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!
What a great year 1983 was! Not one, but two James Bond movies were released that year. How fitting it is then that I review Octopussy and Never Say Never Again as back-to-back blog entries. I’ll get into particulars in a moment, but while Never certainly has its flaws, it’s better than Octopussy.
The Wikipedia entry has the details, but in short Never Say Never Again is a remake of the older Bond film Thunderball, but made by another film company. It’s a fascinating story reading about how this all came about. I’ve seen Thunderball many times and even read the novel, but the plot of Never Say Never Again still felt pretty unfamiliar too me, even though I watched it as recently as a couple of years ago. Basically SPECTRE compromises a U.S. military officer to aid them in stealing two nuclear warheads and holds NATO ransom. (I think it was NATO.) Bond has to hunt down SPECTRE’s project manager in charge of the operation, a man named Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) who has seduced the compromised U.S. officer’s sister, Domino (Kim Basinger). Largo is assisted by the evil Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera), who spends most of the movie unsuccessfully trying to kill Bond.
As a libertarian who doesn’t believe in intellectual property, I love the whole concept of this movie! I know the filmmakers went to great pains not to violate the copyrights of EON Productions, who make the “official” Bond movies, but even so watching this movie is like getting a glimpse into a world blessedly unfettered by copyright. And on top of that, it’s not a bad Bond film. After all, when you’ve got Irvin Kershner as your director (he directed The Empire Strikes Back), how can it not be at least decent?
Let’s get the bad out of the way, shall we? The music is terrible. I mean just dreadful. I think it’s safe to say this movie has the worst music of any Bond movie, starting with the terrible theme song. I’ll give them points for going for the classic style of a Bond theme song, but it’s just awful. And yet I can’t get it out of my head. The rest of the music in the film is bad too. It really sounds like stereotypical 80’s TV drama music, not something from a major motion picture.
The worst scene in the movie is the one in which Bond finally kills Blush. It’s by far the worst Bond-getting-out-of-almost-getting-killed scene in all of Bond history. So she finally catches him after a pretty awesome chase scene. She has him sitting on the ground, gun pointed at his crotch telling him where the first shot will go. In his pocket he has a pen that shoots an explosive projectile. So how do the writers get him to use it? He tells Blush that he was going to write her into his diary, so she grabs a piece of paper and orders him to write down how great a lover she was, thus giving him the chance to use the pen. Ok, so he takes advantage of her pride, but come on. Couldn’t they think of some more plausible way for him to kill her? And then right after she explodes, Felix walks in (Bond’s CIA counterpart). Bond asks how long he’s been standing there to which Felix responds, “Long enough.” Really? Your associate is about to get shot in the crotch before being killed and you’re just going to stand there to find out how he gets out of the situation? If I were Bond I’d have suspected Felix were in on it.
I’m not a big fan of Kim Basinger in general, but I really can’t figure out Domino’s attraction to Largo. I guess he’s charming and rich and all. But early on in the film she asks him what he would do if she were to leave him and after laughing it off he tells her quite seriously that he would cut her throat. She looks a little nervous, but wouldn’t you try really hard to get away at that point?
All that aside, I did enjoy this movie. Sean Connery reminds you why he’s the best Bond with his charm and confidence. Brandauer is actually quite a good bad guy. He does a good job of being creepy crazy. Max von Sydow is Blofeld! He’s only in the movie a short amount of time, but it’s still excellent casting. And then there’s Rowan Atkinson, the bumbling British government worker Bond runs into in the Bahamas. Atkinson is of course famous for playing Mr. Bean. My dad and brother used to always say, perhaps to annoy me, that Atkinson should play Bond. Well, here he is in a Bond movie. And that game Domination that Bond and Largo play? I want that. The three dimensional CGI globe still looks cool almost thirty years later.
The Wikipedia article points out the similarities between the way M sees Bond as archaic in this movie to the way M viewed Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye. I thought another similarity was in the female villains in the two movies. Fatima Blush seems like the prototype for Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp with her obvious insanity and lust for killing.
If you haven’t seen this one, it’s worth checking out. If it’s between this one and Octopussy, watch this one.
