bkev said:
Thunderball awhile back. Sorry, but I honestly prefer Never Say Never Again. At least a little less boring.
WHAT?!?!?! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Ok, I'll admit that NSNA has some value for me (guilty pleasure in spots) and the fact that Sean is back and actually seems to enjoy hmself. Kersh is not allowed to do anything and the whole film is completely lifeless.
Thunderball may move slowly (due to infusion of an island laid-back charm), but it is one of the classics and a Terrence Young Bond film. SC is great, it's the first Panavision Bond, the underwater sequences are really good, the colors are a new pallette for the series, this features Ken Adam at his best and has the talents of John Barry and Peter Hunt. Also, Largo is one of the few villains that actually pose a formidable threat to 007. He could actually take on Connery with his bare hands. He leads his men personally, and when he comes at Bond underwater with nothing but a knife you actually feel the malice. (As opposed to Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray, and others.) This is a lost art: having the villain be imposing and formidable either in intellect or power or both. The film is a classic, full of memorable scenes (for instance the skyhook which was supposed to be so original when featured in The Dark Knight some forty odd years later) No contest. This is one of the films that form the essence of cinematic 007. How is Thunderball boring??
People say that FYEO is tepid and that Octopussy is ridiculous. This may be true but at least they are still Bond films and not the horrible mess that is NSNA. The "Bond War" of 1983 could have easily gone either way, but rightfully went to the official series which had firmly established itself as an institution. Needless to say, neither film was particularly good at all.
The fact that NSNA makes any coherent sense is a tribute to the cast and crew that prevented it from being unwatchable. This could easily have been the Kevin McClory version of the 67 CR. (a very very guilty pleasure and leading candidate for most incoherent film ever.) It is more modern, and a bit easier for today's audiences to swallow. This has led to it being shown more often in TV reruns etc. and the placement amongst the general public's Bond knowledge. Otherwise it would have sunk back in to the no man's land of pop culture.
NSNA: the script is uninteresting, this is the bad parts of Thunderball re-hashed with very dated elements of the early 80's, the elegance is gone, the underwater sequences are primarily gone, the location is moved, the film is boring and worse: tedious. Kim Basinger is tepid and annoying, Rowan Atkinson is not the worst part of the movie, Max Von Sydow is in there for two seconds as an ineffective Blofeld, Edward Fox make sM a ineffectual bigot, the score is ill-fitting in most parts, the title song is pretty bad, and to sum it up the whole exercise just feels like one of the old producers of 60's 007 ripoffs got a bunch of money in the 80's and made another Bond knockoff, but was able to use the name, Connery, and base it on Thunderball. Granted, the film has some good scenes, Brandauer makes a very credible villain, some efforts were made to make a decent and different film, the new Q was a nice touch, and Connery looks better here than he did in DAF.
Worth watching as a curio.
Kiss Me Deadly.
