like Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and George Lazenby, taking over the role of the MI6 agent every few years, as well as continued public interest in espionage thanks to the Cold War, the popularity of the franchise held firm through the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The last James Bond movie before Goldeneye was 1989’s License to Kill, the third Bond film to star actor Timothy Dalton as the legendary spy. The six year gap between Goldeneye and its predecessor remains tied for the longest in franchise history, and if you discount the COVID pandemic delay of No Time to Die, the wait from ‘89 to ‘95 is first with a bullet fired from a Walther PPK.
This was not according to plan. License was meant to be followed up within a couple of years with another Dalton feature, likely another attempt at grounding the Bond character as something resembling a real human being. Good effort, Dalton and company, but License to Kill is also the movie where Bond is attacked by Hong Kong ninjas in Mexico while spying on a cartel leader and then pops a semi truck wheelie to get through a pillar of flame. I don’t hate License to Kill, but I don’t ever need to see it again or recommend it to anyone except franchise completionists [it gets a 2.5/5].
License to Kill was a total bomb. To this day, it’s the worst performing film in the Bond franchise when adjusted for inflation. Even though critics didn’t hate it, the audience rejection was powerful enough for longtime series steward Albert Broccoli to step down as lead producer and hand the reins of the franchise to his daughter Barbara and stepson Michael. That transition of power would already be a delaying factor for any franchise, but that was only the start of Goldeneye’s long road to release.
While the Broccoli family sorted out new responsibilities and commissioned the first draft of the screenplay for the License follow-up, MGM/UA, Bond’s longtime home studio, was circling the drain of an acquisition by Australian private equity firm Qintex. However, the deal fell apart at the eleventh hour, allowing a Canadian company, Pathé Entertainment, to swoop in and purchase MGM instead. Immediately, Pathé began shopping around licensing rights for its freshly acquired IP, including Bond.
Danjaq, the Broccoli-owned holding company responsible for the Bond IP, was unhappy with what they perceived as a massive undervaluing of the Bond license rights by Pathé and sued. There were countersuits. Things got ugly.
In 1991, Pathé Entertainment declared bankruptcy and sold off MGM/UA to French bank Crédit Lyonnais, which would maintain oversight of the studio until ‘96. The lawsuits weren’t cleared up, however, until late 1992, two years after production was meant to have started on the follow-up to License to Kill. By the time the studio finally had time to focus on making a new Bond movie, circumstances were vastly different.
First and foremost: the Cold War was over. The era of exciting, dangerous espionage between two parallel superpowers was no longer reality, just a pastiche of a bygone era. The Berlin Wall had fallen on live TV less than 6 months after License to Kill was released. So much of the franchise was dedicated to plots where the Cold War threatened to turn hot. What do we do, then, with a character like James Bond, especially when his last movie did so poorly at the box office?
Moreover, who could even be Bond now? Timothy Dalton’s contract to play the agent expired in 1993. When actor and studio were unable to come to terms on a new deal, there was suddenly a physical void at the center of the franchise to match the philosophical one behind it. If the franchise wanted to continue, it would have to be a complete reset on every level: tone, style, and star.
First, the Broccoli’s had to figure out the answer to “Who?”. Thankfully for them, one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen was available to chat.
Irish actor Pierce Brosnan had been up for the role of Bond before in the 1980s after Moore hung up the tuxedo, but other commitments kept him from becoming 007. Now, the actor had the time and the motivation to go for the role. Sadly, his wife of 17 years, actress Cassandra Harris, had passed away in 1991 of ovarian cancer. She had been a Bond Girl in For Your Eyes Only in ‘81, and had always thought her husband would be an excellent Bond.
Three years after her passing, her wish came true. Brosnan was announced as the newest James Bond at a press conference in 1994 in front of hundreds of journalists from around the world, about a year after increased American awareness of him thanks to his role in Mrs. Doubtfire [3.5/5].
How do you justify a new Bond movie in the mid-90s, then? Screenwriters Michael France and Bruce Feirstein came up with a creative answer. They put together a story that simultaneously appeals to the nostalgia of classic Sean Connery and Roger Moore era Bond films that also acted as a compelling action thriller for modern audiences, all while sprinkling in knowing references to the meta perception of Bond being a spy out of time.
