Gustav Graves
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Sir Gustav Graves is a fictional villain in the twentieth James Bond film Die Another Day. He is played by Toby Stephens. An unusual feature of this villain is that Graves appears to be younger than James Bond. In general, Bond villains are roughly the same age or considerably older than Bond (with Elektra King in The World Is Not Enough a notable exception). He is also the first Bond villain to be portrayed by two different actors in the same film.
Biography
Graves was born Tan-Sun Moon, son of General Moon. When first seen, he is a Colonel in the North Korean army. He studied at Oxford and Harvard and was intended to become a bridge between the West and the East. Instead, he became a weapons smuggler, exchanging weapons for conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone, intent on the invasion and conquest of South Korea. MI6 became aware of his activities, however, and dispatched three agents, including James Bond, to shut him down. The mission was a success, and Moon was believed to have died when his hovercraft fell off a cliff.
Somehow, Moon survived this, and he fled to Cuba where he underwent DNA replacement therapy to alter his appearance. He then reinvented himself as Gustav Graves, an orphan who worked in diamond mines in Argentina who discovered a great mine of diamonds in Iceland, in reality the conflict diamonds he had been dealing with originally, and made a huge fortune. He assumed a new personality modeled on James Bond, sophisticated, sarcastic and, by Graves' own admission, arrogant. With his new wealth, he built the Icarus Satellite, a huge articifial satellite capable of harnessing solar energy and focusing it on any part of the world he wished.
Graves' official reasons for the construction of Icarus were humanitarian, ending weather inconvenience and poverty, helping the harvests, and so on. His real reasons were more sinister. He was still intent on his dream of the conquest of South Korea, and was planning to use Icarus to create a pathway in the mined demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, then use Icarus to destroy any ballistic missiles or nuclear warheads lauched against North Korea, so that the North Koreans could cross the DMZ and easily invade South Korea, Japan, and other surrounding nations one by one, with retaliations from enemies foiled by Icarus. Graves had the controls for Icarus built into a large metal suit with an additional electroshock weapon for self-defence.
When Graves put his plan into action, he took off in an Antonov An-124 with his father, and unbeknownst to him, James Bond, onboard to watch the scene. When General Moon expressed his disapproval of the plan, Graves killed him. Bond then attempted to kill Graves, but his shot missed and broke a window in the plane, sending all other passengers except himself and Graves in the room flying out. The two fought until Bond used Graves' parachute and the electroshock function of his suit to forcibly eject him, and Graves was sucked into the blades of the Antonov's jet engine, killing him and destroying his suit, rendering the Icarus harmless.
Before he died, Graves was a known ecologist, fencing champion and adventurer. His closest collaborators were Miranda Frost, another MI6 agent and an insider contact from the West; and Zao, his best friend and henchman.
Henchmen
- Zao
- Mr. Kill
See also
- Colonel Sun, the name Colonel Tan-Sun Moon is a homage to the first official James Bond novel written after Ian Fleming's death.
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