James Bond film compare and contrast

1. SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING AND DESIGN
THE DESIGN SCHOOL
FOUNDATION IN NATURAL BUILD ENVIRONMENT
NAME: Lim Pui San
STUDENT ID NO: 0318144
FILMS SELECTED: Tomorrow NeverDies, Skyfall
WORD COUNT: 1001 words
ENGLISH 2 (ELG 30605)
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT 1: COMPARE – CONTRAST ESSAY
LECTURER: CASSANDRA WIJESURIA
SUBMISSION DATE: 5TH DECEMBER 2014

2. Compare & Contrast Essay
James Bond Movies
There are a lot of movies have been created, filmed and produced in the
world. In honest, I am not a movie lover. For me, watching movies is a luxurious
hobby because it is costly especially if you watch with your family plus buying
snacks and beverage from the cinema. However, after I start my college life, I
used to watch movies with my friends because as an architecture student, I need
more inspiration from my life. So, I found that movies are actually the interesting
and quick way for me to get inspired in order to work well and creatively.
Basically, I will watch the trailer of the movie at home before watching it in the
cinema to ensure that the movie is really worth to watch. The other action I will
do before watching a movie is to know the genre for the specific movie. There
are many movie genres such as horror, romance, comedy and etcetera. So, what
is genre about? As shown on the Oxford dictionary, genre is a particular type or
style of literature, art, film or music that you can recognize because of its special
features. In film, genre can be known as the method based on similarities in the
narrative elements from which films are constructed. In this assignment, we can
choose either James Bond films or Horror Films to compare. I would like to
choose James Bond films as the topic of my essay.
For half a century, James Bond movies have obsessed many audiences in the
world. Many people believe that most of the people will at least watch one of the
James Bond films in their life. The James Bond film series is a British series of spy
film with the fictional character, James Bond who worked as an officer in the Secret
Intelligence Service, where also known as M16. James Bond also commonly known
with his code 007, and he was also a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve. Before
showing out on screen, James Bond originally is written in a series of books by Ian
Fleming. Ian Fleming was a popular British author. He possessed the title of “The 50
greatest British writer since 1945” and all his Bond series novels have ranked the
best-selling fictional novels that time. The first Bond novel is Casino Royale,
completed in 1952. Among all the James Bond movies, there are many different
actors played the role of Bond. In order to show the differences between the James
Bond films, I choose “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Skyfall” for further explanation.
There are two different actors who played “Tomorrow Never Dies” and
“Skyfall”, who are Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. “Tomorrow Never Dies” was
produced in the year of 1997 but “Skyfall” is the most recent movie of James Bond
film series, which released in 2012. The director in both movies is also different.
Roger Spottiswoode is the director of “Tomorrow Never Dies”, while Sam Mendes is
the director of “Skyfall”. Besides that, “Tomorrow Never Dies” is written by Bruce
Feirstein, but “Skyfall” is written by three authors who are Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
and John Logan. The composer of “Tomorrow Never Dies” is David Arnold, but
Thomas Newman is the composer of “Skyfall”.
Both films have different storyline even though they are based on the
character of James Bond. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond was sent to a border
region in Russia to spy on the large bazaar where selling weapons illegally to

3. international terrorists. MI6 and the Royal Navy identified several wanted
buyers and many weapons by watching the operation through a television..
Despite M’s protest, the British Admiral Roebuck launched a guided missile in
the bazaar. The missile speeded toward the target. Bond then discovered two
powerful soviet nuclear weapons on a plane. He attempted to abort the missile
but failed and it caused the terrorists escaped from the area. Story then
happened in the South China Sea. Elliot Carver, a British media mogul was
planning to provoke a war between United Kingdom and China. Then, Bond had
been sent to investigate Carver due to the incident of Devonshire. After that, a lot
of conflicts happened between Bond and Carver and how Bond was going to
destroy the missile and stop the war. In Skyfall, the story began in Istanbul
where Bond found that a MI6 agent, Ronson was wounded and the hard-drive of
a laptop, which contained undercover agents placed in terrorist organizations,
was missing. Then, Bond and Eve chased the person who stole the computer,
Patrice from car to up to a train. Both men fight. Eve wanted to shoot Patrice but
unintentionally, she shot Bond and he fell into a river. The villain in this movie
was Raoul Silva. He worked for M in MI6 before. He showed his antagonism in
the movie by humiliating M and he took revenge to kill her for betraying him in a
secret operation. Then, Bond saved M and brought her into his childhood place,
Skyfall.
As an ending, in Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond succeeded to destroy the
stealth boat in Ha Long Bay and the missile that launched by Carver as to
provoke the war. After a long battle with Carver and Stamper, Bond killed them
and saved Wai Lin, his lover from the missile explosion. At the end, Bond and
Wai Lin survived and had been rescued. In Skyfall, Silva followed M and Kincade
to a chapel. Silva attacked M and she was wounded. Silva placed a gun to his head
and attempted to commit murder-suicide. Bond reached and threw a knife on
Silva’s back. Both Silva and M died in the end.
In a nutshell, the settings of the films are great as I can see many different
countries in a movie just like travelling the world with James Bond. The
storylines are also fascinating and I can’t stop moving my sight from the screen. I
enjoyed watching both James Bond films even though they produced in different
years.
(1001 words)

4. References List
1. (2011), Synopsisfor Tomorrow Never Dies(1997). [Website]
Retrieved November 17, 2014 from
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120347/synopsis
2. (2014), Synopsisfor Skyfall(2012). [Website] Retrieved November
18,2014from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1074638/synopsis
3. Wilson M.G. & BroccoliB. (Producer), & MendesS. (Director).
(2012). Skyfall2012 [Motion Piture]. UK: Eon Productions.
4. Wilson M.G. & BroccoliB. (Producer), & SpottiswoodeR. (Director).
(1997). Tomorrow Never Dies[Motion Picture]. UK: Eon Productions.