The resulting adventure features James Bond hitting all of his classic story beats: dangerous car chases through a beautiful mountainside, sultry flirting in an elegant casino, a femme fatale with a ridiculous name (Xenia Onatopp! Wow!), a plot to throw the world into chaos (this time using EMPs), and even a dangerous foe from Bond’s own past. Many of the major and minor story elements in Goldeneye are clearly in homage to past Bond films, noticeable to even someone like me who has only seen a handful of these things.
Brosnan does an excellent job as Bond. Suitably charming, extremely handsome, and physically believable in the film’s action scenes, the actor also brings a sensitivity and warmth that the character lacked in the Sean Connery and Timothy Dalton depictions of the character that I’ve seen. Not to dump all over Dalton’s performance in License, but the difference between the two in terms of on-screen charisma is almost startling.
This Bond can crack self-referential jokes about the sad state of torture methods these days while a few scenes later admitting that his sardonic sense of humor is a coping mechanism for all of the violence he’s seen and enacted. Both ends of Brosnan’s performance feel believable, leading to a more fleshed out version of the agent. Ironically, this is something that License to Kill attempted but didn’t quite nail, due to Dalton’s more stoic performance.
As Bond’s wisecracks would indicate, this is a self-aware Bond flick. Both the movie and the audience, already familiar with the character and his meta-history, are in on the joke that this is all a bit preposterous. By the time a film franchise has entered it’s 3rd decade, there’s a lot of recurring motifs to lovingly roll your eyes at. Goldeneye’s referential moments work for the most part, but some things just look too out of place for 1995.
Around halfway through the movie, Bond and his love interest (played by Isabella Scorupco) find themselves placed in a ludicrously over-the-top death trap by the film’s antagonist, Agent 006, Alec Trevelyan (played by Sean Bean). With the two leads bound in a military helicopter about to be destroyed by its own missile, Bond is able to free the two of them by bashing his head into the big red “EJECT” button right next to him.
Obviously there’s no tension in this scene anyway, since it’s an hour in and Bond always gets out of these sorts of predicaments. But the solution to the puzzle is noticeably and weirdly silly. It feels like you’re having a fun conversation with an attractive person with a wry sense of humor when suddenly they pull out an accordion and burst into an over the top Weird Al Yankovic cover. I wouldn’t hate it, but it would be jarring!
Where the movie succeeds much more often is in its earnest attempts at being a compelling mid-90s action movie. Director Martin Campbell does an excellent job of directing traffic both behind the camera and in front of it, making for clear, easy to understand set pieces that exhilarate thanks to a combination of miniatures, in-camera practical effects, and killer stunt work. With action this watchable, it’s not a surprise Goldeneye got its iconic video game adaptation so that people could try to emulate the onscreen fun.
The opening extended flashback is an incredible example of this quality filmmaking. Starting with a record-breaking stunt leap off of a massive dam, the scene goes on to introduce Pierce Brosnan as the charming, confident new version of James Bond. We then get an introduction of pre-betrayal Sean Bean, watch a few important story and character moments during a Cold War infiltration mission, and end on another incredible stunt, combined with a great looking model of a Soviet facility getting blown to smithereens.
The movie doesn’t really exceed the thrills of its opening minutes, but besides the overt silliness of the helicopter escape scene, it does an admirable job showing that James Bond could still be relevant in 1995 as an action hero at the very least. Campbell and team accomplish this by juxtaposing modern cinematic production standards with reverential homages to the early days of the franchise.
The movie does not shy away from pointing out that the Cold War is over; the title sequence features the extremely subtle imagery of beautiful models destroying Soviet statues with sledgehammers. Later, in the scene where Bean reveals himself to be the villain, he and Brosnan stand surrounded by similar statues, cast to an abandoned junkyard, unwanted relics with no purpose at the end of history.
Judi Dench, in her first appearance as MI6 head M, really hammers it home and point blank calls 007 a chauvinistic dinosaur from the Cold War. It’s a bold move to constantly remind the audience that the main character of the movie they’re watching should not exist anymore, but the film never really argues against the existence of James Bond like later Craig iterations would. Instead, it’s more of a fun joke, an acknowledgment of what many viewers were likely feeling.
