Gustav Graves
Sir Gustav Graves is the main villain in the twentieth James Bond movie Die Another Day. He is played by Toby Stephens. Very unusually, Graves seems to be younger than Bond when, in general, Bond villains are roughly the same age or considerably older than Bond. He is one of the villains that has more in common with Agent 007 referred to his personality: sophisticated, sarcastic and, according to Graves himself, arrogant.
Biography
The official story is that he is an orphan who worked in diamond mines in Argentina; from there, he discovered a great mine of diamonds in Iceland and made a huge fortune. With that fortune, Graves develops Icarus, a big satelite which will take solar energy and focus it, "gently", over the Earth, ending with weather inconvenients, poverty, helping the harvests and so on. The presentation of Icarus is held at the outside of an ice castle in Iceland, built specially for the occasion. But the truth is that Sir Gustav Graves is really Colonel Moon, a North Korean soldier, son of a high General, who studied at Oxford and Harvard and was intended to become a bridge between West and East. Back in North Korean Moon became a weapon dealer with the intention of invading and conquering South Korea. Moon exchanges the weapons for conflict diamonds from Sierra Leone until Bond finds out his business, goes after him and tries to kill him. Apparently, Moon dies in the chase at the beginning of the movie, but somehow he survives and flees to Cuba where he gets genetic therapy that changes his appearance and turns him into Gustav Graves. The diamonds that he supposedly discovered in Iceland are, actually, the conflict diamonds and Icarus is in fact a powerful weapon capable of concentrating all the solar energy in one point. With this, he pretends to clean the mined demilitarized zone between the Koreas and open the way to North Korean troops. Graves/Moon even kills his own father when he opposes his plan. Gustav Graves is presented as an ecologist, fencing champion and adventurer. His plan comes to an end when he dies, along with the controls of Icarus in the propellers of an airplane. Graves closest collaborators are Miranda Frost, and insider contact from the west; and Zao, his best friend and kind of a brother.
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