Culture 3 min read By Trevor Kendall
Tomorrow Never Dies villain Elliot Carver shows how fake news is made
A fan-shared clip from the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies draws attention to Elliot Carver, a media mogul villain whose fabricated headlines are a pointed take on news manipulation.
A short clip from the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, is circulating among film fans as a sharp illustration of how fake news works. The scene, posted to the movies community on Reddit, shows the film's media mogul villain, Elliot Carver, explaining his approach to manufacturing and steering the news. The post itself carries little accompanying text, so the clip largely speaks for itself.
The character is an unusually direct portrait of propaganda for a mainstream action picture released in the late 1990s. Carver controls a global media empire and wants to provoke a conflict between nations so that his network can deliver exclusive coverage of the crisis he has engineered. The scheme centers on invented stories and staged events presented to the public as fact. In the film, the villain's real weapon is not a gadget or a weapon but the power to decide what people believe is happening, which is why fans sharing the clip describe it as a rare moment in a blockbuster franchise built on spectacle.
Viewers have increasingly returned to the picture's media storyline as its satire has come to look prescient. The plot's depiction of a broadcaster shaping events to fit a headline anticipates debates about misinformation that have dominated public discussion in the decades since the film opened. Carver's willingness to fabricate a crisis for ratings and influence maps onto concerns about sensational coverage and manufactured outrage that critics have raised about news and social media in the years since.
Film culture's attention to nonfiction storytelling has also been on display this week. The documentary Mohabat, directed by James Longley and produced by Mohammad Sharif Hotak, Longley and the Oscar-winning Alex Gibney, won the Opus Bonum section at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival on Saturday. The film follows a 12-year-old boy named Mohabat, whose father dies in a drone strike. Left without parental care, he is taken to a city orphanage. Festival commentary described the work as meticulously researched and exquisitely crafted, citing its patient observation of the boy's interactions.
The two items share little beyond a common interest in how images and narratives shape public understanding of war and violence. One is a fictional thriller that dramatizes media manipulation for entertainment, while the other is a nonfiction account of a real child's experience in the aftermath of a strike. Together they reflect a wider cultural conversation about the stories audiences are told, who tells them, and how those stories are constructed. Both invite viewers to consider what they are seeing and why it was chosen for them.
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