MovieChat Forums > James Bond > Alec Trevelyn Is A Great Villian

Alec Trevelyn Is A Great Villian

posted 8 years ago by XFiles26
6 replies | jump to latest

Rare for a Bond film to have a main villain be a former friend and really a villain better than Bond, in terms of toughness a lot of villains have henchman like Oddjob and Jaws who are superior but Treveleyn is the main villain of GoldenEye (1995) and is one of the best.

His motives are different, he doesn't want money or gain really, he wants revenge for what British betrayal of Lienz Cossacks during World War 2, as his parents were and ended up commuting suicide.

Sean Bean is very good but it is unbelievable his character would have been alive during world war 2, Bean was 36 when he did the film, even if added the time between Trevelyn's faked death and his reappearance years later he would only be about 45, maybe an older actor would have made it more believable.

Then again, it would have been unlikely to be beat Bond if an older actor was cast.

All in all, I think Bean was great and a great character.

[–] AlisonBlaire 8 years ago

I always thought that to handwave the Lienz Cossack idea and make it work, Trevelyan's father had basically lived with the guilt of escaping the death squads for years - maybe even a couple of decades - before it consumed him and he killed himself and his wife. So I never thought the film claimed Trevelyan was alive in WW2 - more he wanted to claim revenge for his parents and how they'd been treated *in* WW2.

[–] XFiles26 8 years ago

Good point really, Trevelyn is probably 45 or so in the 1995 part of the film, when he appears as the villain.

[–] pking-2 8 years ago

One, yes I always took it that Alec was not really around during WW2, meaning the damage done to his parents took its toll over an extended time.

That combined with a sort of haze in which I view all Bond stories (yeah they take place when they were released as movies. Also, in the past so that they connect to DN etc. Also today so that they connect to today so that James can be going on all these missions spanning eras, sort of, reboots be damned) makes it so it kind of doesn't matter to me that ww2 was not exactly the right year for GE...any moreso than the space race technology was not really the right year for MR and the Brezhnev's cold war is always going on whenever I watch OP etc etc etc.

Now, this is a signature gun, and that is an optical palm reader.

[–] TheSharkFromJaws 8 years ago

Yes he is.

[–] Pink_Gold_Peach 8 years ago

He is tied with Scaramanga for being my overall favorite. I think they both nail the aspect of an evil counterpart to Bond, with 006 being a field agent and Scaramanga being a professional killer.

[–] RockinRickyRialto 8 years ago

When Goldeneye was still going to be Property of a Lady with Dalton, Alec was going to be played by Anthony Hopkins, meaning he would be old enough to have been a child in WWII. GE changed it so that it was the trauma that caused Alec to lose parents years after the war.

If you must blink, do it now.