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Sure it has its problems, well-enumerated by many here... but each movie since Dr. No was bigger and more extravagant than the one before.
YOLT is the natural evolutionary result of that process.
It has become the Bond archetype, and you have to respect that.
During my annual re-watching (in chronological order) marathon, I am always sad to see YOLT end, because I know it will be a long slog until it's TSWLM's turn.
Definitely agree, @Birdleson; YOLT and TSWLM are outstanding. I cut Moonraker more slack than some folks do, but I don't think it is what you'd call "outstanding."
All three of those films are essentially remakes of Dr. No, and a legitimate argument can be made that the first is still the best.
But I still prefer You Only Live Twice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah - @chrisisall is right! YOLT is indeed "marvelously entertaining"!!
And considering that it is the Source From Which All Good Things Flow, Dr. No is criminally underrated.
Maybe by the "casual Bond fan" but not on these boards I don't think. Most of the people I "bump shoulders" with on here love it just as much as I do.
Also, to answer the OP's question: No.
I really enjoy MR but it is OTT with too much comedy where it should have been serious.
YOLT is the original, but it's dated.
TND is ok, but not up to the same level as TSWLM imo (except for the pretitle sequence, which is absolutely up there with the best of them).
DAD is, well, DAD. A stinker, but an entertaining one.
Yes, was discussing this in the OHMSS thread yesterday. OHMSS set everything up perfectly for the 70s and I personally think Laz could have grown into a great Bond (infact, I'd argue his one performance was pretty epic). What an idiot, indeed. A proper revenge follow up to OHMSS would have been amazing. Although apparently Hunt originally wanted to save Tracy's death until the start of the next movie, which would have ruined OHMSS. Oh well. Swings and roundabouts.
"We couldn't find a castle by the sea"
It was originally intended to put SPECTRE HQ in a seashore castle, more in keeping with Fleming's novel. But since the Japanese don't build a lot of castles by the sea, that idea was changed to the hollowed out volcano... What, so you can't find a seashore castle anywhere else, give it a modest facelift to make it slightly more Japanese and tell us we're in Japan? Almost all of the Korea stuff in DAD was filmed in the UK! Besides, plenty of volcanoes in Japan but the actual interiors were stage work in Pinewood anyway. If the idea was not to sell us something that doesn't exist in reality, an extinct volcano housing a rocket launch platform for space travel isn't exactly a legitimate substitute, now is it...
Rockets swallow rockets
Why? SPECTRE hopes to lure the Russians and the Americans into war. So, simply shoot them out of the sky. Why actually send a manned spacecraft in orbit to "eat" the capsules and take them back to Earth, when you have no use for either the capsules or the astronauts anyway? By mysteriously picking the capsules out of space, you also make the idea of Sovjets and Americans fighting each other much less convincing. And since firing an armed missile is still a lot easier than launching a giant rocket that will manoeuvre back to Earth and be ready for immediate re-use, the plot could have been a trifle more credible.
James Bond must die, but why?
First of all, what's with this ridiculous set-up? No-one thought James Bond wasn't going to survive passed the OT because everyone saw the trailers, the posters and the TV clips. But okay, let's say it does fool a few people into thinking that Bond is dead, I'm still confused. Bond sleeps with a girl who's in on it. But so is Bond since he doesn't look a bit surprised aboard the submarine and in fact he had the breathing equipment on when he came in. So why does she "suddenly" hit the button, allow the gunmen to storm in while she looks all tensed up and have them perforate the bed (but none of the bullets actually goes through the bed)? Couldn't she have just said, "sorry James but it's time to pull off this charade now"? Wouldn't be very exciting for us, I agree...
... but then I still wonder why all this fuss? Osato and Brand "knew" that Bond was dead because they had read it in the newspapers. But the newspapers had printed his photo - because all secret agents who die draw front page attention - and yet neither Osato nor Brand, when sitting close to Bond, recognises him a mere few hours later? Not the slightest sign of suspicion? No, because the papers had told them that Bond is dead so this mysterious doppelgänger couldn't possibly be Bond... And these people work for an organisation that's all about "counter-intelligence". This unnecessary "plot twist" makes our enemies look even more incompetent. All we get out of this is a dull reason to call the film You Only Live Twice.
