Simply put, this episode is fantastic. Its loud, chaotic, as well as both terrifying and thrilling. There’s a lot of action and shit goes down. The Covenant are here in full force, the cadets fight for survival, and we finally get to see the Master Chief! If you haven’t watched yet, I’d recommend doing so before reading on.
This episode again starts with another Cortana intro then drops us about where the previous one left off with the cadets thrown right in the middle of the Covenant invasion. They make their way through the deadly battleground and take cover back inside the academy. The remaining cadets band together and are clearly on the edge of panic. They are attempting to make their way through the academy to arm themselves while also dealing with one cloaked Elite that made its way inside. These scenes are fairly terrifying and its not a situation I’d want to end up in. Just when the cadets think they are done for, Master Chief saves the day. Well, for them anyway. It turns out they are the only survivors on the entire planet! Chief radios fellow Spartan Kelly for evac via Pelican. From there the group makes their way to a Warthog to head to the rendezvous point, but not before Chief says my favorite line: “Cadet Lasky, can you drive a Warthog?” An awesome battle takes place and the episode ends with the Chief and cadets speeding away in the Warthog.
So far I’ve really loved the introduction scenes with Cortana alone on the Forward Unto Dawn ship. This one is no exception, but I liked the first 3 better. Everything inside the ship is now frozen with a layer of ice. A pipe breaks sending a perfect shiny metal ring floating. It glistens in a ray of light and in that moment small lines and engravings can be seen on the ring’s surface. It definitely resembles a Halo ring, but beyond that I’m not sure of its significance. Right after this an orange wave flashes through the ship, the same orange wave seen in the live-action launch trailer for Halo 4as well as the “>live-action trailer shown at E3 that introduces the UNSC Infinity ship. This places this Cortana scene very near the start of Halo 4 and if you’ve paid attention, it has some hints about how the game might begin.
I couldn’t be more pleased with how the Covenant weaponry turned out. There’s Plasma Rifles, Needle Rifles, Carbines, and an energy sword. The sounds are incredible. They sound highly familiar to the Halo games but with extra fidelity. The way the Carbine’s bright green beam flashes then fades in a wavy trail is perfect. What’s really spectacular though are the needle rounds as they zip by and shatter on impact. If you watch closely, Colonel Mehaffey dies in the beginning to a brief supercombine. Its brief and partly off screen, but enough needles hit her to combine and explode in a shower of pink mist and blood. I was hoping for a bigger more clear supercombine, but I’ll take this one.
Master Chief. After 3 weeks of waiting we finally get to see you in action, and it is good. My main impression was that Chief is a badass. I’m quite happy with the way Chief is presented. His actions, voice, and movement are all spot on and I found the scenes featuring him to be really exciting. His suit isn’t perfect, it looks slightly cheap and a bit plasticky, but I think it works and the lighting does a lot to help it. If a Halo movie ever happens (hopefully with Stewart Hendler!) I’d expect a suit like the ones in Iron Man or the latest Batman movies. Daniel Cudmore does a great job playing the role of Master Chief. Check out our interview with Daniel if you haven’t yet and see what it was like for him to be the man in the suit.
This web series has been really exciting and while I’m excited to see how the next episode wraps things up, I’m also bummed it’ll be over. I hope the final episode is closer to 20 minutes long and features more closeups of the Covenant besides the Elites.
We’re back with another pair of previews from The Clone Wars. This is the conclusion to the Onderon arc, so my guess is that things are going to heat up for all involved. It will prove to be interesting to see how the Jedi (or, just Anakin, by the looks of this) justify their Jedi code with the parameters of their mission.
Here’s the official blurb:
As a full-scale revolt embroils Onderon, the rebels strike a decisive blow against the planet’s Separatist-aligned king. Unfortunately for the rebels, such victory comes at a high price in “Tipping Points,” airing this Saturday, October 27th at 9:30am ET/PT on Cartoon Network.
Episode Trivia:
An unscripted response from the lead droid gunship mechanically intones “by your command,” a nod to the classic Cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica series.
