Goldeneye (feat. Isaac Chotiner)
Unclear and Present Danger
Jamelle Bouie
4.7 • 660 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2023
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For this week’s episode, Jamelle and John were joined by Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker magazine to watch and discuss 1995’s GoldenEye, the first James Bond film of the 1990s and the first James Bond film of the post-Cold War era. GoldenEye is the seventeenth film in the James Bond series and the first to star Pierce Brosnan, who would go on to star in three subsequent pictures, all of which we will eventually cover on the podcast: Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough and Die Another Day.
Directed by Martin Campbell and starring, in addition to Brosnan, Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco, Famke Janssen, Alan Cumming, Judi Dench and Joe Don Baker, Goldeneye was something of a reboot for the Bond franchise, which had been on a six-year hiatus since the previous entry, License to Kill starring Timothy Dalton.
The plot of GoldenEye is as straightforward as one of these movies can manage: Bond is tasked with stopping the mysterious Janus syndicate from stealing and using a Soviet-era space weapon capable of causing an electro-magnetic pulse blast anywhere on the planet. Complicating this mission is the fact that the leader of Janus, Alec Trevelayn, is a former MI6 agent who was supposed to have died on a mission with Bond, nine years earlier. There’s the usual adventures and explosions and casual sexual encounters, culminating in a final showdown between Bond and Trevelayn on a massive satellite.
GoldenEye, if you’ve somehow never seen it, is available for rental and purchase on iTunes and Amazon.
For our next episode, we’re covering the 1995 romantic-political comedy, “The American President,” starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning.
Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When the world is the target. 72 hours ago a secret weapon system was detonated over 7. And the threat is real. Golden Eye exists. A radiation surge that destroys everything with an electronic circuit. You can still depend on one man. |
| 0:25.6 | The name's Bond. |
| 0:28.6 | James Bond. |
| 0:30.6 | The world's most famous secret agent is back. |
| 0:34.6 | We aim to please. |
| 0:35.6 | And this time, 007 is facing the ultimate enemy. |
| 0:40.2 | The man who knows him best. |
| 0:43.7 | Hello, James. |
| 0:44.6 | What an unpleasant surprise. |
| 0:48.2 | Kill him. |
| 0:49.3 | The pleasure will be on mine. |
| 0:52.3 | Did you check her out? |
| 0:55.0 | How's it home? Three! That's it all. |
| 0:56.0 | Three clicks. |
| 0:57.0 | Arms the fuse. |
| 0:59.0 | Don't say it. |
| 1:00.0 | The writing's on the wall. |
| 1:01.0 | Grow up, 007. |
| 1:03.0 | I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the gold wall. |
| 1:08.0 | You know James? |
| 1:10.0 | I was always better. |
| 1:11.2 | Both of you, stop with it. |
... |
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