You Only Live Twice

Sunday 26th January

Bond begins this film in Hong Kong faking his own murder with the help of the British Navy. No sooner as body is ceremoniously plopped into the sea a couple of sneaky individuals take it to a nearby submarine where the body bag is opened to reveal Bond completely fine and wearing an oxygen mask.  After a brief chat with M and Moneypenny he’s spat back out again near the Japanese coast, no rest for the wicked.

He tracks down the quite strange Mr Henderson, and while I was slightly disappointed not to find my old chemistry teacher on the other side of the door the disappointment didn’t last long as he’s quite literally and remarkably quietly stabbed in the back. Cleverly James catches the killer, disguises himself as him to use the getaway vehicle to try and gauge the enemy’s identity. Instead he manages to crack a safe jump in a getaway car with a random girl and end up being caught by the person he was trying to meet in the first place – all terribly confusing if you ask me.

Despite being a long way from England Q does not disappoint as he brings Bond a mecano helicopter; for someone pretending to be dead this is quite a stupid move, not only is it bright yellow it’s also extremely noisy attracting a stupid amount of attention to such a unique machine.  It can therefore not be considered surprising when four normal sized helicopters arrive with the apparent aim of shooting Bond out of the sky.  Proving size doesn’t matter James and his tiny flying machine prevail bringing them all down.

Back once more with his cat is number one; his love of fighting fish has moved on from goldfish to piranhas, though I can’t see his feeding this to the cat and although they do give him a new way of disposing of agents I believe they are further proof that the execution branch of SPECTRE is being to get bored and uncreative.

In an interesting racist twist; Bond must become ‘Japanese’ which apparently involves wearing a wig and a partial face mask to cover his eyes. He’s also forced to marry, as apparently this makes the whole thing less suspicious. A strange triple wedding where the minister reads from a take away menu before presenting the couples with lunch which since its Japan that have to eat with chopsticks.

Finally we get to see the face of the elusive number one who has been kept from the viewer since film two. Not only do we get to see him but he also reveals his real name and it’s not surprising he prefers to go by number one. Only a minute and a half away from starting the next world war Bond is seemingly powerless to stop the evil scheme; and the rocket launches. What number one and his rather bored looking cat haven’t planned on is the ninja army approaching to save Bond and destroy number one’s little hideout.

Honestly, I’m starting to tire of the concept of SPECTRE now; initially the idea that this film would be based around space related things was promising but I actually found it quite tiresome and difficult to maintain interest in this film.  Though since number one is still alive I can only assume there will be at least one more SPECTRE related adventure, unless the cat snaps and attacks him before number one can come up with a new plan.

Thunderball

Friday 24th January 2014

We begin with James in France attending a funeral; for a transvestite, that isn’t actually dead.  Either extremely judgemental of the man’s lifestyle choice or annoyed by the fact that he’s still alive Bond proceeds to kill him and escape using a jet-pack which I believe raises the question. Was the whole thing just an excuse to finally use the jet-pack?

Thunderball sees the return of SPECTRE and its many numbered members.  Maybe Dr No gave me false hope of the intelligence of the members of SPECTRE but number one seems determined to slowly kill off the agents in albeit rather inventive fashions – surely this will eventually lead to two problems, firstly a lack of people and secondly having to assign increasingly larger numbers which is just going to get confusing for everyone. Even though this film was made in the sixities I still feel that number two’s eye patch is probably a little out of date; unless channelling you’re inner pirate at a child’s birthday party. What did intrigue me was the mention of SPECTRE’s execution branch which given its previous inventions of the blowing up chair and poisoned spike must be quite the creative workplace.

Once again Bond does not disappoint on the clichéd seducing of every woman he runs into, except for poor Miss Moneypenny.  Firstly he seduces a nurse, initially against her will but like so many before her she quickly becomes needy and clingy; maybe woman have been missing a lot of relationship advice subtly offered by Bond films because if one thing is standing out its playing hard to get works – very well but as soon as you get clingy James will lose interest and very quickly and conveniently get called away to do very important work things. Later in the film he also claims to have only slept with SPECTRE agent Fiona for King and Country – what a hard life!

Managing to avoid being sent to Canada Bond once again finds himself in a tropical climate, and once again everyone is dressed in suits!  We also see Bond back at the blackjack table demonstrating his questionable card counting abilities to impress women.  This film’s main bond girl ‘Domino’ tells the audience her tragic tale of how when she was young she fell in love with a pirate with pet sharks but now finds herself trapped and scared; controlled by number two – who does in fact have a real name! Making it all so easy for Bond to swoop in and steal her innocent affections.

Everyone’s favourite geek, Q also is back in this film, unfortunately backing up the stereotype that geeks dress badly by getting into full holiday mode with a rather garish Hawaiian shirt.  Though once again it would appear that money has been poorly spent as they seem to have run out halfway through making James’ wetsuit; leaving him trouser-less.

Things look like they might start to get exciting as Fiona and various SPECTRE lackies chase an injured Bond through a parade of the characters from It’s a Small World to a secluded bar for casual dancing and shooting the wrong person by accident, poor Fiona; all she wanted was to be given a higher agent number.

With this being the longest of the films I’ve watched so far I was starting to loose attention towards the end. However on the whole, I like the sharks and the underwater fighting – much quieter and much more entertaining to watch than the typical on-land fights. Leading to my conclusion that we need more underwater fight scenes in films, and if not completely underwater we should make people just wear the flipper and snorkels for sheer amusement factor.