Hondo’s yacht is named the Fortune and Glory, a nod to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, wherein Indy and Short Round talk about seeking out “fortune and glory.”
When Lux points out to Ahsoka that Steela’s courage is all well and good but, “What good would that do us if she gets herself killed?”, it’s a deliberate echo of a line Luke Skywalker delivers about Han Solo in Episode IV.
To those of us in the United States, our first mainstream exposure to Ian Fleming’s James Bond was in 1962’s Dr. No (though it could be said that JFK saying he loved the novel From Russia With Love in LIFE Magazine, helped, too). In his homeland of Great Britain though? Readers could thrill to the daily exploits of 007 as early as 1958, just five years after the first novel was published! Thanks to an agreement with British newspaper Daily Express, Fleming allowed his novels to adapted to the daily comic strip format.
For me, the amazing thing about these strips are that they are generally really faithful to the original Fleming novels, though there is some censoring of some of the more grisly deaths and the like. This is something that the movies got further and further away from, sometimes really only sharing a title. Another interesting fact is that the visual appearance of Bond, by artist John McLusky, is said to have influenced the casting of Sean Connery as Bond based on his resemblance to said rendition! See for yourself and compare:
From: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Sadly, aside from a few sporadic collections, the Bond strips have been really hard to come by in the USA. Thanks to Titan Books, however that’s no longer the case. The James Bond Omnibus series has been collecting the strips in the original published order since 2009. The four volumes currently available cover all of the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, but seeing as the strip ran from 1958-1983, there is a ton more to be collected.
The volume I picked up recently is The James Bond Omnibus 002. I picked up for a couple of reasons, it contains some of my favorite Bond tales, and I was able to get it on the cheap at my local comic shop. This volume in particular covers On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Living Daylights, Octopussy, The Hildebrand Rarity, and The Spy Who Loved Me. Clocking in at nearly 350 pages, this is a pretty great value, and if you’re not a fan of prose, but want to read the original Fleming novels, this is a great compromise.
One aside that I thought was interesting,if not a little annoying is this: the adaptation of Thunderball in Volume 001 is incomplete. At the time Thunderball was being serialized, Ian Fleming contracted a rival newspaper to publish the short story The Living Daylights. Unfortunately, because of this, Thunderball was never completed in comic strip form. In my mind, this makes Thunderball the black sheep of the Bond family, because not only did it cause this brouhaha, but the original novel had its share of legal trouble too, due to being a collaborative project. Then of course Kevin McClory, one of the previously mentioned collaborators, commissioned Never Say Never Again, a remake of Thunderball that isn’t considered a part of the main Bond series.
Now that I’ve bored you with history, allow for me to make up for it with a few of my favorite strips in the collection. If you like, they can be had inexpensively on Amazon.
No offense to Jon Favreau, I think he’s great, but this looks as though it’ll be the best Iron Man film yet. The stakes don’t look like they’ve ever been higher for Tony, which is exactly the right way to follow up the spectacle of The Avengers. Bring him to his lowest point and show how he does.
This film hits in April and it’s already too far away.
If there’s one thing we haven’t had enough of in James Bond films, it’s deaths at the hands of sharks. Fortunately, this film gives us plenty of these in spades.
It’s a bonus, I guess. It also gives us the first James Bond film without the slack-jawed racist Sheriff, so there’s another fortunate bonus for us. It also gives us Jaws, who’s actually not a bad Bond villain and somehow iconic.
This film also gives us one of the best pieces of Bond music ever with Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does it Better.”
And, if you ask my ten year old son, this is the greatest Bond film ever made because it features a car that goes underwater. If you ask me, though, I think this might be Bond’s worse car. Being so close to the 60s, they seemed to have abandoned the classic elegance that Bond was. Roger Moore wore digital watches and drove the latest car, instead of the coolest. It was all very blah.
If, like me, though, you’re a warm-blooded adult who enjoys the promise of what James Bond can be, you’ll find that this isn’t all that great of a movie, but as I rewatch the Roger Moore films, I find that this might be the most bearable of his oeuvre. The convoluted plot involves an evil “Hank Scorpio” style super villain who has taken control of American and Russian nuclear submarines and plans to unleash nuclear war on the world while he lives peacefully in his underwater community.
