BEFORE: I've got to tip my hat to the James Bond franchise, 23 films is a serious achievement. I don't know if it's technically the most successful film series, but it's gotta be up there. That's nearly four times the number of Star Wars films, stretched out over 50 years! I'll be spending most of June on this series, since I'm only on Bond actor #2 out of 6.
THE PLOT: James Bond heads to The Bahamas to recover two nuclear warheads stolen by SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo in an international extortion scheme.
AFTER: However, as the Bond movies grew in popularity, it's a shame that the production values didn't get better at the same speed. I hope this is the low-point for the overall low-budget look of this series. I honestly can't see why people were so enamored of this as an action film, when it just looks so rundown.
First off, there are the underwater scenes. Maybe this was a big deal back in 1965, but they've got some major drawbacks. Some of them are murky and it's hard to tell what's happening underwater. Beyond that, obviously people can't talk underwater (though I suppose they could have given Bond an underwater radio/voice transmitter, but they didn't) so most of these scenes have the feel of a silent film - and that's just unacceptable for the mid 1960's. I honestly found many of the underwater scenes very boring, even the ones with sharks. So many later films did this sort of thing much better.
Then we've got the cheezy dubbed villains - which seems to be a recurring theme. Eventually you realize that all of Goldfinger's lines were re-dubbed by an English actor doing a German accent, and in this film Largo's lines were re-dubbed by an English actor doing an Italian accent. Would the original German/Italian voices have been that bad? In fixing one problem, the filmmakers just created another one, namely that the mouths of the Bond villains often don't sync up with what they're saying.
In this case story was originally written to involve Sicilian mafia, then after casting they retrofitted the story to include SPECTRE. But still, it ends up looking bad. You can say they were doing some kind of homage to the way foreign films often look, but in my book, that's a poor excuse.
Next up are the ridiculous explosions - you see a lot of this in action movies, I'll admit, with cars falling off cliffs, and bursting into flames well before they hit the bottom. This was debunked a while back on "Mythbusters" - most cars that end up going off of cliffs just crash, with no "BOOM". I'm sure some of them do explode, but it takes a really specific set of circumstances for a car to catch on fire or explode. But you see it in films ALL THE TIME.
This film has a lot of that, and as a bonus depicts a boat that's out of control, and the second it hits land, it explodes into a million pieces. Completely unrealistic, as are the sped-up projection effects of the boat veering out of control, while characters stand in the control room and are somehow NOT thrown from side to side. Come on... Also, this type of thing occurred during the underwater harpoon battle. I'm sure harpoons hurt, but the film shows agents hit with one harpoon and instantly "dying" - I'm thinking some of those piercings looked quite survivable.
I'm not sure I even understood the plot - I can see stealing warheads, but using them to - what, blow up Florida? Go ahead, I won't miss it. See, never negotiate with terrorists, because you can't trust them anyway. And don't give them any money, they'll only blow it on bigger yachts and pools filled with sharks...
LOCATIONS: Paris, Bahamas
VILLAINS: Col. Jacques Bouvar, Count Lippe, Emilio Largo
BABES: Domino Vitali, Fiona Volpe
ALLIES: M, Q, Felix Leiter (actor #4 playing Felix - didn't they lock anyone down to play him for sequels?)
PASTIMES: Baccarat, Scuba diving
CARS: Aston Martin DB5 (carrying over from "Goldfinger")
GADGETS: Jet-pack, underwater camera, underwater flares, mini-rebreather.
THEME SONG: "Thunderball" by Tom Jones. Cheezy goodness.
Also starring Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Desmond Llewelyn (all carrying over from "Goldfinger"), Adolfo Celi, Claudine Auger, Luciana Paluzzi, Martine Beswick (last seen in "From Russia With Love").
RATING: 3 out of 10 harpoon guns
No comments:
Post a Comment