Lipstick

The Last Gasp of the Gadget Era

There’s a strange, sickly kind of nostalgia I feel watching *Die Another Day*. It’s not the good kind, where you miss a simpler time, but rather the disorienting sensation of watching a legend try to stay upright while the floorboards are actively rotting beneath him. This was the 20th James Bond film, arriving in 2002, and it carries the distinct, bloated energy of a franchise that had hit a wall and decided, rather than turn around, to just smash through the drywall with a tuxedo on.

Lee Tamahori’s direction feels less like a guiding hand and more like a fever dream of late-nineties excess, even though we were well into the new millennium. Everything is shiny, metallic, and strangely weightless. It’s the kind of movie where the plot—involving a North Korean general, a diamond mogul with a penchant for face-replacement surgery, and a satellite that functions like a giant orbital magnifying glass—is almost beside the point.



We begin, of all places, in a North Korean prison. For the first ten minutes, there’s an actual, palpable tension. Pierce Brosnan, looking ragged, bearded, and genuinely stripped of his usual Teflon-coated sheen, plays a man who has been broken. It’s the most interesting he’s ever been as Bond. He isn’t quipping; he’s surviving. He’s scrawny and desperate, and for a fleeting moment, the film touches on the actual cost of being a spy. It asks: what happens to the man when the mission ends, not with a victory, but with torture?

But then the credits roll—that bizarre, fiery Madonna-scored sequence—and the movie decides that introspection is a bad look for a franchise that makes its money on beach vacations and fast cars. By the time Bond is back in London, shaving with a straight razor and acting as if the trauma of a gulag was just a bad hangover, the movie has abandoned its only truly human hook.

The scene in the fencing club remains the strangest, most enduring image for me. Bond faces off against Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves. It starts with civil, aristocratic blade-play and devolves into a chaotic, smashing-glass-and-furniture brawl. It’s meant to be high-stakes, but the editing is so frenetic, so intent on showing us every angle of every splintered chair, that it loses any sense of geography. Roger Ebert, in his review, noted something I haven't been able to shake: he compared the film to an "inflated souvenir," something that hits every expected note so loudly it deafens you to the melody. He wasn't wrong.



And then there’s the invisible car. The Aston Martin V12 Vanquish, equipped with adaptive camouflage. It’s the moment the series jumped the shark, not just because it’s absurd, but because it represents a complete surrender to the digital. When the car vanishes, so does the reality of the action. It’s easy to dismiss this as "just a Bond movie," but there’s a genuine sadness in watching a series that was once defined by real, tangible danger—cars tipping on two wheels, stunts performed by actual humans—replace its stakes with pixels.

Halle Berry’s performance as Jinx is caught in the middle of this. She carries the weight of the film’s ambition to modernize—she’s a CIA agent, she’s competent, she has her own agenda—but the script treats her mostly as a set piece to be moved from Havana to Iceland. She’s given iconic lines and the requisite bikini-clad entrance, but the chemistry feels manufactured, like a forced handshake at a corporate retreat. There’s a scene where she and Bond are just talking in a hotel room, and for a second, you see the actors looking for a human connection that the screenplay simply refuses to provide.



The film’s villain, Graves, is equally trapped by the era’s limitations. Toby Stephens is clearly having a grand time being a megalomaniac, but his character’s pivot to a genetically modified North Korean colonel is so laughable it undermines the very real geopolitical anxiety the film tries to exploit at the start. It’s a classic case of a movie being too big for its own good. It wanted to be a Cold War thriller, a sci-fi epic, and a classic Bond caper all at once, and in trying to be everything, it became nothing in particular.

Looking back, *Die Another Day* is the necessary failure that allowed the franchise to breathe again. You can see the exhaustion in Brosnan’s eyes by the final act. He’s a wonderful actor—I’ve always admired how he could play a kind of weary grace—but here, he looks like a man waiting for his contract to expire. The irony, of course, is that the very excess of this film—the space lasers, the ice palaces, the invisible cars—is what made the eventual pivot to Daniel Craig’s grit feel so necessary. Sometimes, a series has to completely exhaust its own mythology before it can finally reinvent itself. Watching this, you aren't just seeing the end of a film; you're seeing the end of an entire philosophy of how to make an action movie. It’s a loud, shiny, hollow relic, and honestly? It’s kind of fascinating to watch it fall apart.