The most interesting part of the plot (especially for 1977) is that Bond is forced to work with a KGB agent (Agent XXX) whose lover he’s killed. I also quite loved how they played up Bond’s background as a Commander in the British Navy. He’s seen in uniform and even referred to as Commander. It’s sad to think that it’s one of the few elements the Moore era did right and the Craig era seems to have done away with entirely.
“The Spy Who Loved Me” might have the best, wry Bond one-liner that ends any of the films. “Bond, what are you doing?” M asks, after finding Bond and Agent XXX in an escape craft on the water, half-naked or under covers.
“Keeping the British end up,” he replies, before closing the curtain and the end credits begin to roll.
It’s also interesting to note that the end of this film promises that Bond will be back in “For Your Eyes Only” but Moonraker is the next to come out. Citizen-bot will be back with a review of that tomorrow.
This might be the peak of Roger Moore’s Bond era and one of the few Moore-era Bond’s that isn’t a chore to watch. For that, I’ll give it 2 martinis.
Our third episodic trip to Onderon brings us closer to the political conflict and sees something like a retelling of Robin Hood. A massive public execution is planned for the deposed king and Saw Gerrera (caught during a mission to rescue the former king) and the rest of the rebels, led by Saw’s sister Steela, hide in the assembled crowd, waiting to stop the proceedings.
After three episodes, we’re finally entrenched deep enough into Onderonian politics to give the episode a core of invested emotion that I haven’t felt before now. The scenes of Saw being tortured and interrogated were particularly well written and apt. I think everyone needs to be reminded that resistance can be patriotic.
We’re also shown Ahsoka’s side of the conflict, with her being forced into inaction by the Jedi code and council. It’s a wonderful microcosm of the internal conflicts Anakin has been forced to go through during his time as a Jedi on his path to Darth Vader.
To be honest, it makes me wonder if we’ll see Ahsoka falling to the dark side as opposed to meeting a mortal demise.
Watching this episode in HD, it’s a stunning reminder how far this show has come. There are beasts and pack animals in the backgrounds, and the backgrounds don’t fade in their detail. The costumes and new models for what are, in the grand scheme of things, disposable characters (like the new king or his general) are stunning. The coloring is fantastic and the lighting is incredible.
For me, my favorite moment of the episode was Ahsoka going off her orders and interfering in the rebels’ plight. It was one of those kickass moments that Star Wars does best.
But everything has gone for the rebels so far, and it seems like we’ve got one episode left, meaning we’re going to be in for a major sacrifice on the part of our primary cast. And if they aren’t laying down their lives, will they be laying down their ideals?
We’ll see next week.
I think this might have been the best of the Onderon arc so, far. It’s good, but I can’t wait until we can move on to the next arc.
Watch the (purposefully) Leaked Iron Man 3 Teaser Trailer!
Facebook fans of the Iron Man fan page got an exclusive look at the Teaser Trailer this morning, but now you can watch it too!
We don’t see a whole lot in this teaser, but we now know that the world premier of the full length trailer hits this Tuesday, October 23rd. I will be anxiously awaiting its arrival, as the Iron Man movies have been my favorite of the Marvel features (with the exception of The Avengers…that’s probably in my top 5 favorite movies of all time at this point).
What do you think we’ll see in the upcoming film? Shout out in the comments below!
Before I go, here’s a larger (clickable) version of the awesome set photo shown at left.
The 3rd installment of the web series, Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, hits today!
I really like this series so far, and this episode was great overall, but its the first to disappoint me. Its not necessarily this episodes fault though, but more the fact that the conflict doesn’t really build up or start until the end of this episode meaning we only have 2 episodes for what I would consider the real meat of this series. This bums me out. I’ll come back to that though.
