Goldeneye's opening sequence, starting with James Bond's stunning bungee dive off the dam at the Soviet Arkhangelsk facility may be one of the best sequences in 007 movie history, but it hides a problem. The shock opening salvo of the death of Sean Bean's 006 agent, Alec Trevelyan doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny and it threatens to derail an otherwise perfect opening.
Trevelyan's plan comes down to more than your typical Bond villain (and draws him in line with the best MCU villains), because he seeks more than power, he seeks vengeance. He turned on MI6 because the British government betrayed his parents during World War II, selling them out to Stalin after the Cossacks had turned on the Red Army, defecting to fight alongside the Nazis. When Britain handed them over, the Cossacks paid in blood and inspired in Trevelyan a long-gestating desire to get revenge. It's a far more noble inspiration than most Bond villains, avoiding the cliches of empty power grabs that can signal a lack of true depth and substance.
But the problem for Trevelyan's well-intentioned revenge plan is that it makes no sense, particularly when you rewatch Goldeneye, which the stunning opening demands you do. That dam set-piece is the gold standard of the Bond cold open: better than a Union Jack daubed parachute, Skyfall's Bond assassination ane even Sean Connery's jetpack. It combines gadgetry with wit, superior intellect and a suggestion of the superhero gene that bubbles just under the surface of Bond's DNA sequencing. But in order to get to that point and enjoy it for its spectacle and its impact, the audience has to suspend belief and logic on every rewatch thanks to Bean's treacherous spy. And it has nothing to do with the fact that his dam appears to be on the top of a mountain, defying geographical logic - it's the issue around him faking his death when he plans to kill Bond on the Arkhangelsk mission.
Though there is some speculation that 006 turns after he is shot, that simply cannot hold weight, because Trevelyan talks about the consideration to invite Pierce Brosnan's Bond to join his scheme. Given that he starts harboring specific feelings of vengeance against Bond after he changes the timer to blow up the facility quicker, there would be no time for that consideration if not prior to a planned defection. So the shooting was faked - which is why it wasn't successful. So why was that necessary at all? A faked death is only important in the interest of theatrics and theatrics only matter if you plan for them to be seen and reported, but Trevelyan's plan included killing Bond to cover his defection. If it hadn't, Trevelyan would have made his escape a lot simpler than having to drive off a cliff and climb into a nose-diving plane: film directors account for spectacle, Bond villains don't tend to care so much. For any of that to have been Trevelyan's actual plan would require a stunning leap of disbelief. There are simply too many possible fail points.
Trevelyan's enter plot to defect is needlessly complex: if he wanted Bond to escape to pass on news of his death, there was no need to make it so difficult to achieve. Bond barely escapes with his life, after all. Impressively, this isn't even the only plot-hole in the scene: there's also the issue of Ourumov's magic gun, which fires a blank when shot at Trevelyan but which then fires a real bullet at the Soviet soldier who accidentally shoots at the barrels hiding Bond. It was either a blank weapon or it wasn't. And then even more crucially, Trevelyan's issue with Bond shortening the countdowns in order to cover his escape is illogical based on the fact that he'd just convincingly been killed. His won field training should have told him that Bond would do whatever it took to escape once he knew the outcome of 006 being shot, and Trevelyan made sure the General shot him point blank in the head. There was no room for doubt and thus any room for brattish, illogical emotional responses which ended up driving the plot of Goldeneye also should have evaporated with it.
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