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It s boring as hell, usually. It works in OHMSS.
Yes, OHMSS does it fairly well- perhaps because we barely see the fighting between the stuntmen and the film focuses on the lead characters.
YOLT is an incredible spectacle, looks gorgeous, and features one of Barry's best scores. It has moments of visual poetry, like the opening death in space and Bond's marriage. If only the film had an actual story and a couple more moments of characters behaving like human beings to anchor the spectacle. Roald Dahl was told to script the film according to the formula established by the earlier films, so YOLT marks the point when the series truly begins feeding on itself.
TB is a flawed halfway house between Terence Young's previous Bond films and the post-GF excess that overtook the series. It's overlong and, as Raymond Benson noted in his James Bond Bedside Companion (one of the best Bond reference books of the 80s), the screenplay is a needlessly complicated adaptation of the book. I would also say that the film's characterization is much weaker than the book's--cinematic Largo and Domino are much blander than the originals. Despite all these flaws, within the bloat there is an effective thriller struggling to get out, and it does during the best moments: the brutal fight and jetpack in the pre-credits, the Spectre meeting (which remains the organization's finest moment on film), the methodical plane highjack, pretty much every scene with Fiona, the frogmen parachuting from the sky into the mother of all aquatic battles, etc. So I prefer Thunderball.
That's not exactly a bad thing: that's recognising what worked about previous entries and giving people more of it. It's how Goldfinger turned out so good too: they took the bits people really liked of the previous two and turned them up to 11. Thunderball curiously learns very few lessons from Goldfinger and makes everything just that bit less larger-than-life, when it should have been going bigger and crazier. "Your watch contains a geiger counter" Oh... wow.
I certainly agree with you about the Spectre meeting and Fiona's scenes- they're tremendous and have real fizzle, but I tend to think everything else there is a bit weak or even dull. The opening fight is just a sped-up fight in an ordinary room, there's nothing particularly innovative or imaginative about it, the jet pack is somehow rendered quite dull (maybe because he doesn't do anything interesting with it: he could have just used a ladder to the same effect), the plane hijack drags, the aquatic battle is famously regarded as pretty slow and (ironically!) dry. It's not terribly thrilling.
Give me Sean hitting a massive Japanese wrestler with a sofa in a stunningly design penthouse office any day of the week. It's got zip and energy and feels fresher.
And I think YOLT (along with GF and NTTD) is one of the best-paced Bond films.
Perhaps, but I think it's more that they turned an already over-the-top novel to 11--as Maibaum said when he turned the buzzsaw into a laser, he wanted to "out Fleming Fleming." With YOLT the series started cannibalizing itself--instead of a Bond film you get a Frankenstein's monster made from parts of other Bond films. When done well, as in YOLT and TSWLM, this approach was very enjoyable, but it's too derivative for me to respect or love as much as the foundational films.
I think the cutting and staging in the pre-credits fight is superb--it would work well without the sped-up bits, but those are also well done and an example of how sped-up action can aid a scene. The jet pack is a memorable visual even if it's simple one. I get why people feel the hijack and aquatic battle drag, but sometimes quick pacing isn't everything. A slow, methodical sequence can give plausibility to a fantastical plot, and sometimes the nature of a sequence--underwater combat--means it can't zip along and has to be accepted for what it is. I ultimately agree that there is too much underwater ballet in TB, but it's pretty good ballet, and the film as a whole feels more human and organic than YOLT, which is a string of set-pieces.
Anyways, back on track here: YOLT was the first one to really deliver what was promised in the advertising tagline years later for TSWLM: It's Bond, and B-E-Y-O-N-D (the ad campaigns for Austin Powers in Goldmember missed the opportunity to use: It's Powers, and B-E-Y-O-N-C-E !!! SOME of us would have gotten it !)
I think if you're a Bond fan you have to embrace the derivative! :)
And I don't think GF is purely just Fleming derived; it's using the tone and gags that worked in the last couple of films- they've understood what it is about Bond's crazy world that folks respond to. And in TB, for some reason, they back off that and take it back to the slightly less sexy and crazy level of the books again, whereas they'd just taken it beyond the books in the previous one to wild success. It's an odd response. Maybe it was McClory's influence? I don't know.
