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Cant help wonder if you'd be saying this if it was Brozza jetting around? The fact that the jetpack is actually real and works doesnt stop it being crap and taking us way too far away from Fleming.
'Perfectly crafted'? Appalling continuity errors, sloppy editing, shoddy sped up footage, characters being voiced by the wrong actor in dubbing? Need I go on? Rather than being crafted it has the appearance of hastily being thrown together to meet a release date. Is it any wonder the gap between films went to 2 years after TB?
Seriously? I think Raiders, Die Hard and T2 might beg to differ. Not to mention half of the Bonds. Some of the underwater stuff is decent but the only jaw dropping stunt in the film is George Leech hanging onto the hydrofoil. The truck chase in Raiders alone beats all of TB's action combined.
The words of an imbecile.
The golf game is absolute classic Bond and better than 95% of scenes in TB (only the SPECTRE briefing and the death of Fiona come anywhere near for me).
'A villain eating fruit alongside the road' is reason that TB is better than GF? This scene lasts what - 30 seconds? While we're talking about dull moments why not mention Bond spending half the film lying around at a health farm or flouncing around the Bahamas and endless plodding underwater scenes?
TB has some good moments which could be regarded as classic (most of the scenes involving Fiona, the early SPECTRE stuff - and I'm including the entire heist of the bomb here before the repetitive underwater stuff gets tedious, the attack on Palmyra) but after a decent first half it starts to run out of steam and just becomes more and more bloated and dull culminating in a climax that on paper sounds amazing but in reality goes on forever and as Terence Young himself said 'Theres only so many times you can cut someones air pipe or rip their mask off before it becomes dull'.
On top of all the that the plot is seriously devoid of any tension. The whole thing hinges on Bouvard hitting Bond with the poker. If Bond doesnt get hit with the poker he doesnt go to Shrublands and see Angelo/Derval so when the bombs get taken M sends him to Canada with Group Captain Pritchard and SPECTRE succeed. Any plot that hinges so fundamentally on a coincidence is deeply flawed.
But even overlooking this, where is the sense of any sort of drama and impending doom? There are just a few days before a nuclear warhead will go off and what's Bond doing? On a club 18-30 holiday with Domino.
And even at the climax SPECTRE never even get close to detonating the bombs. The closest we get to disaster is Miami and all that takes place off camera and is resolved by one line to Felix from Bond!!!
I think a nuclear bomb about to go off in a city full of people has rather more tension as a climax than one about to go off in the middle of nowhere under the sea. And it cant even go off anyway because Kotze reveals he has thrown the fuses into the sea FFS!
Some people have used a food analogy and I think it is fairly apposite with regard to TB. Sometimes you are starving and a massive KFC bucket hits the spot - its not sophisticated but it fills you up. On the other hand though sometimes you would prefer scallops fried in garlic butter - less being exquisitely more. DN (massively underrated), FRWL and, to a lesser extent, GF all leave you less full but more satisfied. And in terms of entertainment and spectacle YOLT also delivers more. For me TB edges just slightly behind YOLT but significantly ahead of DAF as Connery's 5th best Bond.
But I do agree with your points regarding TB.
I disagree with a lot of what you said, but this bit especially. TB has a far better ending than GF, with Bond doing actually some work instead of mainly standing around, the fight between him and Largo is far more suspenseful than the one against Oddjob (where Bond is mainly tossed around), their antagonism far better built and the Bond girl far more developed than Pussy Galore. I would take TB over GF any day.
Better that than no stopping power and fitting nicely in a lady's handbag old son!
I find TB far superior to Die Hard and T2, but then again the first one, although good is a rather light version of a far superior novel and T2 is a repetition of the first movie, which is by the way far superior. And in T2's case, it is another genre entirely, more like a paranoid scifi movie than an action movie per se. For Raiders, that depends of everybody's taste, but I will always have a preference for the movie that paved the way. And TB did in many ways, as a popcorn action movie. I very strongly disagree with your assumption that Bouvar poking Bond was the reason why he ended up in Shrubland. In the movie, it is not developed, in the novels we know it was on M's orders. And yes, in te novel too, it is based on a pure coincidence. Blame Fleming and the genre Bond belongs to, where sometimes coincidences to happen to trigger the plot. TB is in general (and the pre-Shrubland omission aside) very close to the original novel. Yes, the bombs are not about to blow off immediately at any time, but they are a MacGuffen anyway: their presence is enough of a threat. I love that SPECTRE's scheme is defeated through investigation and that Bond is far more proactive in TB than in GF.
I think here and elsewhere TB is criminally underrated.
For the time being (and probably always), GE is the only Brosnan film I like more than TB. There are a lot of good/great individual aspects to TB, though, mostly the humor and the girls. TB and YOLT are pretty close for me, but for now I just feel that TB is simply a superior film. YOLT is potentially more entertaining, though. TB is also the first Bond film I ever watched, so there's that too...
To my mind you both are pretty much bang on. Apart from me putting TB firmly in front of YOLT,that is.
I see it as the first by the numbers Bond film.
Yup.
