20 James Bond References You Might Have Missed In Die Another Day
17. Escape From The Plane
Memorably, during her battle with Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike), Jinx (Halle Berry) sets Gustav Graves's massive Antonov An-124 Condor cargo plane on a collision course with the deadly Icarus beam. Although the aircraft survives flying through the intensely hot beam, it is severely damaged.
As they later escape from the doomed aircraft, Jinx opens up the rear cargo doors whilst Bond activates a conveyor belt, dumping a yellow Ferrari F355 (the same model, but different colour as driven by Famke Janssen's Xenia Onatopp in 1995's GoldenEye) and a red Lamborghini Diablo into the upper atmosphere. Bond and Jinx climb into a helicopter that is also on the conveyor belt as the forward holds explode before them. The helicopter is thrown from the aircraft just in time, saving Bond and Jinx as, seconds later, the Antonov erupts in a massive fireball.
Whilst the explosive destruction of the Antonov's cargo hold recalls the sinking of The Liparus supertanker in The Spy Who Loved Me, the scene itself is a recreation of a similar sequence in The Living Daylights (1987).
Timothy Dalton's James Bond finds that a Hercules cargo plane that he has commandeered is running out of fuel and cannot land safely. Instructing Kara Milovy (Maryam d'Abo) to get into a Jeep in the cargo hold, Bond sets the plane on a low course and jettisons the Jeep with a parachute over the desert. Bond and Kara have a bumpy ride in the Jeep, safely coming to a stop in time to see the Hercules aircraft nosediving into a mountain range.