The World is Not Enough (1999)
d. Michael Apted

Dr. Molly Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas)

After suffering a dislocated left collarbone, Bond (Brosnan) was off the active-duty list until cleared by medical personnel.

Bond didn't want to abide by the restictions imposed by the British Secret Service's medical officer, Dr. Molly Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas) with whom he had a previous liaison. He claimed: "I need a clean bill of health. You have to clear me for duty."

Although it wouldn't be "ethical, practical, smart" for him to be released prematurely, he suggested that they renew their contact: "Let's skirt the issue, shall we?" as he seduced her in the examination room. He unzipped her skirt, helped remove her blouse, and they began kissing as she was coaxed to recommend that he be released - but added that things would be different this time: "You'd have to promise to call me this time...I suppose if you stayed in constant contact...if you showed sufficient stamina, cut out all kinds of 'strenuous activity'..."

Forever jealous, secretary Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) snidely remarked about Warmflash's new health report about Bond (including that he now had "exceptional stamina"): "I'm sure she was touched by his dedication to the job in hand."

The World is Not Enough (1999)

Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards)

Impersonating Russian Atomic Energy Department nuclear scientist Dr. Mikhail Arkov, Bond (Brosnan) arrived by propeller plane at a Russian ICBM nuclear clean-up site in isolated Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

There, he met buxom IDA (International Decommissioning Agency) nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) who was cleaning up (or decommissioning) older Russian nuclear weapons at test sites. Bond was cautioned that Jones was "not interested in men" - and she appeared immediately suspicious of his identity.

A few moments later down in the missile silo, Christmas arrived with military guards and exposed Bond as an imposter ("Dr. Arkov is 63 years old"), although the agent claimed that Renard (Robert Carlyle) was the real 'imposter' and was stealing one of the nuclear missiles with plutonium.

Bond helped both of them escape from the exploding underground complex, evading a chain-reaction series of blasts that completely destroyed the facility, as Renard escaped with one of the nuclear weapons and weapons-grade plutonium.

Later, the two traveled on a second rig to defuse a bomb hurtling within a pipeline toward its terminus. Christmas took over driving a second pipeline rig ("Doesn't exactly take a degree in nuclear physics") to get to the bomb in the pipeline, but when they realized the bomb on the rig had been tampered with (half its plutonium was missing), but was still dangerous, they jumped clear to safety.

They were thought to have died in the explosion that ruptured a fifty foot section of pipe. Bond had deliberately wanted villainous, double-crossing 'Bond girl' Elektra (Sophie Marceau) to believe that they were dead ("she thinks she got away with it"). Bond explained to Christmas how Elektra's ploy would make her appear innocent and result in Bond's elimination: "The explosion covers up the theft of the plutonium, and they make it look like a terrorist attack."

Later in the film, both of them were taken captive by Elektra at the Maiden's Tower in Istanbul, Turkey. While Bond was tortured in an archaic neck-garrotte device by Elektra, Christmas was taken onboard a sabotaged nuclear submarine that was being prepared (with the stolen plutonium) to cause a catastrophic meltdown, and provide Elektra with an oil pipeline monopoly in the region.

After killing Elektra, Bond rescued Christmas on the sub ("Thought I'd forgotten you, eh?"), and the two worked together to thwart Renard's plan. Although the sub began to flood, and Renard threatened to insert the plutonium rod into the reactor, Bond was able to cause it to backfire and impale Renard with the rod.

They escaped the sub before it exploded by expelling themselves (tightly gripping each other) through a torpedo tube.

Later that evening in Istanbul, the two enjoyed champagne in fancy party clothes, toasting themselves amidst fireworks and "Christmas" jokes (Bond: "I always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey"). She asked: "So isn't it time you unwrapped your present?"

They were spied upon enjoying intimacy in bed, by "R" (John Cleese) and M (Judi Dench) and other British Secret Service personnel in Scotland's castle. The couple was viewed via a thermal imaging camera (their bodies appeared orange in the image, and then turned redder as they had sex).

As Bond laid on top of Christmas and kissed her, he told her: "I was wrong about you...I thought Christmas only comes once a year."

The World is Not Enough (1999)

Elektra King (Sophie Marceau)

(This was the first Bond film in which the major villain was a female). Bond (Brosnan) first met beautiful Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) at the Scotland funeral of her father, murdered oil baron Sir Robert King (David Calder).

