05/30/2026
Goldeneye arrived on Home Video this week in 1996, after a November 16th, 1995 theatrical release.
Just in time to stop James Bond dying. Not in a dramatic shaken-not-stirred type cliffhanger, but more of a slow, embarrassing, nobody's-returning-calls kind of way.
Moore had turned him into a cartoon but the overcorrection for Dalton had left 007 as someone nobody wanted to have a drink with. Spies weren't cool in the early 90s - even Arnie was poking holes in the genre with True Lies, while Jack Ryan was exhausted by all the subterfuge. James Bond belonged to the past.
And, as Gen X were becoming adults, the world shifted. The Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War thawed and the yuppie boom ended with the yuppie boomers. In a time of change we defined ourselves by contempt for our neglectful parents and cynicism about their world, so of course, we questioned everything. Including the need for a has-been, alcoholic, womanising colonialist tool.
The other problem with Bond was his nationality. Britain was going through its own identity crisis, trying to work out where we stood on a world stage we'd dominated 100 years ago. The uncomfortable answer seemed to be: somewhere off to the side, getting angry glares from other countries still waiting for their stuff back.
That stage now belonged to the USA - which was also the audience Bond needed to win over. Was it really wise to send a British spy back out to undermine dodgy foreigners and expect everyone to just accept that Britain still had the moral authority to do... well, anything?
Goldeneye did something clever that I'd thought was impossible: it stripped Bond back to his basics, gave Pierce Brosnan a perfect entrance, acknowledged the problems with the franchise and released a banger of a film while doing it. To this day, I'm still impressed at how they pulled it off.
Turns out the best way to deal with intrigue, misdirection and problematic spy films is with strategic honesty.
Just... not before the cold open - which immediately exploded into peak Bond. James and his bff, Alec Trevelyan, pull on their tactlenecks and codenames for the mission at hand: infiltrating a soviet chemical weapons lab. 006 and 007 (doot doot) exchange chummy quips along the way but when Trevelyan is captured, Bond makes a cold call. Alec gets shot and left for dead as Bond blows everything up and escapes in an action sequence so insane they'd have cut it from Moonraker for being too far-fetched. Just another Tuesday in the life of a suave super spy. But for us, Bond was back!
Turns out that was the flashback. 9 years on, Bond is finding life a lot more complicated with a new boss.
MI6 had been a boy's club and Bond was always the cool kid. If he got lost in a dangerous lady or failed to reply to communiques, the guys at HQ would chuckle to themselves and roll their eyes - that was Bond for you.
However, the new M is a woman. Which, a couple of years after Stella Rimington became the real Director General of MI5, made the casting feel grounded rather than forced. More than can be said for Bond who now needs to take orders from a woman he can't woo, kill or ignore. A woman who makes it clear Bond's foibles will no longer be tolerated. She also questions his value in a modern MI6, telling him he's a cold war relic and a misogynist dinosaur.
MI6 is no longer his happy place but at least he's been given a mission which should be fairly straightforward. Follow orders, serve Queen and Country - no moral ambiguity or divided loyalty, just do what's right. Right?
Except his antagonist is 006. Trevelyan's back from the grave with a grudge. Two actually. His parents were Lienz Cossacks - ethnic Russians who surrendered to the allies when Britain promised them protection against the Soviet Union. Weeks after VE Day they were packed into trains and sent back to Stalin's gulags where many of them died.
That's not just back story, it actually happened. Betraying the Cossacks is one of many bloody stains on our collective British hands - none of which were properly acknowledged in a bond film before Goldeneye. Trevelyan also has a personal grudge earned in the opening scene when Bond left him for dead.
And, one last twist of the knife: Bond's mission isn't clean or heroic, like preventing a nuclear explosion or saving millions from a man-made earthquake. Trevelyan isn't targetting lives - he's targetting the only thing a fading Britain can still offer the world: financial services. His plan is justified retribution for the sins of the Empire - triggering a financial meltdown designed to push the UK back into the stone age.
And that, right there, is the genius of Goldeneye.
Brosnan has to deliver a convincing James Bond in a world that no longer has space for him, yet still find a reason to exist. Goldeneye does this by stripping him of everything that defines him as "Bond" and handing him a Kobayashi Maru of his very own.
There's no moral high ground. The institution he serves committed real atrocities. His enemy has a point. Every comfort he relies on: the womanising, the drinking, the cold pragmatism, the certainty that he's on the right side, has been examined and found wanting. All his compartmentalisation collapses as the film poses the question: who are you when you can't pretend you're the good guy?
Bond is someone who does his job. It's not right, noble or justified but it's necessary. And yeah, he might be flawed, out of his depth and past his peak but he'll do it anyway because someone needs to and he's there.
All the baggage of the past: the context, the issues, the personality swings and the tone shifts of the past 30 years gets erased, even the imperial elephant in the room is acknowledged, shot and put on display. And Bond emerges brand new, shaking off the past and letting Brosnan make the character indisputably his. Even the final scene gives a knowing wink at the new world order: Bond's post-mission "debrief" gets interrupted as the US takes him to Guantanamo Bay for a real debrief. In case anyone forgot who's actually in charge now.
I saw it at the cinema and loved every minute. The film's great fun (I mean, it's a Bond film) but Goldeneye felt like it was saying something about being British that I hadn't been able to define until then.
I like a lot of things about the UK and our culture. But there's one thing that drives me to distraction about my home country: we can't quite let go of the empire. We look at the faded grandeur and the statues and get nostalgic for a time that never actually existed for anyone except the rich. We still carry remnants of manifest destiny and pith-helmet exceptionalism, with sadness at the idea that we once mattered in a way we're never going to matter again.
Goldeneye was the first Bond film that looked forward instead of back. It acknowledged the damage, centred it in the plot and took every anachronistic thing about Bond without hedging or deflecting. But instead of eulogising a different time, we got a message that said: Yes, this is what you are. Flawed, past your peak and carrying a history you can't recapture or undo. Walk it off princess, there's work to be done.
Which is really something I think we should've taken to heart.
-Mom
