Was the Janus crime syndicate supposed to play out past Goldeneye?
armenianmovieman
The 818Posts: 738MI6 Agent
I know Trevelyan dies and the movie doesn't really mention the organization outright other than a few exposition lines but did they ever intend to play this one out?
Watching Goldeneye again, and perhaps its because of Spectre and Hydra setting up for future movies for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and modern Bond, but lately I've been wondering if they left it open or wanted it to, as they finally got the Bond rights and it was the first Bond movie in 6 years: Martin Campbell would later direct a similar restart in Bond that featured such an organization that was meant to play out over several flicks.
Watching Goldeneye again, and perhaps its because of Spectre and Hydra setting up for future movies for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and modern Bond, but lately I've been wondering if they left it open or wanted it to, as they finally got the Bond rights and it was the first Bond movie in 6 years: Martin Campbell would later direct a similar restart in Bond that featured such an organization that was meant to play out over several flicks.
Yes. Consssssiderably.
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Since the key characters were killed though, and the Radio teliscope was either overun or destroyed, I think it was meant to be a closed book. Carver Media (there's another one!) picked up anew where the others had previously been.
Perhaps it was intended to be armenian.. It could have been something Jeffrey Caine or Michael France intended on continuing had they had a jab at what would become TND. I'm sure if it was Feinstein's idea he would have implemented it somewhere in TND, or even TWINE, where I can see it working with Elektra - faking her death during her kidnapping only to resurface to kill her dad and take control of King Industries.
Well the Janus group had the ability to recruit dozens maybe hundreds of computer technicians, support staff, and private security troops to man its elaborate, massive radio dish complex in Cuba (I doubt Janus built that place from the ground up, most probably a former Soviet facility re-occupied and renovated by Trevelyan's crew like his armoured missile train).
However until that point in the film it was shown as a relatively shallow conspiracy between a crooked Russian Fed general and former 00 agent with a handful of bodyguards and thugs working alongside Xenia Onatopp, with enough behind the scenes clout to sic Russian military police onto Bond and Natalya through bribery and/or manipulation.
Reviving another 9 year old thread...
I did also wonder this myself the last time I watched Goldeneye. There also seems to be a bit of "dual face" symbolism that crops up in the film (which could be a subtle reference to Blofeld):
I did wonder if they were sowing the seeds for a possible return of SPECTRE and Blofeld but the rights were tied up with McClory at the time. Perhaps it was another subtle middle finger to him as there were rumours abound that he was working on another of his Bond films titled "Warhead".
I feel like the mention of Janus was only really there as a sort of percursor to Alec's reappearance, to give it a bit of foreshadowing and impact when it landed. Otherwise it didn't really need a name, any more than Kamal Khan and Octopussy teaming up together needed a band name; or Sanchez's operation needed a name. I've never felt it was going anywhere beyond that movie.
I did wonder if they were sowing the seeds for a possible return of SPECTRE and Blofeld but the rights were tied up with McClory at the time. Perhaps it was another subtle middle finger to him as there were rumours abound that he was working on another of his Bond films titled "Warhead".
Don't forget they'd be giving the middle finger to Brosnan too(!), as he was the one who approached McClory (and not the other way around) before GoldenEye to try to make his own rival Bond film whilst Eon's were tied up in the legal stuff.
I didn't know Brosnan approached McClory - he'd go on to have form at that kind of thing, wouldn't he? When EON was stalling he approached Quentin Tarantino who had been talking up the Casino Royale rights. That's likely to annoy Barbara Broccoli.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yeah I didn’t realise it either until a couple of years back when I saw the interview below (it’s the last question about 13m in) - he’s quite matter of fact about it.
Some fans get all upset when they talk about him getting let go from the role and how the Brocs should have been kinder to him or whatever, but this was a business arrangement and he was more than happy to do the dirty on them!
I hadn't seen that interview, thanks for posting it. How things might have been....
That’s all new to me - thanks for posting @emtiem
That's a really interesting revelation. Maybe Brosnan was subtly annoyed that he missed out on the Bond role in 86/87 because of the fact he couldn't be Remington Steele and James Bond at the same time.
Janus was similar to SPECTRE, but far too wrapped around one ex-UK super spy with a grudge and a few key comically corrupt ex-Soviet officials, and once they were taken out the organisation effectively died as a relevant force, with the illicit theft and deployment of Petya & Mischa being their climax (but it's a fun headcanon the thugs and mercs "hosting" that giant Russian arms bazaar in the pre-title sequence for TND were a smaller, less organised post-Trevelyan Janus organisation).
Based on what you say, I do theorise if there was a slight hint of continuity in the background throughout the Brosnan era.
Janus is a fractured organisation following GE. The remaining members sell off the rest of their weapons and equipment in the opening scene of TND. The onscreen tag "somewhere on the Russian border" fits.