Soon after, Bond conducted research in the MI6 video archives to learn about King's oil enterprise, and heiress daughter Elektra (with a "wild-child image"), who had previously been kidnapped and held for ransom for $5 million dollars. She had escaped from Cyprus after shooting two of her captors dead, when M (Judi Dench) advised her father that one must not negotiate with terrorists (or pay their ransom of $5 million dollars), and sent in agent 009 to rescue her - but she had already escaped.

Elektra's former kidnapper was Victor Zokas, aka Renard (Robert Carlyle), a treacherous, international terrorist and anarchist. M assigned Bond to be Elektra's protective bodyguard following her father's assassination (to protect her from any further harm). She explained her objective to the agent - to take over her father's work and build an 800-mile pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Turkey, past the terrorists in Iraq, Iran and Syria. In a northern area, the Russians already had three competing pipelines.

Elektra claimed she had bigger problems than the threat on her life: "My father was murdered, the villagers are rioting, and you, Mr. Bond, have come all this way to tell me that I might be in danger." She told how her family had relied twice on MI6, but she wouldn't "make that mistake a third time" -- she denied wanting Bond's help.

However, he was forced to save their lives when they were attacked by four parahawks (hybrid paraglider-snowmobiles) piloted by armed henchmen on a mountainous ski-slope as they surveyed the pipelines. After dispatching with the four killers, an avalanche was triggered. Bond inflated his protective snow-bubble ski jacket to protect them from being buried alive, and they crawled out of the snow to safety.

Later at her villa in Baku in Kazakhstan, she alluringly asked: "Don't go. Stay with me. Please?" but Bond insisted on leaving, and claimed: "You'll be safe here." She replied: "I don't want to be safe." As he left, she tempted him: "Who's afraid now, Mr. Bond?"

That same evening, she joined him at the local casino (owned by Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane)), and made a stunning appearance in a low-cut red gown. In a private betting room, she casually made an exorbitant bet of $1 million dollars, for a simple game of "one card, high draw" against the house. Bond protested, but she went ahead ("There's no point living if you can't feel alive") - and lost. [Later it was revealed that the money was payment for services to aid Elektra's deadly scheme in monopolizing oil transport in the Mediterranean.]

She then romantically challenged Bond to the same game of "high draw" ("Shall we?") but he said he couldn't afford to play her game. Later that evening, with chilled Bollinger champagne and a candle-lit bedroom atmosphere, Elektra was naked in bed with Bond at her villa, telling him: "I knew when I first saw you. I knew it would be like this." They shared an ice-cube kiss, as Bond suggested: "Enough ice for one day," and they made love.

Afterwards, he asked about her kidnapping escape: "How did you survive?" She told him: "I seduced the guards. Used my body. And the rest. I got a gun and started shooting." She asked him the same question and he responded: "I take pleasure in great beauty."

Later when he was able to hold Renard at gunpoint in a nuclear missile silo, the villain revealed that he was Elektra's lover: "She's beautiful, isn't she? You should have had her before, when she was innocent. How does it feel to know I broke her in for you?" Bond was incensed and struck Renard on the forehead, but then suspected that Renard was working with Elektra when he used her motto ("There’s no point living if you can't feel alive").

Bond returned to Baku and confronted Elektra about Renard's knowledge of him: "Knew all about us. Knew about my shoulder." He told her to "drop the act" -- "It's over!" He diagnosed her as suffering from Stockholm syndrome -- common in kidnappings with a "young, impressionable victim. Sheltered. Sexually inexperienced. A powerful kidnapper skilled in torture, manipulation. Something snaps in the victim's mind. The captive falls in love with her captor." She slapped him hard across the face: "How dare you? That animal, that monster? He disgusts me. You disgust me." She accused Bond of using her and lying - all the time knowing that Renard was out there coming after her: "You used me as bait. And you made love to me. What? To pass the time as you waited for him to strike?"

He cautioned his superior M (Judi Dench) about Elektra, whom he was supposed to be guarding: "Perhaps that girl isn't as innocent as you think." He suspected that she had switched her father's lapel pin to kill him. M was incredulous: "She kills her own father and attacks her own pipeline?" However, she did reveal herself as a double-crossing temptress when she orchestrated Bond's 'death' in a sabotaged pipeline with a dud nuclear bomb, and presented M with a "gift" - repayment for how she had advised her father on "the best course of action" when she was kidnapped. The gift was her father's original lapel pin, used to kill him: "I just couldn't let it explode with the rest of him." Her bodyguards killed four agents protecting M, as she told Bond's boss: "I was very upset when the money didn't kill both of you."

