Tomorrow Has Arrived

Akiva Schaffer, director of The Naked Gun, recently expressed on Letterboxd his appreciation for Tomorrow Never Dies, claiming that the second Pierce Brosnan James Bond film influenced his recent film. “It’s beautifully shot and served as a visual touchstone for how I wanted our movie to look. Lots of 90s atmosphere in the air, shot on 35mm, but still epic and cool by 2025 standards,” he said.

Having rewatched Tomorrow Never Dies many times –both for research on The Bond of the Millennium and merely for enjoyment–, I can say it’s perhaps even more rooted in the 90s than GoldenEye. Where Brosnan’s debut was a bridge between the Cold War and a new world of post-Soviet arms dealers, Tomorrow Never Dies plunges fully into a world of satellite TV, multimedia conglomerates, computer software, and Windows 98 – down to its Times New Roman-style location captions.

The eighteenth instalment in the EON-produced series departs from the political ambience of GoldenEye.  As James Chapman points out in his book Licence to Thrill, despite the illegal arms bazaar from the pre-credits sequence being located on the Russian border, the terrorists exchanging weapons there are neither Russians nor ex-Soviet allies. Among Chilean mines and German explosives being distributed in the fair, MI6 is observing a Berkeley radical-turned-technoterrorist and a Japanese fugitive from the 1995 Tokyo subway attack. Even inside the Ministry of Defence’s situation room, we see British and Russian military leaders working side-by-side. The Cold War is over, the battlefield has shifted.

The Roger Spottiswoode film is often maligned due to its abundance of action, and Brosnan himself complained of this and requested a more emotionally-rooted story for his second 007 adventure, The World Is Not Enough. But beneath the action set pieces, it offered something unusually prescient: a sharp commentary on how information can be manufactured, manipulated, and weaponised. Back then, 24-hour news cycles were relatively new, the internet was in its dial-up infancy, and “fake news” was decades away from entering the political lexicon. Today, in an age of social media algorithms, AI-generated images, and deepfakes, Elliot Carver’s brand of news-as-weapon feels like a reflection of the present day.

Structurally, it borrows from You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me, with the lean, relentless pace of an accident-prone production forced to meet the Christmas 1997 deadline imposed by MGM's Kirk Kerkorian. From the outset, the lines are clear: we know who the good guys are (Bond and Wai Lin), who the villains are (Carver, Stamper and Gupta) and who will be the inevitable tragic loss (Paris). The drama unfolds like a high-tech chess match played via satellite, where both sides are in strict dependence on global communications. Sometimes, to a fatal outcome: the HMS Devonshire is misdirected towards Chinese territorial waters and eventually sunk, in a scenario not so dissimilar to the fate of the Sevastopol submarine at the beginning of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, released in 2023.

In GoldenEye, satellites had destructive power; here, they are tools of misdirection. This is a film about direction versus misdirection, information versus disinformation. Like The Net and Hackers explored the dangers of the internet, Tomorrow Never Dies takes aim at the mass media’s ability to distort reality — echoing the themes of Costa-Gavras’ Mad City (also released in 1997), which examined how media manipulation could stir up a domestic incident.

This is one of the reasons why the film aged so well. In 1997, few questioned the objectivity of what they saw on TV. We consumed news passively, without the social media platforms that now allow us to challenge, remix, or disprove it. Today’s “fake news” culture — in which citizens, activists, and even governments openly accuse media outlets of bias or agenda-setting — makes Carver’s tactics feel alarmingly contemporary.

Even heads of state across the political spectrum –from Barack Obama to Donald Trump in the United States and Cristina Kirchner to Javier Milei in Argentina– have clashed publicly with media conglomerates. In the film, Carver extorts the president to lower the cable bills and plans to install a puppet dictator in China to secure the broadcast rights he was refused by the current Chinese government. We’ve always known media moguls could play both sides; the difference today is that the game is visible.

The film’s title sequence, designed by Daniel Kleinman, cleverly pulls us “behind the screen,” visually dismantling the idea that TV presents an unfiltered truth. Cybergirls with blank expressions become alluring only once TV screens pass in front of them — a perfect metaphor for how media can fabricate beauty, horror, or credibility. In the 2020s, with AI-generated images and lifelike humanoid robots blurring reality further, Kleinman’s imagery feels eerily prophetic.

Throughout the story, Bond witnesses Carver’s fabrications firsthand: the sensationalist war headlines at Hamburg airport, the false news report framing him as Paris’ murderer, and the villain’s premature obituary for 007 himself. “Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery,” Carver boasts, comparing his media empire to Caesar’s legions or Napoleon’s armies. 

Jonathan Pryce’s character may be considered “exaggerated,” but what is not exaggerated through the lens of the camera? Criminals appear more dangerous, women are prettier, and mere debates are treated with an excessive amount of sensationalism. Carver himself is a product of the media, and behind his histrionic facade, we are in the presence of a George Orwell character for many reasons (you can read more about this in The Orwellian Nature of Tomorrow Never Dies). This is a Bond villain who lives through his image: huge banners of his face are seen hanging in all of his offices, one of which is destroyed by Bond and his ally and love interest Wai Lin as they attempt to escape.

The first coup 007 executes against Carver is humiliating him with a simple, analogue action: throwing a switch. No gadgetry, no hacking — just cutting the power and taking him off the air mid-speech. Like in GoldenEye, where he disables Trevelyan’s transmitter with a crowbar, Brosnan’s Bond repeatedly shows that human instinct can outmatch technological might. The film opens with a similar message: when Admiral Roebuck orders a missile strike that would detonate nuclear warheads. In the end, it’s Bond’s field judgment — not the machine — that saves the day.

Tomorrow Never Dies tells a story that, today, feels less like fantasy and more like a prediction. The public now openly questions media outlets and suspects hidden agendas, just as Q’s gadgets in this film foreshadow smartphones and vehicle guidance systems with a female voice. Yet beneath its prophetic tech, the film delivers a clear, timeless message: no matter how advanced the tools of manipulation become, there will always be a human intelligence, resourcefulness, and courage that machines cannot defeat – in this case, represented by James Bond.

Bond doesn’t just resist Carver’s technology, he bends it to his will. He humiliates the mogul with a simple flick of a switch, turns the villain’s own Sea Vac drill against him, and undercuts digital deception with analogue cunning. In the end, Tomorrow Never Dies is less about technology’s power and more about its limits. Gadgets, algorithms, and media empires may shape the battlefield, but it is Bond who will win this war.