I’m not enough of a fan of the series to determine if Goldeneye is a great Bond movie, but as a 1995 blockbuster action flick, it is firmly Quite Good. The effects look great thanks to a focus on practical over CG, the set pieces are exciting, and everyone in the cast is clearly having a fun time bringing the screenplay to life. It isn’t perfect though. Some sequences go on for a bit too long, past the point of escalating the tension and into territory of being a bit boring. Bean’s villainous Agent 006 is a little too weakly sketched as an antagonist, leading to a lack of tension at the very end despite the cool setting of an actual massive radar dish in Mexico.
Despite that, I like Goldeneye overall, and I’m not surprised it was so popular at the time. With a handsome, popular star, strong pre-release marketing, and the allure of seeing a whole new era for the iconic character, the movie probably would have done decently well even if it was kind of bad. But the modern production values brought on by the then-highest budget for any movie in the franchise and the solid performances brought by everyone in the cast made the movie a hit.
In using its plot as a meta commentary on the state of Bond, Goldeneye also may have served an important psychological purpose for the American public. The Cold War was over, sure, but the lingering effects of decades of paranoia and uncertainty didn’t collapse alongside the Soviet Union. To see such a prominent pop culture figure, so tightly connected with that era, confront the fact that it’s over could reinforce the fact that you’re living in a new, hopefully safer time.
The movie is too silly and action-packed to be described as textually comforting. But in reflecting our reality, the media we ingest reinforces the way we perceive it. By combining a reverence for the movies of the Cold War with a reassurance that the geopolitical context that drove their creation is no longer applicable, Goldeneye achieves a message that most movies these days couldn’t even consider trying to deliver.
It makes you glad that the past is past and that you’re living right now.
Upon release, the movie did well with the critics. Roger Ebert gave it a 3 out 4 stars, and many other critics praised the movie for bringing the franchise out of the Cold War and into the new millennium with aplomb. In the years since Goldeneye’s release, many publications, such as IGN and Entertainment Weekly, have ranked it as one of the better Bond movies, but never the best.
Even though it only topped the box office for one weekend, Goldeneye lingered around the top 5 of the chart until the new year, and still had enough pull past that to have a theatrical run that lasted until March of 1996. The film was the fourth biggest film of 1995 in terms of gross, and, very importantly, was the highest grossing Bond movie since Moonraker in 1979 with inflation factored in. The franchise was saved.
Two years later, Brosnan returned as Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies, but that movie failed to top the Weekend Box Office as its predecessor had. Granted, that’s entirely because it ran into the brick wall that was Titanic for week after week after week and isn’t necessarily an indicator of its quality. Later Bond films, led by both Brosnan and Daniel Craig, would reach the top of the Box Office once again, so they’ll get their time in the spotlight here.
As I have said a few times here, I am no James Bond super fan. I honestly walked into this movie expecting a decently fun time without much in the way of production lore. But there has been so much written and said about Goldeneye’s creation that I had to leave a lot of the finer behind-the-scenes details out in the name of brevity. There is a massive subculture of people (largely a British one from what I can tell) that hold the Bond franchise as their central interest when it comes to pop culture products.
I cannot hope to just hop into that kind of space and expect my voice to be held above people who have spent literally decades covering the franchise. So instead, let me then just offer my final thoughts as someone who enjoys movies and who just watched this movie for the first time. Goldeneye is a fun time, a compelling and charming action movie that works best when you have at least a cultural understanding of what goes into the structure of a typical James Bond movie.
I wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s first James Bond movie, but if you’re interested in a modern, fun time with the most famous spy in fiction, then Goldeneye is a solid time if you see it on streaming. It won’t inspire any nostalgia bait comics to be shared online like its game adaptation, but you’ll probably find yourself smiling through the spectacle of it.
Rating: 3.5/5
Next Week: We dive into the history of computer animated movies as we look into the first movie I ever watched: Toy Story.
Thanks for reading, see you next week!
-Will