I'm pretty sure I watched this in the theatre with my high school friends. None of use were James Bond fans, but this film was marketed everywhere, so we decided to watch it. What else was playing that day? I'm not sure when we went to see it, but it was released in November 1995, and other big movies at the time were "Toy Story" (which we probably saw even though we were teenagers already), "Casino" (which I'm sure we didn't see, maybe because of the rating?) and "Heat" (which we watched because we were Val Kilmer fans after seeing him in "Tombstone").
It turned out to be pretty fun for us. We were a bunch of teenage boys watching the beautiful women on the big screen, listening to the double entendre's and experiencing the cool gadgets and awesome action. It felt like this was a James Bond film for us.
I had forgotten that the theme song was written by Bono and The Edge. I was really into U2 since the early 90s, after I had gotten their Achtung Baby cassette for cheap from Columbia House. I listened to that tape over and over. And then I I got The Joshua Tree and listened to that also over and over. I think I bought the War album from Sam Goody the previous year in 1994. The clerk took the CD and made a point to show it to his co-worker and said that that was the album to listen to or something to that effect. I had no reaction.
Anyways, I was probably the only one of my friends who was looking forward to the film because of the theme song. I knew it was going to be performed by Tina Turner, as I had read about it on the internet. They had these things back then called zines or e-zines. Do they still call it that? I remember our Computer teacher Mr. P. sending one student to me to help him search something for a project. This was before the googalizer. I was most likely going yahoo.
As for Pierce Brosnan, I didn't really have an opinion either way. I think I was optimistic that he would be good. I knew he was from "Remington Steele" and I remember the reruns were on WWOR channel 9 weekday mornings. I took a glimpse channel surfing when I was absent from school, but was never too captivated to pay attention, even though we never had cable growing up. We were inundated with marketing campaigns, so I think we had it in the back of our minds that this new Bond was supposed to be good.
Spoiler alert! How does one fake being shot in the head assassination style? Wouldn't James Bond have seen enough killing to know whether it was real? Also, even if it was indeed faked, Bond set the building to explode, and we saw it explode. Somehow the bad guy survived that? How many of the henchmen did? Did they all know to exit the building quickly, even though Bond set it go off to half the time? These are things I never thought about at first viewing. We were mostly talking about Miss Onatopp and her preferred method of execution.
Anyways, it was just a fun experience for us as high schoolers. We used to wear loose fitting jeans and would sneak in food and drinks from Burger King. We would literally put filled soda cups in our pockets and walk carefully in the theatre. Surprisingly, we never had any accidents or spillage.
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