The World Is Not Enough
Produced by MGM-UA
Directed by Michael Apted
Screenplay by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade
Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The World Is Not Enough (hereafter TWINE, as its promoters have dubbed the film) is the 19th official James Bond feature. As if that weren’t enough, it is also the first genuinely interesting one since the 1963 release of From Russia With Love, the series’ second film and the last one not to be ruled by what has become the Bond formula. TWINE director Michael Apted and his writers have chosen to reimagine the series. The secret can be found in one of its more conspicuous conventions: the lone individual taking on the forces of a dehumanizing technocracy. It turns out that, gadget master though he is, Bond is at heart a Luddite.

This Bond film, like the others, opens with a pre-credit special effects and stunt extravaganza. In TWINE, this is more crowd-pleasing than usual. Bond—Pierce Brosnan playing the part with more authority than his first two Double O ventures—takes out a roomful of evil Swiss bankers with a pair of eyeglasses and makes his getaway by jumping from a tenth-story window with an improvised bungee cord. As usual, the real plot begins after the opening escapade. Bond finds himself once again pitted against an archvillain of supremely technocratic intelligence, willing to destroy civilization with a nuclear device he has cunningly stolen from either the Americans or the Russians. And, also as usual, Bond’s unerring instinct leads him directly to his enemy’s lair. After a few singlehanded skirmishes with an army of faceless thugs, he calls in the forces of virtue (the British and Americans, of course) and pulls the plug on the nefarious operation.

The Bond films have nothing to offer in the way of suspense or character development; what they provide is a ritual in which every move is as predictable as in a Japanese Noh play.

Why has this particular ritual so captivated audiences for 57 years? Other films have employed the same ingredients, but never as effectively. The Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies tried and failed miserably. Mike Myers’ Austin Powers japes falter because they are little more than parodies of what is already a parody. (The Bond franchise has always been smart enough to give its material an arch, ironic style, as if to say to the audience, “This is ridiculous, isn’t it? But let’s enjoy ourselves.”)

The truth is, all the Bond copies, whether straight or comic, have left out the essential ingredient: Bond’s attitude toward technology, which invariably surfaces in our hero’s obligatory interview with Q, chief of technical operations. In this de rigueur moment, Q (Desmond Llewellyn, who died in an automobile accident last December at 85) briefs Bond on his most recent creation in an ever-more startling line of lethal gadgetry—cigarettes that fire miniature missiles, elegant sports cars equipped with radar and machine guns, getaway helicopters fully armed with heat-seeking rockets that collapse to satchel-size. In TWINE, it’s a remote-controlled BMW with enough firepower to take out a tank battalion. Having explained the functions of his deadly toys, Q reluctantly hands them over, a note of pained exasperation entering his voice as he pleads with the smirking 007 to take care of his prized inventions.

It’s here that the plot ritual really begins. When will these wonder workers reappear? What awful menace will they enable Bond to overcome? Whatever suspense the series can still muster derives from these questions. But the gadgetry itself doesn’t matter much; its how Bond treats it that makes the series compellingly distinctive. Whether Bond dispatches his enemies with his cigarette missiles or his car’s firepower, we know that afterward he will dump his equipment casually, even contemptuously, as if it were of no account.

It is Bond’s irreverent use-and-dispose attitude toward high-tech equipment that has made him such an attractively subversive hero for our time. For the general audience, bewildered by daily reports of dioxin spills, nuclear proliferation, and germ warfare, what could be more satisfying than an unflappable hero so singularly unimpressed by technology, however lethal?

Bond’s disdain for technology cannot fail to warm the heart of anyone who has struggled with a stalled car in sub-zero weather or argued futilely with surly mechanics about how best to fix it. Our hero is so coolly capable that he can even repair the ultimate appliance malfunction: a primed thermonuclear device counting down to doomsday. He merely reaches into the ticking mechanism and instinctively pulls the correct wires to save the world once more.

TWINE hits all these notes but does so in an uncharacteristically self-conscious manner. Apted seems determined to expand upon the series’ subtext right from the start.

