About 14 years ago, I watched Dr. No, the first James Bond film I had ever seen starring Sean Connery, if you don't include Never Say Never Again. Which I don't.About seven years ago, I watched the next two in the span of 24 hours, getting in From Russia With Love so I could go sequentially and see Goldfinger, which I was watching as part of the series I was writing at the time called Flickchart Road Trip, where I watched a movie at least partially set in each U.S. state for 50 weeks in a row. (Goldfinger goes to Kentucky.)
It's another seven years later and I've finally moved on to the next.
You may recall in yesterday's post that I vowed to watch a pre-2000 movie on streaming, and you know what? It's hard. At least 80 percent of the movies available on streaming have been released in the past two decades, and the ones that haven't are classics that I've already seen multiple times.
Except not the James Bond movies. As the timeline above will tell you, there are plenty of Bond movies -- about three starring Sean Connery, about three starring Roger Moore, and the one starring George Lazenby -- that I hadn't seen yet. (There's also the one starring Woody Allen, if we're counting movies we don't count.)
And fortunately, my Australian streaming service Stan is carrying all of them.
As you can tell from the poster, Thunderball was next up for me, and I watched all 130 minutes of it -- at least half of which were underwater -- on Saturday night.
Although Goldfinger is definitely the movie where many of the James Bond tropes we still know first appeared, Thunderball seems like the movie where they became ripe for parody. And boy is this movie jam-packed full of James Bond silliness. Just a small overview of some of the things we see in this movie:
- James Bond uses a jet pack. For reasons that seem entirely superfluous to the scenario, he escapes some kind of compound with the help of a jet pack that, I guess, he had stashed in there. If you have the access to stash the jet pack in the first place, it certainly doesn't seem essential to your escape, now does it?
- James Bond punches out a woman. During that same opening scene with the jet pack. It's not actually a woman but a man dressed as a woman, though it does function quite symbolically in terms of the mild to heavy misogyny that characterized the franchise at the time.
- James Bond gets "stretched" on a device called "the rack," that is supposed to assist with rehabilitation from injury. This seems to clearly call back to the famous scene in Goldfinger where his manhood is threatened by a table saw. I was surprised that he doesn't actually figure his way out of it, but is saved by the returning nurse, whom he quickly beds.
- Spectre makes its first appearance. I believe, though it could have appeared in Goldfinger. You get the cat being petted and the room full of Spectre agents, one of whom is accused of embezzlement and summarily executed, his chair sinking into the floor and coming back empty. Classic fodder for an Austin Powers movie.
- You get a villain with an eye patch. Largo by name. Classic.
- James Bond is the target of an assassination attempt during a big parade/festival. The gun peaking from behind the curtain also seems classic Bond. Of course, he turns the duplicitous woman he's dancing with in the path of the gun shot, and she takes the shot to the back and dies instantly. In fact, numerous people are killed instantly from back wounds in this film, including, ultimately, Largo.
- In addition to the large meeting of Spectre agents, we get a large meeting of 00 agents. Not sure if we had seen that before either.
- Desmond Llewelyn appears as Q. Not for the first time, but he appears in a way that reminds me of all his subsequent appearances, completely rolling his eyes at everything Bond does.
- Doppelgangers. A villain gets cosmetic surgery to look like the NATO pilot with security clearance, so he can board and ultimately hijack a plane carrying nuclear weapons.
- The one-liners. Ugh! A typical example: Connery shoots an approaching villain with a spear gun, and says "I think he got the point."
- The shark tank. I almost forgot! Largo has a pool full of sharks he feeds with human beings who have crossed him, or merely let him down. Classic villain behavior.
Thunderball clearly has it all. However, the most ridiculous thing it has is literally 40 minutes of underwater footage.
Many a Bond movie might have a single underwater scene, but Thunderball really goes for it. It keeps returning, and returning, and returning to the underwater milieu, and I'll be damned if I could figure out what was supposed to be going on and what was at stake in half of those scenes.
But the most hilarious moment had to be the grand finale. You know well those scenes that have become ubiquitous in epic adventure movies, where the two armies run at each other on the battlefield and ultimately meet up for a ferocious clash where heads are bashed and blood flies.
Now imagine the same thing underwater.
That's right, there are no fewer than 200 scuba divers shooting each other with spear guns and engaging in hand to hand combat underwater as one group escorts a nuclear device and the other tries to stop them from doing so. (In an interesting failure to present an immediacy to the threat, the device is not about to be detonated, but is just being escorted in the finale.)
The scene goes on for so long, and includes so many people speared (how many spears does the average scuba diver carry?), that I spent most of the time laughing. The hand to hand combat was almost as funny, with combatants slashing each others' air hoses and removing each others' face masks. (This last was considered some kind of fatal move, almost like they were removing an astronaut's helmet rather than a diver's. I suppose it's disorienting not to have your mask underwater, but does it really limit your effectiveness as a combatant? When it happens to Bond himself, he just gets a mask from a floating corpse nearby. Never mind that if you put the mask on underwater your mask would be totally filled with water and would not function as intended anyway.)
Thunderball is so silly at some points -- including the crazy speed of the background in the climactic fight scene aboard a boat -- that I almost considered giving it less than the minimum three stars for a movie you would recommend to somebody else. But after judging that I had had a really good time watching it, I did give it those three stars.
One thing I didn't mention above is that this is also the movie where the Bond franchise just unapologetically goes for the T&A. I just quipped to someone that Thunderball features "enough beautiful babes to fill a Russ Meyer movie." Indeed that is true. The babes are buxom and frequently in bikinis, or baths, or Turkish baths. Hubba hubba.
I don't think it will be another seven years before I see You Only Live Twice, the next up for me, whose beginning I may actually have seen years ago. There's a Bond scene I remember where he appears to be shot in a folded up bed at the beginning, and I think that's this movie. I definitely didn't see the whole thing though.
Especially with the availability of all the movies on Stan, I think Thunderball has inspired me to keep making my way through the now six remaining Bond movies I haven't seen. It may be a tall, and unnecessary, order to see them all before No Time to Die finally does debut later this year, but neither would I be surprised if I ended up doing so.
No comments:
Post a Comment