Renard also buys up some of the equipment later seen in TWINE.
Other equipment is also sold to General Moon which later appears in the pre-titles of DAD.
Also Janus being the biggest criminal organisation in Eurasia by the events of GoldenEye may have drastically changed the dynamic with how the oligarchs and crime bosses carved up ex-Soviet economies in comparison to RL and even who was in the Kremlin at the time, when you have a highly skilled ex-00 officer like Trevelyan and ex-Soviet officer like Onatopp who could get to many in Russian government and business in a chaotic late 80s into the 90s era.
And after Janus lost most or all of their key leaders after the Cuban debacle, I can imagine it left a power vacuum that got filled by relatively small sharks such Zukovsky who were able to drastically expand and upgrade their business interests (both legal and illegal), hence why only 4 years later you had Zukovsky extend his reach drastically past St. Petersberg and into adjacent ex-Soviet countries, with a lavish casino and caviar farm (an upgrade to the seedy clubhouse on an rundown industrial estate seen in GE).
Also Gustav Grave's Russian scientist may have been part of the R&D branch of the Janus organisation, with even Graves' mirror satellite originally being a late 80s Soviet design that was put through development by Janus' private secret laboratories (the GoldenEye kill sats were only two in number, reflected sunlight is less high risk and more reusable than orbital nukes, etc).
Janus was a two-headed Roman god, with one face looking to the past and one to the future. Quite apt for GE, as a film inaugurating a new cycle of Bond movies while respecting Bondian tradition.
The Janus idea is strikingly reflected in the image of the two-headed, cigar-smoking woman (Xenia) in the credits sequence, but thematically it relates to the deceptions practised by Trevelyan, a Double-O biding his time to exact revenge on England for Churchill's betrayal of the Cossacks, and Ourumov, who poses as loyal to the Russian Federation while criminally abusing his military position of power for his own ends. Since Janus seems thematically to be about the two-faced duplicity of these characters specifically, I'd guess that the intention was always to tie the name to this one film only. The scarring on one side of Trevelyan's face caused by his injuries at Arkhangelsk may even have been an allusion to Batman's comic-book foe, Two-Face (Arkhangelsk/ Arkham).
Of course, there'd been a tradition of Russian traitors or rogues in Bond films, from Klebb to Orlov to Zorin to Necros (who seems paradoxically sentimental about Soviet Communism while trucking with a redneck American mercenary like Whitaker).
Following GE, it's true that the arms bazaar in the TND PTS riffs again on the problem of organised crime exploiting the break-up of the Soviet Union and accessing its legacy infrastructure and hardware.
Zukovsky (GE and TWINE) is coded as a more 'acceptable' manifestation of this criminal phenomenon than either Janus or the highly dangerous dealers in nuclear weaponry at the bazaar: he's a comic, low-rent Russian Corleone figure ("Take a hike!"/"To what do I owe this accommodation?")
That interview with Brosnan is fascinating. He affected nonchalance but was clearly relishing his success, and felt confident enough of it to talk frankly about his past discussions with McClory. Pierce in a late 80s/early 90s TB re-make? He could well have outshone the Connery of NSNA. But I'm glad it was Eon that picked him up.
A likeable chap. I still want to see him involved in whatever comes next.
Having Soviet recruited and trained villains like Necros being part of a corrupt non-official scheme, Ourumov being the face of post-Soviet Russian military corruption, Rosa Klebb still posing as a KGB officer while really representing SPECTRE, and General Orlov being at odds with relatively more rational Soviet officials like Gogol is a obvious creative slight of hand by Bond producers to dodge out of presenting the actual Russian government as the principle villains, despite the fact Russian intelligence and military often functioned as secondary antagonists for Bond and MI6 (and Gogol in a few films still sent troops and henchmen out to potentially kill Bond, even if he's acting more as a foil to M rather than the real villain).
And while GE's Mishkin and Zukovsky weren't primary antagonists, they were still presented as somewhat ominous figures with blood on their hands (the Russian defence minister knew about the Soviet legacy project of having orbital nukes still active after 1991 and Zukovsky's associates allegedly had a nosy investigator dismembered), while Russian infantry and guards are on occasion viable mooks for Bond to dispose of.
Looking back, Bond's machine-gunning of all of those innocent Russian troops when he's escaping from the jail in St Petersburg is a bit shocking considering Russia was pretty much an ally at the time: imagine if Roger had mown down Sheriff JW Pepper and his fellow cops for getting in his way!
How innocent were the guards actually, especially when they were shooting at Bond and Natalya, and how they turned up at the statue park in a shifty way, like they were tipped off by Janus? And Craig Bond may have unintentionally got a couple of Miami cops killed or badly injured in the CR airport chase.
