IMDb:
James Bond is sent to investigate the connection between a North Korean terrorist and a diamond mogul who is funding the development of an international space weapon.
A bythenumbers retelling of a below average Bond film, The author did fill in a few back story details of how Colonel Moon set himself up as Peter Graves and made his fortune.
The narration felt perfunctory which made the action scenes seem less exciting somehow, Benson has definitely written better Bond novels but his hands were tied with this one, Definitely one of the more ridiculous plots, Discussed on the pod! Not a good book!
sitelink fm/authorizedpod/episo Damn another novelization of a bad film, that just falls flat, A real disappointment from Benson, whose books were actually getting better and better,
Unlike his first novelization that enhanced back stories, characterizations, and description this is rather painful to read.
Seems that both Gardner and Benson just wanted out of their contracts, thus giving fans bad books at the very end.
Such a shame after his original novels were so awesome, some of the best in the entire Canon.
Below is my updated ranking of the Canon with the last book moving up another slot.
Hope youll enjoy them as well,
Overall rating of book series:
Casino Royale / On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Goldfinger / Never Dream of Dying
From Russia with Love / The Man with the Red Tattoo
Live and Let Die
Diamonds are Forever / Dr.
No
Moonraker / For Special Services
Scorpius / High Time to Kill
Doubleshot
Thunderball / License Renewed / The Facts of Death
Colonel Sun
You Only Live Twice
James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me Wood
Icebreaker / GoldenEye
Zero Minus Ten
For Your Eyes Only / Octopussy amp The Living Daylights
The Man with the Golden Gun / Tomorrow Never Dies
The Spy Who Loved Me
Lives Forever
No Deals, Mr.
Bond
James Bond and Moonraker Wood
The Man from Barbarossa
Win, Lose or Die
Role of Honor / Brokenclaw
Death is Forever / The World is not Enough
Die Another Day
Licence to Kill
Never Send Flowers
SeaFire / COLD My first and only James Bond book.
I like the film better, A serviceable novelization. I've found I don't like Benson's Bond books as much this time around as I did the first time I read them, but they're not bad.
Just not great. Most of the aspects that make Die Another Day a bad film are either absent or at least toned down by Benson in his novelization of course, that perception could just be due to the fact that reading about some of the more overthetop details is less jarring than the lessthanimpressive greenscreen work that induces so many cringes every time I watch the movie.
As Benson did with Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough, the author comes up with suitably "Bondian" scenes to bridge the gaps between locations, and he also provides some interesting background for some of the main characters Frost, Moon, and Zao.
I get the impression that Benson found the MoongtGraves transformation and rapid rise huge satellite launch and knighthood inmonths! just as implausible as a lot of the rest of us Bond fans, but that was the screenplay he was given, and he does his best with it.
I'm disappointed that Raymond Benson didn't get to stick around longer in his role as a Bond continuation author, but after reading some interviews he's done about his tenure, I can certainly understand why he was a little relieved to be done with it and move on Benson has said that he was about to ask for a year off when Glidrose/Ian Fleming Publications let him know that they were suspending the continuation novels for a while.
. . six years, as it turned out, . .
sitelink nettheraymondbensoncbninterviewparti. html. I think he did an excellent job with his novels, especially given the mandate he was under to blend the literary and film versions of James Bond.
Fairly basic but still enjoyable novelisation of the much maligned Bond film, Graves' transformation from Moon is fleshed out more later in the book, A rather random mention of Tanner being M early on conflicts with Judi Dench's M appearing throughout.
When I was in school, my teachers used to say the book is always better than the movie.
Upon reading sitelinkThe Shining, sitelinkThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz, sitelinkCasino Royale, sitelinkForrest Gump, I was reminded this opinion was formed by someone who makes like,a year.
Although being a book based on a movie, Die Another Day really was better than the movie if only because one could mentally fix the flaws in the film while reading the novelization.
The movie had no shortage of flaws, sitelinkwhich I have documented exhaustively, Reading the novelization, I got a sense of what the original vision for the film might have been.
I found myself thinking this might have been an enjoyable story if it hadn't been tainted by some "creative" decisions.
Gone is Madonna's atrocious theme song as Raymond Benson fleshes out Bond's ordeal in the North Korean prison.
My imagination isn't limited to the technical capabilities of CGI, I could mentally fix Halle Berry's character design so she doesn't look like a little boy, I can read the dialogue more believably,
What ultimately went wrong, in my opinion, was there were too many scifi elements for a spy thriller: the invisible car, the space weapon, the genetic makeovers.
One of these elements might have worked if it was set up properly, but the story got too untethered from reality.
This was Benson's final goround writing a Bond novel, and he decided to have a little fun, which I appreciated.