Once again in this episode we see an awesome beginning with Cortana and the Chief in cryo. I think these beginnings scenes could be my favorite parts of each episode. They give me chills. They take place in the half of Forward Unto Dawn itself which was severed at the end of Halo 3 and is free floating in space and likely heading to the planet Requiem which Halo 4 takes place on. The CG used looks really great and looks just like some of the footage we’ve seen of the beginning scenes of Halo 4. Cortana gets a little…violent. We know she is dealing with her rampancy in Halo 4 and its likely a key plot point, but this shows its effects starting even before the events in the game, and its very interesting to say the least. I’m excited for what this means in the game, and I’m interested to see how the opening scenes differ from the intro scenes of each episode.
Further character development of Thomas Lasky takes place and things get kind of grim for him. His reactions to cryo come to a point and he is faced with a decision. He also seems to be struggling with the fate of his brother and family affairs. I am finding that I really like Lasky. He’s the noble character type that always sucks me in and I think Australian actor Tom Green plays the part well.
One of the cadets, Sully, decrypts and pieces together video shown in the first person from a battle. As the viewers, we know its likely from Master Chief’s point of view. It shows Spartans fighting alongside the Insurrectionists against an unknown threat. Again, as the viewers we know its the Covenant and green plasma fire and the familiar sounds of plasma weapons are heard. The video pauses on an image (pictured below) of a Spartan with the numbers “104” on his shoulder. This is Fred, a Spartan that has a role in the events of several of the Halo books as well as one of the shorts on the Halo Legends film set. This is exciting for Halo fans and hopefully means we’ll see Chief fight alongside Spartans in the coming episodes. Seeing this video makes the cadets question who the real enemy is. Another bit worth mentioning is that the cadets don’t know what the Spartans are, nor the Covenant and adds emphasis to the timeline of the events of Forward Unto Dawn.
The first two episode features bits of action through training exercises and cafeteria brawl when Vickers insults Lasky who retaliates. This episode though, we see some real action. Things get hairy real fast and the Academy prepares for battle and evacuation. ODSTs drop in hot, Covenant ships show up in the night sky, and structures explode. The space tether gets knocked out presumably leaving the cadets stranded. It looks terrifying and they’ve done a great job showing how scary an attack like this might be. Things look bleak. We’ll have to find out what happens next week.
Now, to return to my first point and why I am disappointed. I’ve liked each episode as a whole, but with only 2 episodes left I feel the action and conflict are coming too late in the series, and Master Chief still hasn’t made his appearance! I don’t doubt that the final 2 episodes will prominently feature the Chief and loads of action, but at this point I can’t help but feel its coming a tad too late, especially since its just getting started in the final quarter of this episode. I worry that the action and Master Chief get cut short or don’t get the time and attention they deserve, but that remains to be seen. Perhaps Forward Unto Dawn will flow better as a single experience. I liked the events of each episode so I’m not sure I’d cut anything to speed it up. I have to remember that so much of the story is about the development of Lasky and we’ve seen a good amount of that. I could also be jumping the gun, but I’ll have to wait and see.
Overall I’m really pleased with this series so far and I’m really anticipating the fourth and fifth episodes. What I assume will happen in the fourth episode with the Chief and some sort of rescue and battle, I had hoped would happen in this episode. My disappointment isn’t great, however, and I still highly recommend this episode and catching up if you haven’t seen them yet.
We’ve been treated with two new clips from Saturday’s new episode of The Clone Wars. Hopefully it isn’t suddenly and deliberately yanked without warning like the entire DC block, which I was the only thing that made the time switch to Saturday bearable.
Here’s the rundown on “The Soft War”:
After an unsuccessful rebel attempt to rescue Onderon’s true king, Ramsis Dendup, an unexpected ally steps forward to halt Dendup’s execution and aid the rebel cause in “The Soft War,” airing this Saturday, October 20th at 9:30am ET/PT on Cartoon Network.
Episode Trivia:
Gregg Berger joins the cast of The Clone Wars as General Kalani. He is a veteran voice actor known for his work on Transformers (as Grimlock), G.I.Joe (as Spirit), and perhaps most famously, Garfield (as Odie).