When we all see how corruption, abuse, and criminality eats away at Putin's military while it's trying to brutally annex Ukraine in RL, even after all the post-Yeltsin reforms, I wouldn't be surprised the fictitious 1990s Russian military and other organs of the Russian state were generally on the take in some way from Alec Trevelyan's wealthy criminal ring (and that most of the Russian guards Bond killed or wounded were little better than Ourumov, but they just lower down the pecking order for Janus' endemic bribery and graft)
How innocent were the guards actually, especially when they were shooting at Bond and Natalya
Well they're just members of the military, following orders from their commander Ouromov: they don't know he's bent and working for Janus. They're not like the usual henchmen who have signed on to blow up the world.
I think it's a bit of a change to watch Casino Royale when Bond pursues the bomb guy into that embassy: he's met by loads of armed guards and yet goes out of his way not to kill any of them, shooting gas pipes and the like to stun rather than kill them.
Shooting Russian troops at the Ministry doesn't sit well with the genre. But purely in terms of plot, Bond has to escape at all costs in order to use what he now knows to foil further, potentially catastrophic use of Goldeneye: he's seeing the big picture. Plus old habits die hard.
The comparison with the embassy scene in CR06 is apt. Where a troop or two is shot there, this is down to Mollaka, IIRC, or 'friendly' crossfire. Craig's Bond himself doesn't actively kill anyone other than bad guys, but he's coldly indifferent to collateral damage.
In GE, it's a shame about Defence Minister Mishkin's fate. He'd have made a great Gogol Mark II, for the Brosnan era. I love it, though, when Ourumov pulls out of the bag an improvisation of Kronsteen, deciding to frame Bond for the murder of Mishkin, the man he himself has just shot.
They were maybe less complicit than the small assortment of plain clothed or disguised Janus henchmen assisting Onatopp and Trevelyan in earlier scenes, or the small army of Janus mercs in the Cuban finale, but they may have heard Ourumov shooting the Defence Minister and were playing a role (knowing or not) in covering up the GoldenEye disaster.
Also I wouldn't be surprised many of the men Ourumov surrounded himself with were as crooked as he was, albeit on a smaller scale (I imagine the Russian guard who drove Ourumov to the Janus armoured train routinely did illegal goods drop offs, etc, for Alec Trevelyan).
With the amount of resources the Janus group were throwing around (the Soviet era military armoured train as their HQ, the elaborate duplicate GoldenEye facility in Cuba, etc) the political reach of Janus in the Russian Federation's may have gone further than just General Ourumov.
Also I wouldn't be surprised many of the men Ourumov surrounded himself with were as crooked as he was, albeit on a smaller scale (I imagine the Russian guard who drove Ourumov to the Janus armoured train routinely did illegal goods drop offs, etc, for Alec Trevelyan).
It's possible, but if it's not established in the film then we can't know; and we're given no reason to think Bond is aware if they are or not- all he knows is Ouromov is dodgy. It's just a bit iffy to be gunning so many down, it's a shame they didn't think of something cleverer and a bit less lethal for him to do at that point.
The comparison with the embassy scene in CR06 is apt. Where a troop or two is shot there, this is down to Mollaka, IIRC, or 'friendly' crossfire. Craig's Bond himself doesn't actively kill anyone other than bad guys, but he's coldly indifferent to collateral damage.
That's another aspect in which I think Quantum of Solace missteps: we see innocent civilians get hurt in the course of the action (a lorry driver has a head-on collision in the PTS, and a lady gets shot at the Palio) and I don't think that's quite right for a Bond film.
In GE, it's a shame about Defence Minister Mishkin's fate. He'd have made a great Gogol Mark II, for the Brosnan era.
Yeah I think you're right, he gets a lot of good value out of a small part, it would have been good to see more from him.
Yes, Brosnan might equally well have punched a couple of guards, flung a filing cabinet or two, lost Natalya in the melee and hurtled out of a window, straight into the tank sequence. He could have been made to look tough without resort to a machine-gun blitz. It was already clear enough that we'd moved on from cello rides, Barbara Woodhouse and John Barry's symphonic arrangement of the Bond theme.
I think GE and TND having prolonged gunfights (with their scripts not thinking about the welfare of all those faceless gunmen) was them blatantly aping other contemporary action films of the mid 80s to mid 90s.
And Ourumov had sent the men under his command to kill Bond and even Natalya (a true innocent) and you shouldn't really blame Bond for the guards' deaths or injuries, willing thugs or not, blame Ourumov and the endemic Janus corruption leaking through the walls of a creaky 1990s Russian state (which was failing BTW in RL during the production of the film, it was a small miracle they did some location shooting in St. Petersburg at all, with the rest being fairly elaborate open air sets in the UK).