I think @TheWizardOfIce nails it above. There is little suspense or tension throughout. By the second hour of the film, it feels stuck in an endless series of repeating scenes and locations - When combined with the flacid storytelling, Barrys' beautiful score and the balletic underwater fight scenes actually have the effect of lulling me gently off to sleep.
And I always hated that jet-pack. It's one of the naffest escape routines in the series. Brozza would have been proud - bet he wishes he could have had a jet-pack, kite-surfing, invisible tank.
Oh, and don't mention the 'rack' at Shrublands. Such an awful scene.
Chortle
1) On Her Majesty's Secret Service
2) Goldfinger
3) Dr. No
4) From Russia with Love
5) Thunderball
6) You Only Live Twice
I enjoy them all though.
Not sure OHMSS is my number one, but I have no problem with seeing it up there.
A quality the critics of TB often forget.
The thing is, I rarely, if ever, find Fleming dull. So for me that TB is so close to the source material is actually an asset of the movie and puts it way above GF and YOLT. Like I said: if you find it slow, blame Fleming, he wrote slow thrillers.
Awful. Just crap imo. A massive step down from the GF PTS (yeah the seagull hat was silly but the rest is so badass), and not a patch on the likes of TSWLM, MR, TLD, LTK, GE, TWINE, CR, DAD and QOS.
The fist time I saw TB I feel asleep. Although that may have been down to the fact that I was playing Mario Kart on the N64 back in the day....
Needless to say, I didn't really want to watch TB again, until I received it as a present, on Christmas Day, along with OHMSS. Both of them blew me away.
Although, I do empathize with people saying that TB is slightly boring. After the Vulcan hi-jacking, a superb set-piece by the way, the film grinds to a halt, with tedious underwater footage, of scuba-divers nailing a sodding net in place. Just have Largo cutting Derval/Palazzi's oxygen tube, and have done with it. Maybe a couple of shots hiding the Vulcan. It comes at a really crucial stage, what with it being after the Flemingesque set up of the plot in Shurblands, you really needed a exciting bit to come after it.
Still, naturally, TB tries valiantly to cover over it's slower pace, with the excellent plotting, sets, action, music, tension, violence, sex and the quips. It is an epic film, and Young is trying to tell us a story, I got caught up with the story like never before. It’s only on for two hours, that’s time to be spent with Bond, so what’s the rush? I just let the film wash over me, savoring Thunderball’s magnificent “epicness”.
But I will agree that TB isn't nearly as strong as FRWL and even DN, a very underrated Bond film. DN and FRWL wanted to be original and fresh films; TB wanted to be GF 2.0 I think.
Okay, so by your reasoning, absolutely anything based on Fleming and conveyed to celluloid floats your boat, no matter what the quality of the end product? If that's the case, fair enough, but I can't sayI share the same view. It's not primarily an indictment of Fleming or the source material to say the film is not very good - its essentially a criticism of the script, direction, editing etc.
If someone takes a book you love and then turns it into a really bad movie that happens to also be slavishly loyal to the text, do you simply love the movie regardless, or do you recognise that the literary and cinematic art forms are interlinked but also seperate and not automatically translateable. I haven't read Thunderball. It may well be brilliant, but even if it is, that does not mean the film based on it will also be any good.
:-O
It is entirely your right to find TB dull. I have read the novel and did not find it dull when Domino tells pages after pages the story of the captain on the Craven A's pack. Or when Bond gets a tour of the Disco Volante by Largo. So I don't get bored with the underwater sequences in the movie.
Faithfulness to Fleming is usually a good barometer when rating Bond films. It certainly stands up to scrutiny regarding DN, FRWL, OHMSS, the opening of TLD and the second half of CR; but I would be very wary of relying on this argument with regard to TB.
A court of law found that Fleming to all intents and purposes plagiarised a screenplay by Jack Whittingham (and, he would argue, Kevin McClory). TB the novel is effectively a novelisation of the TB screenplay by Whittingham. The only bits that are really attributed to Fleming are Shrublands, SPECTRE, and the Domino backstory with the sailor - ironically two of the best bits of the finished film and one bit they left out.
So saying TB is faithful to the Fleming novel ergo it must be good is very murky water to start sailing into.
Silly use of the jet pack (featured prominently in the first few episodes of Lost In Space) and the DB5 rear water guns aside, the movie is a strong one, rich in lush locals & lusher women. The pace is languid to be sure, and yes, the mask switcheroo and the sped-up boat climax bug me a little, but it's fine 60's Bond cheese.
Please remember that DN had the terrible rear projection & somewhat lacking one-angle model at the end, FRWL had the silly & oh-so-convenient boat line-up (plus the Popeye hat), GF had the superfast window trick out the toy plane... :P
Except that I do not buy the conclusion of the court of law and the subsequent attitude of McClory certainly makes me think that the creative force behind the novel was Fleming and no one else. Blofeld is a 100% Flemingesque character, who was used subsequently by Fleming in subsequent novels, SPECTRE is a revamped SMERSH (and other criminal organizations he used in the past), etc.
But whatever you think about the judgment, it is irrelevant: the book was written by Fleming, it was his prose, his work in the end, his writing, his characters.