GoldenEye (film)/Headscratchers

• Why go the bother of hiding your satellite dish so well that James Bond can't find it, only to then draw his attention to it by firing at him?
  • They uncovered the satellite dish as part of the scheduled plan for Goldeneye, regardless of whether Bond was there or not, and the attack on them afterwards was probably a cooincidental random patrol just finding them near the dish. The rocket attack was both so they could adhere to their schedule and because, since they knew that Bond had traced them to Cuba, they weren't taking any chances, regardless of who was in that plane.

• Why, knowing full well of Bond's womanizing reputation, would the new M have sent a WOMAN to evaluate him, and such an easily flustered, swooning one at that?
  • For all we know, she DID do her job: to find out exactly how 007 behaves in such situations. And while she was entirely willing to play along for a while (why not?), she later went back and told M exactly what happened. It's worth noting that M's infamous "The Reason You Suck" Speech happens after this, though she doubtless knew as much beforehand.
    • M tells Bond his "boyish charms....obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you", so the girl obviously gave him full marks. M would probably say she underestimated him.

• The opening sequence makes no sense whatsoever - if the intention is simply to have 006 defect, why slaughter so many Russian soldiers to do so? Why couldn't he just shoot Bond when he had a gun pointed at him when the latter first entered the facility?
  • Trevelyan was already the Big Bad before the intro. His basic motive was that his parents, Lienz Cossacks, were indirectly 'murdered' by the USSR (his father committed suicide after killing his mother), and he believed the British let this happen. Trevelyan was consumed with hate for the United Kingdom. He was pretty much forced into MI 6 by the British government despite Russian blood, as they didn't think he'd remember. He did. Trevelyan had to play along with MI 6 despite hating it. If he had killed Bond and openly defected, it would have counted as high treason. The British Government could have captured him and imprisoned him for life. He couldn't take that risk, so, as the note below states, he wanted to identify as Killed In Action to prevent suspicion. Of course, he was a giant Chekhov's Gun, so it was kind of inevitable he was the villain.
  • 006 wanted to be confirmed as KIA. Who suspects a dead man?
  • Truth in Television: the USSR often displayed a very, VERY frightening willingness to expend dozens if not hundreds of its servicemen in order to cover up ONE defection. For the KGB and GRU, a few dozen dead soldiers and scientists in a burned out husk of a weapons plant that was manufacturing a weapon they could literally not use unless all the gloves came off would have been well worth it to obtain one defector of high standing in MI 6 or another major Western intelligence organization with fresh intelligence and knowledge about how the organization worked.

• A related matter: Why did 006 hate Bond so personally? Yeah, Bond represented the English government that he hates, but 006 keeps mentioning the 3 minutes that Bond switches the bomb to. However, Bond only changes the timers to 3 minutes *after* 006 is captured *and* after 006 goads him to. And then Ourimov "executes" him, giving Bond no reason to assume that 006 is still alive and needing rescue.
  • It is pretty easy to establish that Trevelyan isn't running on all gears by the time of Goldeneye, and so probably isn't thinking that rationally. However, it probably boils down to a combination of Bond's undying loyalty.
  • Moral Myopia. Trevalyn outright tells Bond that he was "supposed to die" for him, and he resents that Bond put the mission above their friendship, even if he predicted it.
  • If we consider the Trevelyan/Bond duality, then it makes so much sense. Bond is the antithesis of Trevelyan: unswervingly loyal, noble, proud in his service. Trevelyan is the complete reverse, a man with no morals whatsoever, completely obsessed with revenge. The money is just a sweetener for him. In effect, Bond is everything Trevelyan despises about Britain, right down to the hypocrisy: Bond halving the countdown time, always taking time out to screw women, and always failing to protect them. He's a symbol of Britain to him, which is why he goes out of his way to kill him.