What gives people the right to complain about Moonraker?
People tell me they loath Moonraker because the entire film is just one big excuse to get to space where the money shots will be. The first and second acts are basically about Bond following simple clues to get to Drax' lair. Okay, let's talk about YOLT then.
Bond has an ally, Henderson. He gets killed. (More about that later.) Bond follows the killer and takes his place. What does the other killer do? Hide for a while? Go to a bar and celebrate a successful mission with some sake and a geisha? Nope, it's night-time in Tokyo but the man insists on taking his partner to Osato chemicals headquarters, to the boss' office no less, so that right there half of Bond's investigating is done for him. And by sheer luck, Bond finds the bar and by sheer luck again, he spots a safe in the mirror. He's even luckier to grab that one microfilm holding some valuable clues to help him make progress.
But don't worry, Bond isn't out of the building yet. Oh wait, he is. Because Aki had been following him all that time? She hadn't seen the killer approach Henderson's house while waiting in her car? By the way, Bond has to go through Sumu wrestlers and the embarrassing exchange of codes with Aki before he can get to Henderson, yet Henderson's house is totally unguarded. A killer can just walk up to the paper walls and put a knife in the man? Tight security.
Speaking of security, Henderson tells Bond he can meet Tiger Tanaka "tonight". Yet Tiger can't just invite Bond into his house? Of course not. He needs Aki to perform ridiculous theatrics in that underground whatever-the-hell-that-place-is so that Bond can literally drop in through the ceiling. What if when Aki pulled over and jumped out of the car Bond had decided "enough action for one evening" and just walked away? And despite Aki and Henderson verifying that Bond really is Bond, we need to go through that I love you routine again.
Back to the plot. Lucky Bond. The microfilm he had just randomly grabbed contains valuable information: rocket fuel and pictures linked to dead diving girls. OK, so now we know who's responsible for it. So let's raid those Osato offices and see what we can find. Even if SPECTRE is involved as Bond magically assumes, if you disable the supplier and manufacturer of the various things needed to keep the space operation going, that's half a battle won right there. Instead, Bond goes there all by himself. He's very lucky that he wasn't shot the first instance he got in.
Aki "loves" Bond?
Let's see. A few minutes to get to Henderson, even less time to get from Osato to Tiger... Yet later that evening Aki walks over to Bond and they hug and kiss as if they had been lovers for years but had been separated for so long. To keep a clear perspective on things, all of this takes place in one evening, from Bond getting torpedoed to the shores of Japan all the way into Aki's bed: exactly one evening. And the moments these two have shared were brief. Things went fast in previous films too but at least GF makes it obvious that both Bond and Jill just wanted a bit of fun. Aki and Bond, by contrast, make it look like there's hardcore romance involved, and Barry's music more or less emphasises that fact. Surely even Bond needs a bit more time with a girl before he genuinely falls in love with her...
Simple annoyances
- Henderson is stabbed with a knife but neither the stabbing nor Henderson dying comes with a sound? Any sound? Yet when Bond throws himself through the wall, the ripping makes one hell of a noise.
- Who put the camera in space that shows the swallowing of the capsule from any desired angle?
- We need to make Bond Japanese so he can blend in. Why? Would the islanders sell him out? Or is it so he can infiltrate SPECTRE HQ? But didn't we have Bond officially dead for that purpose? Must we also give him a makeover (that clearly didn't survive the next 12 hours)?
But don't worry, I still like YOLT.