David Kaye plays General Tandin. He’s known as the voice of Clank of Ratchet & Clank videogames, the voice of Optimus Prime in Transformers: Animated and Megatron in Beast Wars: Transformers.
General Kalani is the first super tactical droid seen in the series. A more robust version of the spindly tactical droid introduced in Season One, several tactical droid designs will appear throughout Season Five.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is often a forgotten Bond film. It interrupts Sean Connery’s tenure with a single film starring George Lazenby, and was the victim of a bad reputation for quite a long time. The only thing that’s chipped away that bad reputation is time. Audiences have had time to view it in the context of the time it was released, and audiences today are much more accustomed to the changing nature of James Bond actors.
For others still, this film gains more and more ground, climbing the ranks of the “best of Bond” lists, finding its way near to the top.
The first thing that ought to be talked about is Lazenby himself as a replacement for Connery. So, without further ado, we’ll turn it over to the robots:
Swank-mo-tron: For me, Lazenby ranks right up there with Connery. He’s a much tougher Bond, and more dynamic. His upper-cut in the opening montage is nothing Connery was capable of. He’s at once like Connery, but somehow more smooth, more vulnerable, and tougher. I think he nailed the part and every time I watch the film I get increasingly angry that he only did one.
Shaz-Bot: This is actually the first time I’ve watched this particular Bond film. I really liked it, and a big part of that was because of Lazenby’s portrayal. He doesn’t play Bond as vulnerable, per se, but I think he definitely plays the part of a Bond who can fall in love a bit better than Connery. Don’t get me wrong, Connery is awesome, but he does have a kind of dickish swagger that makes it a little hard to believe he could love anyone in a real way.
Citizen-bot: What I love most about this film is how different it is from all others. It’s more grounded, more realistic, the characters and situations are more plausible and real. Beginning and ending with Bond. There’s a bit of world-weariness that he brings to Bond, though, and I think that’s what’s key. In no other film (except Casino Royale) does the character of Bond actually have any sort of character arc. He grows, and Lazenby’s Bond seems like he would be content to give it all up. Connery and Moore’s Bond just kind of glide through the movies and seem just as likely to keep womanizing and swilling martinis and foiling baddies until the end of time. When we hit that break with “We have all the time in the world”, Louis Armstrong’s voice is almost like a metaphorical record scratch. We’re kind of re-setting Bond. Of course, then he goes back to infiltrating Blofeld’s hideout and starts bedding every girl he can, but there’s some difference when he then runs into Tracy again.
Swank-mo-tron: Another thing that must be spoken of is Telly Savalas. When you tell people that Savalas was in a Bond film they get a curious look on their face, tell them he played Blofeld and you’ve just blown their mind. He’s fiendish, diabolical, but gleeful. Pleasance was much more menacing, but Savalas wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in a physical sense.
Shaz-Bot: Telly Savalas as Blofeld. Who loves ya, baby? That would be me. This was just awesome. He kind of played Blofeld as a cultured thug. Yeah, he wants to hypnotize his angels to make him a lot of dosh, but he other motivating factor is to legitimise his heritage. It was kind of cool to see. As an aside, Bruce Timm was once quoted that his take on Lex Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series was based on Telly’s Blofeld. I can totally see it! His mannerisms, along with the tone and candor of his voice, are exactly what Clancy Brown ended up emulating in the show.
Citizen-Bot: I talked about Bond being world-weary. In this, Blofeld’s scheme is, quite literally, to get immunity for his previous crimes and have enough money and a landed estate to retire on. Of course, he’s willing to commit genocide to do it, but the point is he wants out as much as anyone. The fact that he and Bond foil each other propels them back to one another again and again after this altercation. But this somehow always seemed more plausible than, say, ransoming the world for millions of dollars with stolen nukes, or trying to start a war between American and the USSR. I guess the thing that really differentiates this film for me is it is so grounded. There’s nothing in here that seems so fantastical, and I think only From Russia With Love really compares in that sense: no ridiculous car chases, no hyper-reliance on crazy gadgets, or ninjas in volcanos. .