The accelerating chair is a bit of a low point for me. It's an alright fight but there's no hook to it, beyond one of them wearing a skirt. In the one before he had a fight with a silent assassin dressed as a manservant in Fort Knox, or he fought another guy who he electrocuted in the bath with a brilliant quip (I'd not noticed before that he electrocutes both of them!); this just ends with him strangling the guy and we have to make do with some flowers being the closest thing to a punchline. It's all on a lower gasmark.
Likewise the jetpack is the beginning of an idea they do nothing with, and it's filmed in such a way to make it seem pretty uninteresting. If they'd picked a chateau with a moat that he actually got across, or he landed it in the back of a moving car (which would actually make sense of why he's brought the French agent lady with him) it'd be something. I get that it's supposed to be excess and crazy on its own, but it doesn't feel that way the way the scene is actually shot.
And sometimes slow pacing can give you time to think "oh wow, this is going on a bit". TSWLM has a short underwater battle and keeps it tight and exciting.
YOLT is indeed a string of set pieces, but that's why it's not boring and TB, sadly, is.
And then the whole bomb threat of the film (a slightly reduced threat considering that no-one we actually see onscreen is actually in danger from the bomb: in the last one Bond was handcuffed to it: that's more exciting) is ended by a character deciding to switch sides; someone we barely get to meet and Bond seems entirely indifferent to(!). It's odd.
It's overused in the final scenes on the Disco Volante but was used more sparingly and carefully in the pre-credits, and arguably enhanced an already fast fight. I'm open to non-naturalistic editing choices when they're done well, whether Peckinpah's slow-motion or Hunt's fast-motion.
Okay, hold it right there spinach chin, slow motion is understood visually as not real time motion. When we have a accident we speed up our cognitive intake & that slows down the visual 'action', so we can understand that. Speeding up stuff makes it look cartoony because we have no times in real life where junk just speeds up for no reason. In combat explosions can be like that, but fighting & driving or speed-boating look like undercranked 20's silent movies.
There are plenty of times in real life where our impression of an event, viewed from the perspective of a spectator, is that of a blur or of action too fast to fully take in. Hence the use of slow-motion in sports broadcasting. I have seen this when witnessing fights in real life--part of what made them unsettling was how sudden the action was. Fast-motion is impressionistic--used with fast cutting it can create disorientation and the impression of lightning speed. Slow motion can replicate the impression of participating in a sudden event; fast-motion can replicate the impressions of witnessing it.
I concur. Overall TB is a better movie. But I end up putting YOLT more frequently.
Sorry, I was training in martial arts & making movies from age 13. My sense of lightning speed is probably different than a lot of other folk. You point is taken.
Same +1
GF to TB is like CR to QoS. A let-down that seems small in comparison to its predecessor.
I never thought of it like that. A good comparison! Ironically, one pair went from really short to really long, and the pair from really long to really short.
The choice is obvious.
No, I’m talking Kutze: the little guy with the glasses :)
He basically saves the whole film!
It’s not really a style which has persisted though whereas slo-mo has: I think it’s generally seen as something which doesn’t really work. I also don’t get the sense it was being used impressionistically in these films but rather they wanted us to think these things were actually happening that quickly.
With a userid like @Thunderball you’re not exactly objective 😊.
In any case, I’ll see your “Domino” and raise my “Aki”.
Interestingly, when I first started to get into Bond fandom, one of the criticisms of YOLT that I read was that Tiger, Aki and Kissy come across in the film as being more interesting than Bond himself. I don’t really agree with that, but that opinion is out there.
In fact, when people speak of spinoffs you often hear Felix mentioned as a potential lead of his own series; but really it would be loads more fun to see Aki and Tiger going about their spy business in Tokyo- Tiger with his hi-tech lairs and underground trains all around the city. It'd make a great fun comic book.
Brilliant !