Octopussy

Tuesday 20th May

Onto the penultimate Roger Moore film; problem is from the title and previous Moore experience I’ve decided I hate it before I even put it on.  

So we start in East Berlin with a clown; who is actually agent 009 (why doesn’t he get his own films!) being chased and killed by knife-throwing twins – well it’s a more original start than *insert big pieces of machinery* has been stolen and someone’s annoyed.  Instead a dying clown annoys a group on people by falling through their window on party night holding a counterfeit Faberge egg.

To help him get over the death of his friend, Bond is off to a Sotherby’ auction to look at shiny things; and some hope that this film might not be so bad begins to rise. Unfortunately we’re not shopping for very long, just to witness the auction of the aforementioned Faberge egg for an obscene amount of money; bitter that he didn’t win Bond swaps the original egg for a fake, a clever idea but it didn’t really do much good.

Bond doesn’t actually meet Octopussy until at least halfway through the film, and thankfully it’s merely an unfortunate nickname her father gave her. As always when Bond seems to be making a lady-friend drama ensues and someone tries to kill them both; giving Bond a way out; essentially faking his own death to avoid any of the “you never called me” conversations later on.

Back to Germany, back to the circus and back to the knife throwing twins, but now as well as knives they have a rather powerful bomb that the Russians are out to cause mischief with.  Something I don’t think we’ve seen before is Bond chasing a train in a car, I’m pretty sure that until this point all the vehicle chases we’ve seen have been fairly matched and it’s no surprise that the poor car end up in a canal.

The Russian bomb is poised to go off in the middle of a circus show on a US airbase in Germany – at least I think that’s what happened… it’s the final few seconds as Bond struggles to convince people to the existence of the bomb; though in their defence you don’t normally believe the things people dressed as clowns believe you. Surely with such a powerful device disarming it is out of the question, well apparently not and when all else fails you just take it apart yourself, with 1 second to spare of course, just for added affect.

Of all the Moore films this one isn’t bad I mean a man got killed by taking an octopus to the face, at one point Roger Moore was dressed as a crocodile and at another a gorilla and Q came to the rescue in a hot air balloon so it can’t be classed as terrible if only for those bits.  It didn’t bore me though personally I would have liked a bit more of the whole Octopussy diamond merchant story and a bit less hide and seek in a circus caravan park.

For Your Eyes Only

Sunday 11th May

Blofeld is back, and so is the cat. Now I have to say that although I welcomed the absence of SPECTRE’s number one but with the recent tedious inevitability of the last few films I’ll admit I did smile when that fluffy little feline came on the screen.  The nostalgia is short-lived as Bond makes quick work of escaping from his hijacked helicopter and returns to head office unharmed.

Bond accidently teams up with Melina, a recently orphaned young woman trying to avenge her parents’ death; they start on separate missions to kill the same man.  Their friendship is short-lived, mostly because Bond is unimpressed by her little yellow car.

Q’s latest gadget, the identigraph is a very odd version of the software you use to build your own person at the start of the SIMS but this one also gives your character a nice little back story. This send James off to Italy for skiing and to meet Luigi, you have to admire Bond’s resilience given the amount of times he’s almost been killed out on the slopes it never seems to put him off.  After abandoning his new over-enthusiastic friend Bibi; Bond is chased around the resort by an Olympic skier with a gun, several people on motorbikes and a man in a funny hat managing to ruin a skiing lesson and several people’s lunch in the process.

Back with Melina in Greece and Bond soon abandons her for a Scouse girl that’s pretending to be a French countess, unfortunately she doesn’t last long and is dead before breakfast. On the flip side it does mean Bond finally gets to meet Columbo only to learn he’s chased down the wrong man; to celebrate their new found friendship the pair go on an adventure to track down the man with the funny hat, Bond finally manages to push him down a cliff in a car which is a very noisy way to die.

After this little adventure he rejoins Melina in an overly cheesy underwater diving scene complete with plinky plonky soundtrack to highlight their reunion. Still determined to track down her parents’ killer they enlist the help of Max the parrot and head off in a submarine which ends which them both being dragged behind a boat and hunted by sharks.  Once they’ve escaped it’s the parrot which turns out to have all the answers that leads them to the bad guys who all get killed before Bond destroys the ATAC machine and they all live happily ever after. Moral of the story – if possible always check with the parrot first.

I’ll be honest it’s taken me weeks to watch this and I’ve sat through the first forty minutes about four times.  I’ve forced myself through it so as to not ruin this challenge despite nearly stopping it several times. That in itself should highlight my opinion here; least favourite so far, by quite a way though it’s difficult to say why exactly. Lack of original plot? Defiantly! Lack of humour? Yep. Lack of decent characters? The parrot was my favourite. Also I think the opening scenes set decent expectations that just weren’t met by any of it so pretty disappointed by this one!