Following the time-honored formula, the opening credits are accompanied by young ladies dancing in silhouetted nakedness against spectacularly colorful backgrounds. This time, however, they aren’t entirely unclothed. Slathered in black oil, they shine iridescently as though their bodies were more metal than flesh. The images may only have been meant to set the stage for Bond’s assignment to protect Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), a young woman who has inherited her parents’ oil business. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that the dancers look and move remarkably like the mechanical woman in Fritz Lang’s 1926 classic Metropolis, whose sinuous dancing bewitches wealthy young capitalists with the promise of untiring, uncomplaining, and ever-compliant labor, Lang’s film is a naive but powerfully visualized allegory of what happens when human beings allow themselves to be seduced by technological expedience: They begin to treat people as they do machines, thinking of men and women as useful tools rather than as ends in themselves.

This vision of technology as a corrupting, dehumanizing force has always been implicit, if undeveloped, in the Bond films. The villains are invariably coldblooded rationalists who have no compunction about slaughtering their own minor operatives. Their closer henchmen are somewhat insulated from this fate because they are likely to be more machine than human and therefore more reliably tractable: Red Grant, the programmed sadist in From Russia With Love; Odd-Job, the top-hat killer in Goldfinger; Jaws, the metal-mouthed giant in The Spy Who Loved Me; Onatopp, the human nutcracker in Goldeneye. They all lack any flicker of compassion, operating solely at their master’s discretion, content to be mechanical monsters.

In TWINE, Apted pushes this theme further and deepens its implications. His villain, the indiscriminate terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle), is literally unfeeling. A bullet has lodged in his brain; his nerve endings can no longer register either pain or pleasure. Immune to suffering, Renard is capable of making superhuman efforts to further his destructive cause. In contrast. Bond tears his shoulder muscles and tendons in the opening sequence, leaving him with a painful injury that doesn’t magically heal as movie wounds traditionally do. Throughout the film, Brosnan winces and groans whenever he puts more than usual strain on his right arm. The implication is unavoidable: Renard’s battle with Bond is one between cold, machine-like intelligence and a feeling, struggling soul. Renard has allowed himself to be reduced to a human instrument; Bond, though he uses technology superbly, never surrenders to it. He remains his own man, however imperfect.

There is ample warrant for this in the original Bond novels. Ian Fleming once remarked that the besetting sin of our century is not any of the usual suspects—pride, greed, lust, envy—but rather acedia, the inability to feel strongly about anything. In perhaps his best novel, You Only Live Twice, Bond’s archrival and would-be nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, confesses to this malady when he explains his need to inflict as much pain on his victims as possible. “There has developed in me a certain mental lameness, a disinterest in humanity and its future, an utter boredom with the affairs of mankind. So, not unlike the gourmet, with his jaded palate, I now seek only the highly spiced, the sharp impact on the tastebuds, mental as well as physical.” Like Iago, Blofeld’s only motive is disgust with all that lives because it reminds him of the failure of his human feeling. Unlike Bond, he places his faith in technology precisely because it doesn’t require personal attachment. Renard’s case is even worse. As he says several times, “there’s no point to living without feelings.” He is left with only one bitterly thin pleasure: using technology to inflict as much harm as possible on those who still do feel.

Apted has tried to bring Fleming’s theme to the foreground in a way that it wasn’t in the earlier films. His Bond is a man of genuine feeling and loyalty, struggling to defeat the dehumanized forces of an uncaring rationalism. Unfortunately, Apted only partially succeeds; no doubt commercial interests prevailed upon him. The film is too cluttered with special effects and stunts to allow for an adequate treatment of this theme, and there are many points at which the script has been obviously and awkwardly truncated. TWINE succeeds only in being promising at first and disappointing at last.

If you want to see what Apted was after, read some of Fleming’s novels. They are better than one would expect, especially From Russia With Love and You Only Live Twice. Better yet, read Graham Greene’s espionage satire, Our Man in Havana, and then catch its truly marvelous film adaptation on cable. (Unfortunately, this 1960 production—directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness, Noel Coward, and Ernie Kovacs—has never been made into a commercial video.) Both novel and film masterfully dramatize what TWINE merely suggests: How much our souls depend on resisting the temptation to become instruments in the pursuit of power and wealth.