20 Things You Didn’t Know About GoldenEye (1995)

19. “God Save The Queen.”

Goldeneye Pierce Brosnan
MGM/UA

Ian Fleming’s 1955 novel, Moonraker, dealt with the idea of the enemy within through Nazi war criminal, Graf Hugo von der Drache who had been caught in an explosion that he had set at a British Army field headquarters.

Subsequently masquerading as a soldier who was caught in the blast, Hugo Drax, Drache discovered a vein of Columbite, a highly-resistant metal used in rocket engines. Donating it to the British government, Drax was knighted and used the Columbite to build the Moonraker, a modified V-2 rocket ostensibly designed as a deterrent against a Soviet attack.

In truth, Sir Hugo Drax had sided with the Soviets and designed the weapon to be fired on London in retribution for the fall of The Third Reich and for the perceived British acts of terrorism against the Soviet Union. He also gambled on the stock market so that he could profit from the disaster.

Inspired by Moonraker, the writers of GoldenEye devised Alec Trevelyan as a supposedly-deceased Double-0 agent and the son of two Lienz Cossacks who had killed themselves in disgrace. Trevelyan planned to use a Soviet-era space weapon to destroy London and plunge Great Britain into an economic crisis after looting the Bank of England online.

Drax had been grotesquely disfigured, both in the explosion and during years of botched plastic surgery so, in a further reference to Fleming’s character, Trevelyan was written as having been scarred in an explosion set by Double-0 Seven.

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