North Korea seeks licence to kill new Bond movie

JAMES Bond’s latest ‘enemy’ struck back yesterday.

In an unusual challenge to Hollywood, North Korea has called on the US to stop screening Die Another Day, saying the 20th Bond movie slanders the isolated communist state and defames the Korean people.

The Pierce Brosnan hit proves that the US is an "empire of evil" and "the headquarters that spread abnormality, degeneration, violence and ... corrupt sex culture," North Korea’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland said.

In the movie, Bond, allied with South Korean operatives, is sent to intercept an illegal arms deal involving evil North Korean officer Colonel Moon, feared to be planning an invasion of South Korea and then Japan.

Die Another Day has irked some South Koreans as well, although it has not yet opened in Seoul cinemas. Some young people are urging a boycott of the movie, calling it culturally ignorant and a slight to their nation’s pride.

They object to a US intelligence agent ordering the mobilisation of the South Korean army , and what they claim is an outdated scene showing Koreans walking a cow on a farm. Bond also makes love to a woman in a Buddhist temple, which is being seen as an insult to the country’s ancient religion.

The North Korean committee said the US should halt the movie for portraying North Korea as "part of an ‘axis of evil,’ inciting inter-Korean confrontation, groundlessly despising and insulting the Korean nation, and malignantly describing even religion".

Relations between the US and impoverished North Korea chilled sharply after President Bush called the country part of an "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq. Last week the Spanish navy intercepted, but then released, a consignment of Scud missiles en route for Yemen from North Korea.

Officials at 20th Century Fox in Korea, which is distributing the film, said the enemy in the movie is not all North Koreans, but extremists in the Stalinist regime.