YMMV / Die Another Day

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did M truly believe that Bond had cracked under torture or was she merely putting on a show in order to set up a Batman Gambit to indirectly help Bond clear his name? Given that M has used this tactic before and how much their relationship has grown over the last three films, the latter isn't that much of a stretch.
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Ice Palaces and hotels are a very real thing, even if in other Nordic countries than the film's (while in story it's in Iceland, the hotel was built and filmed in Sweden).
• Americans Hate Tingle: Unsurprisingly, the film did poorly in South Korea; audiences there resented the film's portrayal of the South Korean military taking orders from Americans. There was also some outrage over the decision to have a sex scene in the vicinity of a statue of Buddha. As for North Korea, are you even surprised that it wasn't released there? Allegedly the late dictator Kim-Jong Il (who was a James Bond aficionado) did get a hold of a copy, but he was not a fan.
• Angst? What Angst?: Although hellbent on revenge, Bond is otherwise of remarkably sound mind after fourteen months of nonstop torture in a North Korean prison. Most to endure such a hell and live to tell of it would undoubtedly have more physical and psychological scars to show for it. Especially remarkable seeing how Bond barely cheated death at the hands of scorpion venom, even though he received antidote between scorpion stings (a slight case of Truth in Television, depending on how often they would use the scorpions, Bond probably gained partial immunity, being a case of torture-induced venom immunotherapy).
• Awesome Music:
  • The outrageously fun "Welcome To Cuba".
  • For techno lovers, "Iced, Inc." (aka "the theme of the Duel of the Cool Cars") is an absolute treat.
• Base-Breaking Character: Jinx is a strong contender for the most divisive Bond Girl in the whole series. Her detractors point to most of her dialogue being made up of terrible puns and laughably stereotypical attempts at being a Sassy Black Girl, as well as her very inconsistent level of competence that sees her go from being More Deadly Than the Male to a Damsel in Distress almost from scene-to-scene. On the other hand, her fans give Halle Berry credit for delivering a strong performance despite the cheesy dialogue, actually don't have a problem with Jinx occasionally having to be saved by Bond since it adds more nuance than one or the other being shown as clearly more competent, and feel that she was in general a well-conceived character who had the bad luck to be in a film where various flaws that had been building up in prior Bond entries grew to the point where they broke the film's back.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans of the series' campier elements tend to like this film, while fans of the more serious films (and novels) tend to hate it.
  • The "Vanish", is it a Cool Car (it IS an Aston Martin, after all), or does being invisible make it one of the dumbest things ever to come out of Q Branch?
    • The original concept was that the "adaptive camouflage" would just make the car blurry and difficult to see. But given what the rest of the film looks like it's no surprise that the CGI team got a little carried away.
  • The title song by Madonna; some don't mind it, others despise it for its excessive autotune and its bizarre lyrics.
• Critic-Proof: Despite generally mediocre reviews, it was a box-office success (being the highest grossing Bond film worldwide up to that point), something all the more impressive when you consider that 2002 had perhaps the most competitive holiday season of the modern era, with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, among many others (as well as crushing the even worse received Star Trek: Nemesis). However, the producers realized that this was more in spite of the film than because of it, and they decided to shake things up big-time for the next entry.
• Delusion Conclusion: It's been suggested that everything after the title sequence is the delusion of Bond while he's being tortured in North Korea.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The female Torture Technician became this behind the scenes, as Lee Tamahori said with chagrin in the commentary that his 14-year-old son was more interested in her than in meeting James Bond!
  • Miranda Frost is considered by many to be a better and more interesting Bond Girl than Jinx, who the studio was so sure would wow audiences instead that they had a spin-off series planned for her (which quickly died with a whimper after Jinx turned out to be too much of a Base-Breaking Character). The film was also a Star-Making Role for Rosamund Pike.
• Fandom Rivalry: The rivalry between this and The Bourne Identity was pretty fierce at the time, and given how Casino Royale would reboot itself with a very similar Darker and Edgier style one film later, it seems fairly plain which side ultimately had the most support.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Gustav Graves, with the outfit he spends the climax of the film in; some unholy mix of a Power Glove, Laser Tag armour, and a Virtual Boy headset, makes it impossible to take him seriously.
• Fetish Retardant: During the opening theme, at one point Madonna moans "Sigmund Freud" in a rather... sexual tone, followed later by "Analyse this...analyse this...analyse this...". Mmhmm, interesting implications there.
• Ham and Cheese: Toby Stephens, a well-known fan of the series who would go on to play Bond himself in the BBC radio drama series, is clearly having a ton of fun as the film's main villain. It even netted him a Saturn Award nomination!
