The name is Bond. James Bond. The situation? A prison camp in North Korea. In the process of a spy maneuver gone bad, James Bond is betrayed and imprisoned for some time. His betrayer - whom we meet later in the movie, in the form of aptly-named Miranda Frost (played to icy perfection by Rosamund Pike) - makes it look as if he were the one giving his position and his information to the North Koreans in exchange for who knows what.
Bond thought, at the time he was betrayed, that he'd killed off the son of a highly-placed North Korean general. Instead, this young man goes off to Cuba, where he receives what amounts to a bone marrow transplant. Evidently, bone marrow transplants in the spy world are different from the ones you and I might receive for cancer. They have the apparent ability to change all of the DNA in one's entire body, thereby making it possible to change one's appearance as well as one's bone marrow. This particular young Korean comes back as an exact duplicate of diamond dealer Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), who lives in a frosty palace in Iceland and has a rather interesting laser device named Icarus orbiting the Earth.
Frankly, that's about as much as I understand of the plot of DIE ANOTHER DAY. It is a typically incomprehensible Bond plot, an excuse to show off all of Q's wonderful gadgets and have Bond and Moneypenny skirt around the edges of their continuing attraction to one another. It is also an excuse to see him hang out with - and seduce - at least two gorgeous women, Ms. Frost and Jinx (Halle Berry). We are treated to lovely - if exaggerated - scenes of Berry in a bikini, an homage to the first Bond film, Dr. No. (Bond fans will remember a similar scene in which bikini-clad Ursula Andress walks out of the ocean in all her barely-clad glory.)
These scenes alone make DIE ANOTHER DAY worth the price of admission. My experience has been that the Bond fans of my acquaintance are not nitpickers. Continuity gaffes don't bother them as much as they might bother, say, a STAR TREK fan. When it comes to action sequences, that's not necessarily a bad thing, either.
However, those familiar with my personal medical history know that I am something of a stickler for medical accuracy, particularly when it comes to transplantation. DNA transplants, as described here in Bond, are utter fiction. The closest that real life comes to Bond is that if a woman gets bone marrow from a man, her blood cells will reflect the change; in fact, doctors look for it, and will tell a patient receiving the bone marrow of a member of the opposite sex that he or she has 100% marrow of the opposite sex if it has engrafted successfully. One does not receive a complete DNA change when one receives new bone marrow; one merely receives a different set of bone marrow, with the blood cells of an entirely different person inside (and occasionally the donor's allergies as well as the donor's marrow, for allergies are an immune system problem).
Sure, people don't go to Bond films such as DIE ANOTHER DAY to watch medical procedures being done. But I wish they'd taken the same time and care to get bone-marrow transplantation right that they did when it came to talking about the MRI. (There is a very funny sequence in which an MRI goes awry; since MRIs depend on magnets, when this one goes wonky, guns and IV poles alike get stuck to the magnets.) I'd believe plastic surgery and skin bleaching as a method of changing one's appearance; after all, look at what happened with Michael Jackson. I'm sure the writers could concoct something that sounded like STAR TREK's quatrotriticale or dilithium (or is it trilithium?) crystals. Just make it more plausible than the DNA transplant thing.
Better yet, stick to the gadgets and the gorgeous girls. That's been a winning formula, rather like Spock's logic or McCoy's emotional nature. If you're a Bond fan older than about 45, you might like it. Most younger movie buffs tend to dislike DIE ANOTHER DAY, though, although I felt strongly that Brosnan finally hits his stride and is the best Bond at least since Roger Moore.
In DIE ANOTHER DAY the 20th James Bond adventure 007 Pierce Brosnan gets off to a rough start when he is captured and subsequently tortured during an ...More at Family Video
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