Elektra was revealed as the sociopathic villain, orchestrating events to make herself look innocent, while working with Renard. Elektra ordered M abducted as a hostage and taken to a helicopter. In Istanbul, Turkey, Elektra met up with her co-conspirator Renard. She remained spiteful over her abandonment by M when she was kidnapped: "Your people will leave you here to rot, just like you left me. You and my father." She believed she was the rightful owner of her father's billionaire oil empire: "His kingdom he stole from my mother. The kingdom I will rightly take back."

In her bedroom, Renard caressed the skin of Elektra, but regretted not feeling her warmth or smoothness. He also wondered whether Elektra was missing Bond, now that he was dead, and asked: "He was a good lover?" Her reply ("What do you think? I wouldn't feel anything?") angered Renard who punched through a mosaic-inlaid table-top. She comforted him by lying on the bed and having him put his injured hand on her private parts: "Remember...pleasure?"

When she was notified that Bond was still alive, she ordered two of her King Industries Buzzsaw helicopters to attack Zukovsky's caviar factory at the Caspian Sea, where Bond was located. She continued to work with Renard to plot a nuclear meltdown in Istanbul (by sabotaging the nuclear submarine captained by Zukovsky's nephew Nikoli (Justus Von Dohnanyi)), part of her master plan to monopolize oil pipeline transport in the region, and put her competitors out of business.

As Renard's men were setting up the plutonium in the captured submarine, she told Renard before kissing him: "The world will never be the same." He presented her with the dead captain's cap as he bid her goodbye: "The future is yours. Have fun with it." Elektra came up to Bond, restrained by her men, and kissed him: "If only you'd kept away, we might've met again in a few years and become lovers once more." She then asked about Bond's relationship with Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), another Bond girl: "Pretty thing. You had her too? I could've given you the world." Bond replied with the film's title: "The world is not enough." She thought it "a foolish sentiment," although he called it a "family motto."

She uncovered an ancient Spanish torture device - a bench-chair with a neck-breaking garrotte, to hold Bond, who asked: "All this, because you fell for Renard?" She began to tighten the screw-bolt of the neck garrotte: "Five more turns and your neck will break. I've always had a power over men." She disclosed that she had mutilated her own right earlobe when kidnapper Renard had refused to hurt her. And she argued that her father had killed her ("He killed me the day he refused to pay my ransom"). She exclaimed: "It is my oil. Mine, and my family's! It runs in my veins, thicker than blood. I'm going to redraw the map. And when I'm through, the whole world will know my name, my grandfather's name, the glory of my people!" She was deluded and assured of her own success: "You understand? Nobody can resist me."

As Bond was on the verge of death, she straddled him. He begged her to reconsider and call off Renard's nuclear launch: "It's not too late. Eight million people need not die." She doubted that he would kill her, especially since she was someone that he had loved: "You should have killed me when you had the chance. But you couldn't. Not me. Not a woman you've loved." She came closer for a kiss. He struggled to tell her: "You meant nothing to me." She tightened the garrotte again, as he strained to say, "One last screw."

They were interrupted by gunfire outside, as an injured Zukovsky and his men launched an attack. Zukovsky was killed by Elektra, concealing her weapon and shooting through his nephew's captain's cap. As he died, he triggered the hidden pistol in his cane's handle at one of Bond's arm restraints to release him. Bond escaped from the contraption and shot Elektra's bodyguard dead as Elektra fled and yelled down to him from a stairwell: "You can't kill me, not in cold blood."

After freeing M, Bond confronted Elektra and challenged her to radio Renard and "call him off." Bond was persistent: "I won't ask again." She looked seductively at Bond, hoping to change his mind. She taunted and doubted that he would kill her: "You wouldn't kill me. You'd miss me."

When she refused to comply and commanded Renard to "dive," he shot her, then cold-bloodedly quipped: "I never miss."

He leaned over her body lying on her bed - he touched her hair, momentarily sorry for the loss. She was the first 'Bond girl' to be shot and killed by Bond himself.