2. The Living Daylights: One Man's Freedom Fighters...
Although the Bond series is one of the great cultural artefacts of the Cold War, direct flashpoints- like Vietnam- were never directly alluded to. This had been a deliberate strategy on the part of the production team- removing the politics of the Fleming novels meant that the films could be accessible to audiences across the world. The Living Daylights, the first film of the Timothy Dalton interregnum, is unusual for adopting a real life global conflict- the Soviet war in Afghanistan- as the backdrop for its storyline. This might have been an effective way of differentiating his debut from the fantasy excesses of the Roger Moore years, but it was a downright awkward way of avoiding the old 'much loved fictional character ends up colluding with a notorious terrorist group' pitfall. In the third act of the narrative, Bond is kidnapped by a Russian double agent and taken to a Soviet prison in Pinewood Studios. Luckily, he has a gas spewing watch that only activates around dopy prison guards. During his escape, he frees a raving derelict who turns out to be Kamran Shah, the Oxford educated leader of a local Mujahedeen faction. Bond presses them into action and after a lot of explosions and a nice model shot of a tank falling through a collapsing bridge, they succeed in freeing Afghanistan from the yolk of Soviet oppression. It's one of the most impressively mounted action sequences in Bond history, and acts as a fine conclusion to a pretty excellent movie. The awkwardness comes when you realise that the Mujahedeen would slowly mutate into the Taliban. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mujahedeen fell into infighting and was eventually swallowed up by the newer organisation. Although there are fundamental differences between the two movements, both are associated with the Islamic notion of jihad, not least because both were funded by a certain Mr Osama B. Laden esquire. Perhaps significantly, Bin Laden, like the Kamran Shah character in the movie, was wealthy, of good family, and privately educated. If Kamran Shah isn't meant as a direct parallel, then he was at least similar enough to provoke a little nervousness from MGM, who pulled the DVD edition of The Living Daylights from circulation for a few months post-9/11. Of course, the Bond team had no way of knowing what would happen in the intervening years and could hardly be accused of endorsing the Taliban. The most awkward thing about The Living Daylights, then, isn't anything in the movie itself (although Bond does not suit a turban). The most awkward thing is that it reminds us that one man's freedom fighters can eventually turn out to be, er, the same man's terrorists.