For their podcast The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin have been watching the James Bond movies in order and discussing them on the show. Now that Netflix has added the bulk of the series to its instant watch library, I thought I’d play along. Warning! Spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk!

Wow, this is without question the best Roger Moore James Bond movie out of the first three, and may wind up knocking off For Your Eyes Only as my favorite Moore Bond film period. This was a special one for me, because The Spy Who Loved Me is the only Bond film that I hadn’t yet seen beyond a few minutes of it. Imagine having a favorite long-running television series. You’ve seen all of the episodes but one, and then years later you finally see it. It was like that.

The plot suffered a little only in as much as it was kind of a ripoff of another James Bond film, You Only Live Twice. In that one the bad guy was using this cool space ship that literally swallowed U.S. and Soviet space capsules. The goal being to get the U.S. and Russia to blame each other for the thefts and get them to launch an all-out war with each other. In this movie, the bad guy is using a giant tanker ship to literally swallow up British, Soviet, and American submarines so he can crew them with his own men to attack the U.S. and Russia. See what I mean? It’s kind of the same. In this one the bad guy has dreams of mankind moving under the ocean, so starting a nuclear war on the surface will just speed those efforts along, or so goes the plan.

At least this time the Soviets and the West aren’t blaming each other. In fact, the Brits and the Russians work together, pairing James Bond with his Russian counter part, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach). We know that Bond’s designation is 007. Well, in keeping with the way females in Bond movies are named, Anya’s designation is Agent XXX. Of course Bond and Amasova have a romance, after which she puts two and two together and realizes that Bond killed her boyfriend (who, let’s be fair, was trying to kill him). Bond was unaware of their relationship, but she threatens to kill Bond when the mission is over. You saw this coming since the killing was shown at the beginning of the movie.

Again, Roger Moore is flawless as Bond in this movie. He typically plays Bond as having a pretty good sense of humor about things, so it’s always refreshing to get a moment in a movie where he shows off Bond’s harder edge. Early on in the film after a really poorly done fight scene with a big bald henchmen, Bond finds himself standing near the edge of a roof. The bad guy is about to fall and is holding on to Bond’s necktie to keep himself on the roof. At first you worry for Bond’s safety, but then Bond starts interrogating him. The moment he gets the information, Bond chops the necktie out of the bad guys hand, sending him to his death. Great scene.

We also get the first of two Bond movies to feature Richard Kiel as Jaws, a very tall henchmen who is so named because his teeth are metal. Jaws is such an iconic henchmen, and he’s used effectively here. One of my favorite scenes of his was the one at the light show at the pyramids in Cairo where you see the one guy running away, the camera occasionally cutting to Jaws standing very still looking menacing. Very cool. (By the way, that looked like a very cool and very real light show.) Later in the movie he kills a shark with his teeth. The question must be asked, is it lame to see a character named Jaws, kill a shark by biting it with his teeth two years after the movie Jaws is released? I can’t decide, but it’s still a neat scene.

I think the whole underlying tension between Bond and XXX could have been handled better. The scene where they finally realize that Bond killed her boyfriend is great, and both players handle the emotion of the scene perfectly, but at the end there’s only mild tension when she has a gun on him only to melt and have sex with him. I think I would have enjoyed it better if she really had tried to kill him but he got away or something like that.

The bad guy, Stromberg, is played excellently by Curd Jürgens, who played the U-boat captain in one of my favorite WWII movies, The Enemy Below (which was the inspiration for a great Star Trek episode). Stromberg has a really cool base called Atlantis that can rise from and submerge under the ocean at will. That dining hall set is great, as was the scene early on where he kills the girl in the shark tank. (Seriously, what is it with Bond villains and sharks?)

Now, I’ve saved the best plot point to talk about last: the car. There’s an awesome chase scene with Bond and XXX being pursued in Bond’s white Lotus by motorcycles, a car, and a helicopter. He defeats the motorcycles and the car, but can’t outrun the helicopter. By the way, let me stop right here and say the machine gun shots from the helicopter were done spectacularly well. It looked real. Anyway, to get away from the chopper he drives the car off of a dock into the ocean where it transforms into a submarine! I knew this car was in the movie, but seeing it was something else! It was, hands down, the coolest thing in any Bond movie. Period.

I don’t know if I have a favorite James Bond theme song, but Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better has to be one of the best. It’s certainly one of the few that is a good song period, not just a good James Bond song. I love the way it starts with the little piano riff.

One thing of note, I think this is the first Bond movie to incorrectly state what the next Bond film would be. It says Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only at the end, but in reality it was followed by Moonraker. On the podcast, John Gruber has talked about how Moonraker was clearly influenced by the arrival of Star Wars, and I can’t help but wonder if they decided to move Moonraker up in the order after the success of Star Wars.

Man, what a great movie The Spy Who Loved Me was. Until next time!