North Korea Insulted By Bond Film

2:43pm UK, Sunday December 15, 2002

North Korea has urged the United States to stop showing the new James Bond film, branding it "dirty" and "insulting" to its people. 

Bond: Shaken but not stirred

In a terse statement, officials claimed the film was culturally offensive and launched an attack on American values.

The Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland called the 20th Bond film a "dirty and cursed burlesque aimed to slander (North Korea) and insult the Korean nation..."

It said Die Another Day, starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry, "clearly proves" the United States is "the root cause of all disasters and misfortune of the Korean nation" and is "an empire of evil".

Backward

In his latest adventure, Bond takes a hovercraft through the heavily-fortified frontier dividing North and South Korea.

He is caught and tortured in North Korea before being released in a prisoner exchange.

The movie has also irked South Koreans, who especially object to a scene where Bond has sex in a Buddhist temple.

It does not open in Seoul theatres until year's end but Korean critics say scenes of a farmer tilling his field with a cow makes the country appear backward.

'Groundlessly despising'

"The United States should stop at once the show," the North Korean statement said.

It said the Bond feature offensively describes "the DPRK as part of an 'axis of evil', inciting inter-Korean confrontation, groundlessly despising and insulting the Korean nation and malignantly desecrating even religion".

DPRK is an acronym for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.

The statement said the US is "the headquarters that spreads abnormality, degeneration, violence and fin de siecle corrupt sex culture."