Trevelyan is not old enough to be a WWII baby

ringfire211

I love GE. It's pretty much the perfect Bond film - top 5 for sure! Plus Sean Bean is tied with Christopher Walken as my favorite Bond villain. That said, there is one issue - there's no way that Trevelyan was old enough to have been a WWII baby. He says that England will enter the economic stone age, inflation adjusted for 1945. So let's assume that 1945 was when England betrayed them and when his father killed himself and his mother. Let's also say that was the year Alec was born. That means he should be 50 in 1995. Bean of course was in his 30s but I could even accept that his character was 40. But 50? No way. We know that Zorin was a WWII steroid baby and I remember thinking that even he looked a bit too young. Though he's certainly more believable because that was 10 years earlier (1985) and Walken really was in his 40s already, even if he could pass for a guy in his 30s. But with Bean it's much more difficult to accept. I heard that they originally had someone older like Anthony Hopkins in mind for 006 (more of a mentor figure for 007) in which case the WWII baby would certainly work. With Bean he'd be better suited as a Vietnam War baby but of course the Brits don't have the connection to that war that we Americans do.

pachazo

Alec said that his parents survived the British betrayal and Stalin's execution squads but his father wouldn't let himself or his mother live with the shame of it.

So presumably his parents lived for a while after WWII and Alec was born during this time. However, his father eventually killed himself and Alec's mother. MI6 thought Alec was too young to remember.

It fits, although it might be a bit of a stretch I admit. It's not impossible though.

DarthDimi

Bond films generally do not reward this level of scrutiny. ;)

MaxCasino

Who knows, we might see Alec in the rebooted series. They can rewrite him to fit in better.

RichardTheBruce

GoldenEye, John Gardner, 1995.
Chapter 11 - The God With Two Faces

...
'So, how did the SIS vetting miss the fact that your parents were Lienz Cossacks? That, in itself, made you a security risk.'

'They knew, James. They knew everything, they simply thought I was too young to remember.

'We're both orphans. Did you ever think about how the Service prefers orphans? The SIS like to become your family. Your own parents had the luxury of dying in a climbing accident. Mine survived one of the most treacherous acts perpetrated in the name of the British government. They survived Stalin's death squads, but my father couldn't live with himself, or let my mother live with it. The SIS really thought I would never remember what happened, so it became a nice little irony. The son went to work for the government whose betrayal caused his father to murder his mother, then take his own life. But I always remembered, James. Even when I was being utterly loyal, I never forgot a thing.'

Bond nodded. 'Hence Janus. Well named, Alec. Janus, the two-faced Roman god, come to life.'

The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen, Jeremy Black, 2005.
Chapter 10 - The Brosnan Films
...
Trevelyan is particularly angry with Britain, repeating the venom of Red Grant, and thus explaining why the country should be targeted for his anger. In a throwback to World War II, his parents were Lienz Cossaacks who had supported Hitler and whom the British had turned over for slaughter by Stalin. This hearkening back to an unherioic act from a past war echoed Fleming's use of the war as a sheet anchor of values. A controversy over the alleged role of Harold Macmillan in the handing over of such people, and the related Aldington-Tolstoy libel action, increased British interest in and concern with the issue in the 1980s and 1990s. The device explains why Trevelyan aims to overthrow Britain, and not the far wealthier United States, and affirms Bond's role as the defender of Britain. This plot device would have struck few echoes, however, outside Britain.

I thought the novelization and another reference might have a little more, but there's not much more to it than the film.

On the idea the father couldn't live with himself, I think it's reasonable he perpetrated the murder-suicide five years after the war. That would potentially put Alex at five years old (old enough to remember), but about 50 at the time of GoldenEye as noted earlier.

Last_Rat_Standing

Tom Cruise is 56 and still looks 40.
They drank the same kool aid

Plot hole filled.