The end of the millennium
was around the corner when The World Is Not Enough hit cinemas in
November 1999. The nineteenth film in the EON Productions series and the third
starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond introduced a different dimension to the
franchise’s familiar villainy. Its antagonists still operate through terrorism,
espionage, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe, but their ambitions are
rooted in a different source of power: the resources and international reach of
a multinational corporation.
This shift is apparent from
the opening sequence. Unlike GoldenEye or Tomorrow Never Dies,
in which Bond infiltrates a Soviet nerve gas facility or a terrorist camp near
the Russian border, The World Is Not Enough opens in the decidedly
civilian world of international finance. Bond walks through the streets of
Bilbao and enters the office of a Swiss banker. Less than five minutes into the
film, he is already questioning the banker’s honesty: “We know how difficult
that can be for a Swiss banker,” he remarks as Lachaise claims to be doing the
right thing by returning three million pounds belonging to Sir Robert King, one
of Britain’s leading oil magnates and a personal friend of M.
While his mission
ultimately involves preventing a nuclear catastrophe in Istanbul, Bond
inadvertently exposes the murkier side of corporate enterprise. The film is
neither an explicit attack on corporations nor an attempt to advance an
anti-corporate agenda. Nevertheless, Bond’s observations and discoveries expose
the questionable dealings of people who operate behind a façade of
respectability.
Returning from Bilbao, Bond
shakes hands with Sir Robert at M’s office. Once King leaves, M describes her
friend as “a man of great integrity,” but Bond immediately questions this
assessment, pointing out that King bought stolen classified reports for three
million pounds. It turns out that King had enough power and leverage to acquire
top-secret documents through the black market in an attempt to identify the
terrorists who had attacked his pipeline. The three million pounds recovered by
Bond were a refund from the anonymous seller, operating through the bank in
Bilbao. So far, we have a respected British businessman, a Swiss banker, and a
murky figure from the underworld involved in an illicit transaction. Adding to
this already troubling picture, an MI6 agent has been killed in connection with
the document.
Sir Robert is killed when a
magnesium-based explosive hidden in the briefcase detonates, causing a massive
explosion in the MI6 vault. Enter his daughter, Elektra, who has inherited King
Industries. Far from being a spoiled child, she is a woman who has suffered.
Three years before the events of the film, she was kidnapped by Renard, a
terrorist with connections to the Russian underworld. M advised King not to pay
the ransom, hoping that Renard would be distracted long enough for 009 to get a
shot at him. Eventually, Elektra escaped by seducing and shooting Renard’s
accomplices, while 009 tracked down Renard and shot him in the head. The bullet
did not kill him, but remained lodged in his brain, slowly killing him. After
Sir Robert’s murder and the bombing of MI6, Bond assumes that Renard’s next
target will be Elektra.
Sophie Marceau’s character
initially shares the same aura of respectability as her father. Far from being
a little girl lost amidst an oil empire, she makes it clear that she calls the
shots. While her father approved a pipeline route through Baku that would have
destroyed an ancient chapel, Elektra orders the foreman to reroute the
pipeline, even if doing so costs time and money. Her decision calms the angry
villagers protesting at the construction site where she shows up, despite her Chief
of Security’s warning against appearing in person.
But Elektra is by no means
innocent. Her apparent benevolence conceals the central deception of the film:
she is not the threatened heiress Bond believes he must protect, but the
architect of the conspiracy itself. Halfway through the film, we learn that she
plotted her father’s death with Renard after King refused to pay the ransom.
Elektra has also long resented her father, believing that he pushed her mother
aside and appropriated the oil resources that should have belonged to her
family. She sees his actions as another example of a woman being deprived of
the power and recognition she deserved. Rather than destroying the company her
father built, however, Elektra takes control of it and reshapes it in her own
image, using its resources to reclaim what she regards as her mother’s kingdom
and expand her own power.