While Bond is trekking through the snow back to Graves's ice palace, he wishes for anything he could ride on to ease the journey, even a cello casea reference to a campy scene in The Living Daylights.
He also mentions Jinx's black leather outfit and how she moved like a cat, perhaps a tongueincheek joke about Halle Berry's role in the muchmaligned Catwoman.
Ultimately, I find novelizations to be a strange genre, The writer is rarely the same person who had the original vision for the story, The books are written on spec, Apparently they are holdovers from the days before home video, where the only way to relive a story other than having a private screening was to read the novelization.
They persisted into the 's as a marketing gimmick, They exist solely to be on display at supermarkets to remind the public there is a movie coming out, and then to be "remaindered" once they fulfilled their purpose.
After finishing Die Another Day, I vowed to myself this would be the last novelization I read.
Life is too short to read books based on movies,
Raymond Benson's Bond series, a retrospective
Having finished Benson's Bond series, I am thankful he knew when to call it quits and didn't overstay his welcome.
The series really ended with sitelinkNever Dream of Dying, and sitelinkThe Man With the Red Tattoo was something of a campy, mediocre bookend in which he was clearly running out of steam.
In that sense, it is like another Bond story set in Japan, the film You Only Live Twice, a campy movie with a bored performance from Sean Connery.
Unlike sitelinkJohn Gardner before him though, Benson was clearly a fan who wrote with the fans in mind.
He seamlessly wove in callbacks to the sitelinkIan Fleming books and occasionally the Gardner books, without it feeling too fan servicey.
I noticed he relied a lot on Bond doppelgängers as villains, The villain in sitelinkZero Minus Ten, the taipan Guy Thackeray, appeared to be inspired by Pierce Brosnan's character, Ian Dunross, in the TV miniseries TaiPan.
The villain in sitelinkHigh Time to Kill, Roland Marquis, was Bond's boyhood rival whoadmits is cut from the same cloth as himself.
In sitelinkDoubleshot, a henchman is something of a James Bond body snatcher, And finally, although it was a novelization, in Die Another Day, the villain, Colonel Moon, tellshe modeled his Gustav Graves persona after Bond.
In fact, the actor who played Graves in the movie, Toby Stephens, would go on to play James Bond in several radio adaptations of Fleming's novels.
As for Benson's three short stories, "Blast from the Past," "Midsummer Night's Doom," and "Live at Five" all of which I own in their original published form, they are all trash, and they wouldn't have been published if they didn't have the official James Bondimprimatur.
I've decided this will be the last Bond novel I read, I mostly prefer the movies to the books, especially postFleming,
Benson's books ranked
, High Time to Kill
, Never Dream of Dying
, Zero Minus Ten
, The Man with the Red Tattoo
, sitelinkThe Facts of Death
, sitelinkTomorrow Never Dies
, Die Another Day
, Doubleshot
. sitelinkThe World is Not Enough Agentlivesto die another dayin the ultracool new motion picture from Metro Goldwyn Meyer.
Also John Cleese and Judi Dench, and features a new Bond song from Madonna, Zamanınız çoksa okuyun, tavsiye edebilecegim bir kitap degil, Typický prepis scenára do knihy, Nenadchne, ale ani neurazí. Kniha sa od filmu odchyľuje len v detailoch,
Ide o pohodové čítanie na jedendva večery,
Mínusom je veľké množstvo gramatických a štylistických chýb, Na jednej strane sa hovorí o vesmírnej družici Icarus, neskôr je to Ikarus a nakoniec ikarus.
Takýchto chýb je v knihe viac,
Ak patríte medzi diehard fanúšikov ako ja knihu by ste si mali prečitať.
Hodnotenie:/A novel novelization of what had become Pierce Brosnan's last turn as, Entertaining to read if you liked the movie without too many changes made, Novelisation of the film of the same name,
I've tried to be fair to this book, The plot isn't the author's fault, it's been foisted on him by the screenplay, and most of my problems with the events in the book are due to it.
The downside is that the book contains some terrible prose, It's very leaden and overdescriptive, but in the opposite way to purple prose, The writing seems to be determined to remove all lyricism and excitement and to state everything as plainly as possible.
Worse, it's boring. The example I am going to use is from the early hovercraft battle,
"As Bond's craft sailed into the Demilitarised Zone, he moved forward and grabbed the pilot by the neck.
He pulled the man away from the controls and threw him over the side, The man fell directly onto a mine in the dirt and disappeared in a fireball, Bond was now in command of the hovercraft, "
Adjectives and adverbs are at a premium through out, losing any sense of immediacy or tension.
Therefore, even accounting for the ways in which the writer was hamstrung before he even started, I cannot give this any more thanout of.
.
Enjoy For Free Die Another Day (Raymond Bensons Bond, #6.5) Envisioned By Raymond Benson Presented In Multimedia Book
Raymond Benson