• Trevelyan's plan is to steal a ludicrous sum of money electronically then use the EMP pulse from the Goldeneye satelite to erase his tracks. One: if you cripple the British economy that way then the pound would drop in value significantly, causing your newly-acquired money to become useless. Two: if you use the EMP pulse to erase the records, then you'll be the only person who suddenly has a vast amount of British pounds following the crash, making it even easier to track you down. Three: it's 1995; most people still have banking books and physical records, and you still don't have the physical cash to spend. Four: never heard of back-up copies?
  • Even if he couldn't actually get rich off the scheme, he could skill raise all manner of hell in London with a massive EMP. It's possible that the promise of money was just to gain support.
    • That's a given. His primary goal is revenge against England for turning against his parents. The promise of a huge lumpsum of money was, at best, his way of gaining followers like Ouromov, Boris, and Xenia.
  • Trevelyn is a major arms dealer and professional criminal mastermind; he's probably got hiding places for the money so he can't be tracked. And as he says, he isn't only stealing money- he is stealing records of everything, which means he can potentially buy or steal huge swathes of land or property in the aftermath. And though the value of the pound might drop, he would still be friggin' rich if he stole enough.

• Isn't Sean Bean a tad too young to have had his parents killed by Stalin after the war?
  • They explicitly were NOT killed by Stalin. His parents escaped only for his father to snap and kill both himself and his wife in a case of murder-suicide because he could not live with it. And a few fanfics have proposed the idea that while it is implied that he was orphaned shortly after Lienz, he was actually orphaned quite a bit later (possibly even decades after the war) as his father fought a loosing battle with his latent guilt until he finally lost it.
  • The character of Alec Trevalyen was originally written as an mentor to Bond, with Alan Rickman in mind.

• Why use a 250m antenna? They're not astronomers, they don't need the enormous gain from a dish of that size. A ordinary, $100 satellite dish, plus a bit of tracking hardware, wouldn't look out of place bolted to a Moscow tenement, and would be completely adequate for communicating with any reasonable satellite.
  • You can't be a Bond villain without an elaborate hidden base. It's in the contract.

• The whole point of Boris's Spike program is that it hacks into a target computer and stops them from hanging up. OK - this is 1995, instead of scratching your head or frantically extracting control boards... what's stopping you from just pulling the phone line from it's socket?
  • It's Hollywood. Remember, to them, it's all magical after all...
  • It could be that its still linked up even after pulling the plug. That's actually how some police traces work in Real Life - once they've got you, you can't sever until they let you.

• Bond thought Alec was dead when he set the timers for three minutes. What the heck is Alec's beef? And why doesn't Bond point this out to him?!
  • As mentioned, Moral Myopia. He's upset about the scars, and he's selfish enough to hold it against Bond. He also dislikes how Bond's first thought when Alec was shot was to go to the timers (ie. the mission). And, of course, his plan involved Bond dying for him, for his evil scheme. He never intended to let Bond leave that building alive. He's an asshole plotting mass murder; Lack of Empathy is kind of a given.

• "You sit on it, but you don't take it with you." Why is Natalya convinced it's your butt? Is hers detachable?
  • Previous scenes established Boris as a pervert, she was just too fixated on that.

• How is a chair not something you can take with you?
  • Do you carry a chair around you all day, or do you use the chair already in the room when you get there? Yes, chairs can move, but they're not something you carry around with you.

• Not that supervillain lairs haven't been built underwater before, but how did Trevelyan build that satellite dish in Cuba where Jack Wade explicitly points out that you can't light a cigar without the CIA knowing about it?
  • Because Jack Wade was using hyperbole and was, quite simply, wrong.

• In the beginning Bond bungee jumps to the bottom of the dam's entrance, but he exits from some building at the top of a mountain. How did he get there?
  • I think thats meant to be either the other side of the dam, and / or the other side of the mountain. Its to do with the geography of the building, but its the same building.
  • The complex wasn't inside the dam, that was just the weakpoint in security. I think he's probably climbing through vents and whatnot for a long while before emerging in the bathroom.