Do you know what the first movie I remember seeing in the theater is? This. While my parents claim I also went to see Return of the Jedi earlier that year, I have distinct memories of seeing Sean Connery on a motorcycle instead of Mark Hamill on a speeder bike as my first theatrical memories. *sigh*
This movie, released within months of Roger Moore’s stint in Octopussy, represents Sean Connery’s return to the role of Bond after a dozen years and is also technically a remake of his earlier Thunderball. A “rogue” Bond picture, it is the only officially licensed Bond film not produced by Eon pictures. It was instead produced by Kevin Mclory, one of the original writers and producers of Thunderball. In an ongoing legal dispute, Mclory claimed he had helped create some sectors of the Bond universe while drafting the early versions of Thunderball with Ian Fleming. The eventual court settlement was that Mclory was entitled to make as many remakes of Thunderball as he wanted, but no other Bond related properties. So, for example, one way in which this affected the production is that while Max von Sydow is clearly playing Ernesto Blofeld, he is never referred to by name, but only, instead, by his moniker “Number 1”, as he was in Thunderball.
But, other than that, this film seemingly had a lot going for it. Moore had made Bond into a silly character. People were clamoring for classic Connery. And so why not take one of his best regarded films and remake it? Oh, and let’s get the guy who just directed the greatest movie in the history of cinema, Irvin Kershner, hot off of Empire Strikes Back, and let him go with it.
But instead, the results were largely disappointing. One of the problems is when Bond is over 50, it’s really hard (and kind of gross) to root for him to have lots of meaningless sex with the women he meets. For instance, Kim Basinger plays Domino, and at the time she would’ve been 30. Connery was 53. Moore’s Bond was having this problem as well, but Connery’s age was really showing. He’d begun to chew his words and mumble. His accent was becoming more pronounced. And, in the final scene, he literally turns to the camera and winks– as though this is some cheesy commercial.
Despite all this, there are some good parts to this. The action is fun. The scenes that obviously left an impression on me at the tender age of 5 with the motorcycles stand up well even today. Bond facing down Largo in his video game of “Domination” was an interesting update, even if now the game and the effects didn’t stand up as well as the motorcycle stunts. And Barbara Carerra and Kim Basinger are improvements on their counterparts from Thunderball. The final shootout in the underwater cave is fun, though it’s no ninjas in a volcano. They also decided to leave some of the hokier elements of Thunderball out of this picture.
The problem is, they didn’t improve on some of them, either. The underwater battle scene in Thunderball is beautifully shot. And while a little hokey, it remains iconic in the pantheon of Bond, and deserving of the Oscar it won for best cinematography. Here, the underwater scenes are really dark. People are wearing dark wetsuits. It just doesn’t pop off the screen in the same way.
And this movie has remote controlled sharks. Seriously. The sharks have electronics attached to their dorsal fins and they’re attracted to Bond because a SPECTRE agent pins a tracker on him. Which makes for a thrilling chase scene through the wreckage of a ship, but if you don’t buy the premise, you don’t buy the bit.
All in all, the movie improves on some aspects of Thunderball, others it fails at. But in the end, it suffers from the same problem: it still just seems hokey to have some criminal masterminds steal two nuclear weapons to hold the world hostage. As interesting as it might have been in the 60s, it was certainly cliche by the 80s. If it hadn’t tried so hard to go over the top, and stopped literally winking at the camera (and maybe traded in for a younger Bond. . .say, Dalton or Brosnan?) this might have succeeded at being better than the original. Instead it remains slightly better than Octopussy, which it was directly competing with, but not as good as the classic Connery Bond it wanted to be. Given the circumstances, it simply couldn’t have been.
2 martinis, but ones that have kind of sat out on the bar for two decades and collected a lot of dust and pretty much all of the alcohol has evaporated off.