• Harsher in Hindsight: In a training simulation, Bond approaches a mook holding M hostage. To kill him, Bond shoots M first before doing so. Q then laments to Bond that what he did wasn't the right way to save her, but Bond reveals he only inflicted a flesh wound. Cue Skyfall, where M ends up being shot in the side by a mook of a former MI6 agent... and due to her age, passes away from blood loss.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After playing a Bond villain, Toby Stephens would play James Bond himself in BBC radio adaptations of the novels, making Gustav Graves's speech about how he modelled himself as a dark mirror of Bond now sound pretty ironic. Furthermore, when Goldfinger was adapted, Rosamund Pike played Pussy Galore.
  • The Graves/Bond mirror is also this in the European French dub of the film, in which Graves's voice actor, Éric Herson-Macarel, later went on to dub Daniel Craig in all of his films as Bond.
  • This wouldn't be the last time Toby Stephens plays a Bond villain — or a pastiche of one, at least.
  • A major plot point is Korean characters using Magic Plastic Surgery to appear as Westerners. In 2018, a controversial English online personality gained notoriety by trying the same in reverse, having gone through multiple plastic surgeries to look like Jimin. His results were far less successful.
• Ho Yay:
  • Moon and Zao. Zao was clearly... devoted to Moon. Their reunion after Moon became Gustav Graves really speaks volumes.
  • Verity clearly has an attraction towards Frost. According to the director, this was much more explicit:
    I shot some moments with Madonna giving Rosamund little touches, but I didn't want to turn the film into a male fantasy thing. Madonna still has all these little looks with Rosamund, which was enough.
  • At one point, Frost is eyeballing Jinx in a manner some have interpreted as a Death Glare (as Pike does on the DVD commentary), while others see it as a Longing Look.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While fans generally didn't have any problem with the idea of the film containing various Continuity Nods to prior entries in the series, a lot of them felt that the main storyline was too obviously copied from Diamonds Are Forever (and, to a lesser degree, Licence to Kill), and that the new plot elements didn't do enough to differentiate it from that film.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Zig-zagged trope. It's a surprise that Bond gets captured and horrifically tortured instead of making a daring escape, but nobody believed for a minute Bond was being sent in front of a firing squad. Or, that Moneypenny would get killed.
• Mis-blamed: While director Lee Tamahori tends to get all the blame for the film's various faults, the only things he was really responsible for were the needless use of CGI and generally over-the-top editing. Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli and screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have admitted that they're really the ones at fault for the film's tone and storyline, and that they completely misjudged what the fans wanted from the series. It hasn't really helped that those four went on to preside over the far better-received Daniel Craig Bond era, whereas Tamahori's career completely crashed and burned for some time after this film (his 2016 movie Mahana/The Patriach fared well with critics, but he hasn't been involved in anything major since), making it easier for fans to turn him into a scapegoat.
• Narm:
  • The diamonds embedded in Zao's face are clearly meant to look striking and act as his Red Right Hand — but the concept is ridiculous, as it begs the question of why he didn't just have them removed at any point in the fourteen months since he was injured; or why the British, who had him in their custody twice, didn't do it either. And it gets borderline farcical when the gemstones are still there even when Zao is undergoing gene therapy and aiming to take on a new identity, a procedure that would be made unnecessarily difficult and a goal which would be rendered pointless by having a face full of diamonds.
  • The outfit Graves spends the climax of the film in some unholy mix of a Power Glove, Laser Tag armor, and a Virtual Boy headset.
• Narm Charm: The sword fight between Bond and Graves is completely over the top, but also genuinely thrilling. It also helps that Pierce Brosnan and Toby Stephens performed most of the fight themselves.
• Never Live It Down: Jinx is often remembered as being a Damsel in Distress whom Bond constantly has to rescue, despite her purported Action Girl credentials. She actually only has to be rescued twice by him; for perspective, this is the same number of times he had to rescue Wai Lin, who is by far and away the most popular Bond Girl from the Brosnan era. That being said, the situations which Jinx has to be rescued from are much sillier and more contrived than the ones involving Wai Lin, which admittedly doesn't do much to help sell Jinx as someone worthy of carrying her own film.
• Obvious Judas: Few people were surprised that Miranda Frost, who was introduced giving off a vibe of being disdainful and stuck-up, ended up being The Mole that set up Bond in North Korea. In fact, some even thought that her overtly bitchy attitude was a Red Herring setting up a more sympathetic character as the actual mole, but nope, it was her.
• Presumed Flop: Due to multiple factors (most notably this being Brosnan's final film turn as Bond, the movie franchise being rebooted, and the movie itself developing a reputation as one of the worst installments in the series), the movie is frequently talked about as though it was a financial failure. However, not only did it make big bucks at the box office (grossing just south of $432 million on a $142 million budget), but its reputation as one of the worst Bond movies is a more recent development than widely assumed; reviews upon its release were more mixed than outright negative.
• Questionable Casting: Michael Madsen of all people as M's equal in the National Security Agency.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Though Toby Stephens was a successful actor before this, he's best-known nowadays for playing Mr. Rochester in the 2006 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (interestingly, the 1983 version had previous James Bond actor Timothy Dalton in that role) and for playing Captain Flint in Black Sails. He would also go on to play Bond in several radio adaptions of Fleming's books.