It transpires that Elektra
had a longstanding business relationship with Valentin Zukovsky, the former KGB
agent turned businessman from GoldenEye. This time, Zukovsky owns a
luxurious casino in Baku and a caviar factory on the Caspian Sea, but he has
never abandoned his arms-dealing business. He has frequently provided Elektra
with “machinery” and “Russian stuff,” and her latest acquisition is a Viktor
III-class nuclear submarine captained by Zukovsky’s nephew. The submarine’s
reactor is central to her plan: to cause a nuclear catastrophe in Istanbul,
contaminate the Bosporus, and eliminate competing oil supplies, leaving the
King pipeline dominant in the region.
Elektra’s apparent loss of
a million dollars at the casino serves as payment for the submarine, disguising
a weapons transaction as a gambling debt. The money came from her father’s line
of credit, a detail that raises further questions about Sir Robert’s
respectability. As Bond observes through his X-ray glasses, the casino is
crawling with armed hoodlums. An early screenplay draft also describes the
place as a haven for prostitution, with Zukovsky remarking: “You can get
anything you want for a pack of cigarettes.” Why would a respectable
businessman frequent a place like that? There is a possibility that King also
had some kind of illicit business with Zukovsky, despite being far less
malevolent than his daughter.
When we look at the players
in this story, we find an apparently respectable oil magnate connected to the
head of MI6 and black-market intermediaries; his daughter and heiress connected
to a dangerous terrorist and an arms dealer who operates through a casino and a
caviar factory; and, in the middle of it all, a Swiss banker facilitating the
flow of money through illicit transactions. The network also includes a corrupt
Russian naval officer, Nikolai, and a corrupt scientist at a nuclear test
facility, Dr. Mikhail Arkov, both operating under Renard or Elektra’s
influence. The film implicitly suggests that a corporation such as King
Industries can acquire a reach comparable to that of a clandestine organization
like SPECTRE when its resources are combined with bribery, black-market
transactions, and criminal alliances.
What makes this network
particularly interesting is that James Bond becomes the catalyst who strips
away its participants’ masks of respectability. He questions the integrity of
Lachaise and Sir Robert, then discovers that King bought top-secret reports through
the black market using the money originally intended for his daughter’s ransom.
Bond subsequently realizes that Elektra’s seemingly carefree bet at Zukovsky’s
casino was actually payment for a submarine, revealing another link between her
business dealings and her alliance with Renard. Not surprisingly, 007’s
principal ally in the latter half of the film is Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear
scientist whose professional expertise contrasts with the corporate and criminal
interests driving Elektra’s scheme. Where Elektra uses industrial resources and
financial influence to manufacture a crisis, Christmas helps Bond understand
and prevent its consequences.
The World Is Not Enough marked a significant development in the Bond franchise. Its villains have personal histories and grievances that precede Bond’s intervention, while M plays a major role in the plot, with her decisions influencing many of the events that unfold. Although the film retains the larger-than-life ambitions associated with the series, it roots its conspiracy in a recognizable world of corporate interests, financial transactions, and criminal alliances. This was not the first time James Bond had confronted villains with corporate backgrounds. Auric Goldfinger and Max Zorin had already demonstrated how business enterprises could serve criminal ambitions. Yet the final Bond film released in the twentieth century places corporate power closer to the center of its conflict. King Industries is more than a respectable façade concealing a conventional criminal organization: its resources and infrastructure enable Elektra to pursue her ambitions on an international scale.
The film does not need to
condemn corporations outright to suggest that economic power can threaten
international security. Its more unsettling implication is that the resources
of a legitimate enterprise can become instruments of coercion when placed in
the hands of someone willing to exploit them. One telling example is the
buzz-saw helicopter Bond spots cutting trees near the King pipeline
construction site in Baku. The same machine is later repurposed as a weapon in
the attack on Bond and Zukovsky at the latter’s caviar factory on the Caspian
Sea. Industrial equipment intended for construction becomes an instrument of
destruction, reflecting the film’s broader entanglement of legitimate
enterprise and criminal ambition. Bond’s investigation begins with a suspicious
financial transaction in Bilbao, but it ultimately exposes a network in which
money, industrial infrastructure, and political influence have become
inseparable.
Read more in-depth analysis on The World Is Not Enough in the Updated Edition of The Bond of The Millennium, available at Amazon and DRM-Free at ZOOM Platform.
