Passionate sex inside of a Buddhist Temple, right in front of a sitting Buddha statue. A freakish looking North Korean with pale white skin and diamonds crushed into his face. A certain Scandinavian man who is actually a North Korean general after having gone through extensively painful gene therapy. Korean characters being played by actors who obviously do not have any grasp of the Korean language. Put all these elements together, and you will end up with the recent controversial James Bond film Die Another Day.

Protests against the film broke out in South Korea even before the film opened up in the country in December 2002. With dialogues being held through internet chatrooms and discussion boards, it became evident that this new James Bond movie was not going to slip through the anti-American radar. Anti-American sentiment has never been an unfamiliar attitude in South Korea. However with the acquittal of two American soldiers who killed two teenage girls by running them over with an armed military vehicle, the feelings were at their peak. Many protested against the gross misrepresentations of Korean people and culture in the film. Boycotts and protests outside of movie theatres occurred all over the country. The film fails to paint an accurate picture of Korea in the 21st century. Instead, the film centers around the theme of James Bond, a white man, saving the world from the “evil Asians,” the North Koreans in this case. With North Korea being entered in as the "axis of evil" it was only time before Hollywood jumped back onto the "yellow peril" bandwagon.
This 20th installment of the James Bond series pivots around the notion that the North Koreans are a gang of evil-doers (with an all-powerful solar laser) whose main goal is to destroy the DMZ (de-militarized zone), which separates the Korean peninsula into North and South. The main mission of James Bond, the ever-so-slick-British-spy, is to catch Zao, a North Korean terrorist/soldier, who is intent on re-uniting the two Koreas through violent means. Not only was actor Rick Yune’s Korean absolutely brutal to listen to, but the fact that for most of the movie he was a disfigured North Korean albino leads one to wonder if simply being an Asian villain is not scary enough for the modern-day audience. Rick Yune received enormous criticism in South Korea for taking on a role that was not only humiliating to Koreans, but also for single-handedly butchering the Korean language. Cha In Pyo, a popular actor in Korea, was first approached to take on the role of Zao. However, he declined stating that the portrayals of Koreans in the movie, whether they be from South or North, were simply too demeaning. Thus Cha was hailed as a national hero, whereas Yune has become the symbol of how low an Asian actor will go to make a living.

The absolute disregard of cultural accuracy is evident all throughout the film. First of all, what kind of name is Zao for a Korean man? Clearly, Zao is a Chinese name, which leads to two plausible conclusions about the writers of this film. They could have either thought that the Chinese culture and the Korean culture were one in the same. Or they could have simply changed the enemy of the film from being Chinese to North Korean (with all the current events and all) and neglected to change the villain’s name. After all, if there is anything that the movie teaches, it is that Asians are quite interchangeable.

Another misconception that the filmmaker had about South Korea was that it is a mostly rural and backwards little peninsula. There is a scene in the film where James Bond and his female sidekick, Jinx, are falling out of the South Korean sky in a highly technological gadget only to be viewed suspiciously by a ragged looking Korean farmer dragging an ox by a rope. Perhaps the filmmakers had not heard about metropolitan cities like Seoul or Busan. Or perhaps it is a lot more romantic to think that James Bond was saving a lot of helpless peasants instead of a highly modernized nation-state.

One particularly tasteless and offensive scene comes at the very end of the film when James Bond is having sex in a Buddhist temple. Many Buddhist monks joined the protest ranks claiming that the scene represents an utmost disregard for a sacred Eastern religion. As Chung Han-Shin, of the Jogye Buddhist Order, told the Washington Post, "You don’t see a Hollywood hit movie where you have a hero like James Bond having sex in a Christian church." Certainly, if James Bond were to indulge in his carnal desires at church, the Christian opposition all over the world would have probably shut the movie down even before it opened. Like all other Asian elements in the film, including the Asian characters, Buddhism is seen merely as a prop. Perhaps, only at a Buddhist temple could all the exotic "Oriental" items, like the statue of a sitting Buddha, be put on display.

North Korea has united with South Koreans to protest the film. In a statement issued by the Korean Central Broadcasting Station in Pyongyang on December 19, 2002, North Korea felt as though this movie was a direct hostile action taken by the United States against Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, AKA North Korea. By belittling the Korean culture and making it seem as though nothing would get accomplished on the Korean peninsula without the Western powers jumping in, the film has essentially relegates the two Koreas as helpless players in a game that is theirs to play. Even the fact that there was not a single South Korean character in the film shows that this North and South Korean situation merely involves the communist country of DPRK and the vehemently anti-communist America. South Korea, as it did at the end of the Korean War in the 1950s, has absolutely no say on the future of the Korean peninsula.

Surely, no one would turn to a James Bond film to understand the complex foreign relations that exist between the U.S. and the two Koreas. However, this film makes it very evident that the South Korean government is essentially run by the Americans and the North Koreans are brutal killing machines. Alas the bearer of Western enlightenment, the white male, comes to the rescue. And once again the world is set right.