Of course I do. The music is great, the sets are impressive as hell, some of the action is staged very well and iconic scenes wrote Bond film history left and right. But the quality drop from TB to YOLT, in terms of story and script, is almost sickening. In FRWL, every line served a purpose, every performance was gold, every editing decision was thought through... But YOLT went for the set pieces, the big but empty spectacle. Lines were meaninglessly dropped like horse manure, the plot moved on coasting on a lot of that GF goodwill we still carried with us. I'll say it right now: I think Roald Dahl was a terrible choice for a screenwriter. He gave us a sort of comic book version of Bond, a self-parody almost. And so yes, as I grew a bit older in my teenage years, these issues became apparent and plenty.
It's a classic. Love everything about it.
What criticism do you find bizarre and inexplicable? :-)
Any criticism of YOLT is bizarre and inexplicable to me! It's nigh on perfect IMO.
I loved it as a kid but my appreciation has grown over time. Having visited Japan as an adult I now love all the Japanese elements more than ever. It's wonderfully evocative of an amazing country. Not many Bond films since have managed to convey that same sense of place as YOLT.
May be I need to do a rewatch to appreciate what's so wrong with it! ;)
But jawdroppingly incredible sets, a killer John Barry score and Sean Connery as James Bond (even if he looks bored half the time) go a long way to redeem it.
I sure hope there's nobody here who bashes SKYFALL and/or SPECTRE because of their plot-holes yet totally loves YOLT... If so, that person needs their head examined!
Consider this:
ICBM-sized rockets taking off AT NIGHT can be seen with the naked eye for a 100-mile radius, even on a semi-clear evening... So are all the Ama islanders -- not to mention everyone aboard aircraft or ships at sea in said radius -- TOTALLY FRICKIN' BLIND???
Does Blofeld deploy some sort of insidious "blindness ray" that they forgot to mention in the script?
I would NEVER do that! ;)
FRWL is the most well thought out, meticulously schemed film in the Bondian cannon. A well crafted joy of a movie. Where as FRWL is complex in small way, YOLT is truly epic. One has to make certain sacrifices with the script and the story, as one gets grandiose. A perfect culmination to the Connery era.
Or it would have been. If you indulge me, my alternative take on the plot to YOLT -
Same set up, with the Volcano Lair. But instead of SPECTRE having to launch rockets to interfere with the Americans and the Soviet space programmes, you have SPECTRE using Dr. No's toppling technology, only on a much bigger scale. It would have been great to tie YOLT's scheme to the first film, Dr. No.
And onto the question posed by the OP. Although I loved as a kid, yet throughout my teenage years, right up until my mid 20's I took a dim view on YOLT and all it's problems. During a Bondathon I used to look forward to YOLT. The music! The sets! The cinematography! Japan! I repressed all of YOLT's issues. For me the memory of this film is actually better than the film itself; I tend to forget just how silly the plot is, for example.
But recently I've grown attached to YOLT. Sure I've enjoyed YOLT in the past, but never to this extent. Same with MR.
There a lot to enjoy with YOLT; Ken Adam's stupendous sets; John Barry's melodic, beautiful music; Freddie Young's gorgeous cinematography, inventive set pieces: Lewis Gilbert's stylish direction, and the first half is imbued with a certain From Russia With Love style of intrigue and the whole film is so darn iconic.
Ian Fleming said “go beyond with is probable, but never the impossible”, I always try to judge the Bond’s film plot by this mantra. However… it was the space race, it was the 60’s, a time when people were not so cynical. So, regrading the special effects, judging it from a 60's point of view, and not a cynical modern viewpoint, the special effects were fine. The film makers were using the tools of their time. Besides, where Adam and Barry are concerned, I can forgive a lot.
You Only Live Twice is a flawed, yet highly enjoyable film, being exotic and innovative. Mix in a little 60's magic, and one gets an iconic entry into the Bond series.
Exactly! What's not to like?!
For the record, I´m in my 40s ;-).
Seems to be a trend doesn't it? Loved when I was 9 (ninjas! Japan! Connery! Blofeld! Volcano!) Then I entered my pretentious teenage years, where I didn't much care for it. Now I'm older, I can see through its flaws, and just enjoy the heck out of it. Although I love the current incarnation of our fav super spy, it is nice to go back to a time when films were much simple and fun.