  • This was the feature film debut of Rosamund Pike who went on to appear in Jack Reacher and Gone Girl. Many articles about her after the latter film came out certainly remembered her from this film, using some combination of the phrase "From Bond Girl to Gone Girl."
• The Scrappy: Madonna's Verity isn't too well-liked, being unnecessarily shoe-horned into the film and not having much chemistry with the majority of the cast. Her theme song for the film also tends to appear on lists for "Worst Bond themes" due to its excessive use of autotune and bizarre lyrics.
• Sequelitis: Generally regarded as Brosnan's worst Bond film, and among the worst overall in the official canon. What's worse, it was his last one on screen (his true final role was the video game, Everything or Nothing).
• Shocking Moments: Bond is not only captured by North Korea, but forced to endure fourteen months of torture and interrogation before his allies make any effort to secure his freedom. The film's opening makes it seem as though we're in for a darker, grittier Bond film that could've easily superseded the Dalton era. As it turns out though, not even this proved enough to put down James Bond for very long afterward.
• Signature Scene:
  • The car duel between Bond and Zao was heavily advertised and is perhaps the best-remembered action scene of the film.
  • The infamous tidal wave surfing scene in Iceland, which quickly became symbolic of the series' controversial foray into CGI-driven action sequences.
  • The main Cold Open in Korea, which was mostly seen as one of the best parts of the film.
  • Likewise, the sword-fight between Bond and Graves was praised for its creativity and escalation, as the two grab different types of blades to best the other with.
• So Bad, It's Good: Some opinions of the film; it's by no means one of the best Bond films of the franchise, but it's offset by its ridiculous premise of North Korea threatening the world and using the solar beam weapon from The Man with the Golden Gun. The way genetic engineering works is also laughable, allowing a literal Race Lift. The film is ridiculous, but it's easy to have a good time chuckling at it.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Don't ruin your awesome hovercraft chase with blatantly obvious green screen, including the shot of one of the hovercraft exploding next to a random bunker, which somehow causes it to explode.
  • Never have a screamingly obvious CGI tidal wave and surfer in a movie that's already featured actual surfing earlier.
  • Another example comes right before the CGI surfing: when Bond's sled falls of the ice cliff, it's very obvious that it's a scale model.
  • In fact, just don't put poorly animated stunts in a series of films that is known for their completely real and awesome stuntwork. It just makes the failure of these effects so much more obvious.
  • To a lesser extent, Jinx's backward dive off the cliff.
  • And the clearly-CGI cars sticking out of the ground in one piece after falling from a plane. In real life, they would have been reduced to millions of tiny pieces.
  • The frequent and randomly placed slow-motion moments in the film, which really don't serve to add anything to the action onscreen.
  • The disintegrating plane during the final showdown.
  • The screamingly superimposed laser effects used against Mr. Kil, where the laser clearly isn't holding place and worse, is causing no physical harm to his head.
  • The pool of blood emerging in front of Zao when he's impaled by the chandelier.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: Critic consensus seems to be that Rosamund Pike made an effort to make Miranda Frost a better and more interesting Bond Girl than Jinx, even having to overcome the fact that Frost is an Obvious Judas, which was all the more impressive considering that this was her feature film debut.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Much like the previous film, many fans feel that had this film focused on either just Jinx or just Miranda Frost as the Bond Girl, it would have worked out better. The end product doesn't give either one of them the focus they deserve, however, leaving Jinx's Action Girl credentials sorely under-developed, while not bothering to explore why Frost might have turned traitor, beyond her just doing it For the Evulz.
  • Colonel Moon is a more interesting and threatening villain than Gustav Graves even though they are the same man.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Bond has been tortured for the past year and a half, and rather than becoming the dangerous man he was in Licence to Kill, he quickly readjusts back into his normal personality (earns him inummerable badass points, though).
  • The Bond producers were clearly trying to use Moonraker's original plot (that is, the plot from the novel) but Die Another Day never ends up being as interesting as the novel.
  • The idea of a James Bond film full of Call Backs and Continuity Nods to all of the earlier films had a lot of potential, especially given that it was the 40th anniversary of the series and a lot of media was being produced at the time that celebrated the franchise's long history. However, given that most of the "references" in the film were just brief visual cues (Graves' mooks in Iceland having orange outfits is apparently a sufficient enough allusion to Blofeld's mooks in Piz Gloria also having orange outfits in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, for example), the move came off as more distracting and unnecessary than clever.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The film tries to avoid dating itself by making the bad guys a faction of the North Korean military that's extreme even for them, but still manages it since the American intelligence agency with whom Bond and the MI-6 work this time is the NSA, meaning it could've only been made prior to that agency's reputation collapsing in The New '10s after its warrantless wiretapping scandal was made public.
  • Early 2000s cellphones also give that impression in the era of smartphones.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Gustav Graves wearing a Power Glove, a Laser Tag vest, and a LaserScope headset. On the other hand, it makes him the otaku to end all otaku.

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