South Koreans back North in blasting Bond

Many South Koreans were today siding with the communist North in panning James Bond’s latest big screen adventure, Die Another Day.

The new 007 thriller drew crowds to its Seoul premiere on New Year’s Eve. But since then many South Koreans have rejected its depiction of North Korea as a diabolical evil regime and the whole peninsula as a backward underling to Western saviours.

“I don’t want to see a movie where North Korea is depicted as a menace to peace on the Korean Peninsula and the United States is depicted as a hero that resolves the crisis,” said Jin-young Park, a 22-year-old student in Seoul. “It’s really getting old.”

In the film, Bond, allied with South Korean agents, is sent to intercept a crazed North Korean officer, Colonel Moon, who is planning to invade South Korea and then Japan.

Bond – played by Pierce Brosnan – is eventually captured, imprisoned and tortured in North Korea.

Later, the North uses a satellite-based laser to burn a swath through the demilitarised zone separating the two sides of the peninsula.

The film also depicts a US intelligence official ordering the mobilisation of the South Korean army and an outdated scene of Koreans using a cow to till fields. Bond also has sex in a Buddhist temple.

A South Korean civic group today announced plans to launch a boycott campaign at 140 cinemas nationwide where the film is shown.

The complaints nearly echo those North Korea made before the film’s debut.

The film proves that the United States is “the headquarters that spreads abnormality, degeneration, violence and ... corrupt sex culture,” said North Korea’s Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.

Tensions with South Korea have also worsened since North Korea took steps last month to reactivate a nuclear programme that could be building atomic bombs.

But when it comes to the latest British spy tale, the two Koreas have formed a bond of a different sort.

And mutual outrage has only springboarded off rising anti-US sentiment in South Korea following the recent acquittals in US military courts of American soldiers whose armoured car hit and killed two Korean girls.