Tomorrow Never Dies
 (1997) -
Roger Spottiswoode's neat Bond adventure has Pierce Brosnan's 007 helped by a Chinese
spy (Michelle Yeoh) to thwart the plans of a crazed media mogul. In one outstanding
stunt sequence, Bond jumps his motorbike over the villains' low-hovering helicopter...
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"When Bond and Q (Desmond Llewellyn)
take the new remote-control BMW car for a test drive, we see a brand spanking new Eurocopter
EC-135 on the tarmac behind them. Later, a Eurocopter 350B A-Star tries to kill Bond on
his motorcycle by using the rotor-blades to slice him up. That doesn't work out too well."
- NATHAN DECKER
"The 'buzzsaw alley' stunt in Tomorrow Never Dies deserves
a special mention as the most blatantly inaccurate portrayal of helicopter flight - of
all time - in a big-budget movie. In this scene, the chopper pitches over forward more
than 20 degrees (nose down, tail up) without moving forward (impossible), then slowly
proceeds to chop up wood and pieces of debris without damaging its rotor blades (also
impossible) and continues to move forward very slowly as it chases Bond! In reality, the
helicopter would have accelerated forward as soon as its nose began to pitch downwards.
(A helicopter cannot hover if it is pitched at an angle other than approximately level,
in normal weather conditions.) The sequence insults the intelligence of anyone who knows
anything about how a helicopter flies, and gives away the fact that it was almost certainly
a life-size mechanical mock-up, perhaps combined with miniature effects, and definitely not
a real helicopter. That ruined the whole movie for me, because after that I could no longer
suspend disbelief, and I felt like I was looking at a 'live-action' cartoon instead."
- LOUIS GONZALEZ
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