Swank-mo-tron: I think we need to speak of Diana Rigg. Everyone talks about how great Vesper Lynd was for 007, but the Contessa was absolutely perfect for Bond in every way. She was so much his opposite but so much like him. She was beautiful and strong willed, much different than the average Bond Girl fare.
Shaz-Bot: Diana Rigg… Ah in my pre-pubescent years she and Julie Newmar were it for me (I watched a lot of 60’s TV). She does admirably in this movie, and doesn’t suffer fools at all. She’s sharp, strong, and cool under fire. The way she handled herself as Blofeld’s guest cemented it for me. “This woman is definitely the one for Bond.” And it goes without saying, her Cougar XR-7 convertible is awesome.
Citizen-Bot: Shaz, you took the words right out of my mouth. Julie Newmar and Diana Rigg (and Donna Reed for me, too, but that’s another story), and so if I thought I liked her before this film, I fell in love with her as much as Bond did.
Swank-mo-tron: The thing I might love most about this movie, though, is the heart of it. It’s the most heartfelt of the James Bond movies. And the ending is gut-wrenching. Of every Bond film, this one has the most perfect ending. Period. It’s tragic. It hurts. And I love it. And they ended it where they needed to, with the hurt, instead of tacking on another act to the film… *cough*Casino Royale*cough*
Shaz-Bot: Yes, I knew the ending of the movie before I watched it. That didn’t lessen the impact of it. In this movie Bond is actually able to open his heart and let someone in, then it gets torn from his chest and drop-kicked into the waste bin, just when he thinks his life is going to be sunshine and rainbows.
Citizen-Bot: Swank, you and I were IM’ing about a writing project you were working on (I think it was an early draft of the first few chapters of Operation Montauk?) the first time I watched this. I don’t know if you remember my reaction. I was flabbergasted. I don’t know another time I’d ever seen a movie that made my jaw drop like that. I imagine it’s like what it would’ve been like to have seen Empire Strikes Back for the first time, or the way my wife reacted in Fellowship of the Rings when Gandalf and Boromir died. I did not believe what I had just seen. And it was so intensely emotional. I’ll plead the fifth as to whether I shed a tear or not. Again, only in Casino Royale (extra, unnecessary act notwithstanding) has there been a death that was that impactful in any of these films– or for me, among most films in general. I think the most tragic thing of all, though, is this didn’t reverberate into any of the other films. When Bond confronts Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, he doesn’t act like a man out for vengeance, he’s the same old Bond. Same old Connery Bond. Which, again, was why this was so tragic there couldn’t be more followup films to this.
And as heartfelt as this is, we forget how badass it is! A coordinated helicopter attack on a mountain lair? It’s no ninjas in a volcano, but on the upside it’s not as silly as ninjas in a volcano. Stuff blows up in this movie, and it’s a lot of fun. But yet, they don’t need to resort to ridiculous explosions to make the movie exciting.
The biggest problem this film has is its unfortunate and predictable comparisons to Connery’s Bond. I take the opposite view. You like Connery so much? Then why, when they tried to bring him back after Lazenby and this film, did Diamonds Are Forever suck so bad? How is it that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service did everything so well, that as I’m making my way through the first several Roger Moore movies, all I can say is, “Saw it done. It was better in OHMSS.” For instance: compare the ski chase in The Spy Who Loved Me to this (or better yet, the craptastic ski chase in A View To a Kill). This ski chase scene (and I should point out how great the score is at this point, as well) has some of my favorite henchmen deaths of all time. “He had lots of guts” and the guy who falls off the cliff for s-i-x-t-e-e-n s-e-c-o-n-d-s all the way to the bottom of the mountains. It’s ridiculous and awesome. Blofeld and Bond have a chase scene on bobsleds. Yes. Is it cheesy? Nowhere near as bad as driving a moon lander through the Nevada desert in Diamonds. “Oh, but the floozies he beds in Blofeld’s mountaintop retreat are so unrealistic.” Yeah? And “Bambi” and “Thumper” are your idea of good? I’ll take any action sequence in this film over any of them in any of the next several Connery/Moore films. Nobody Does It Better? Hardly. Lazenby does it better. So is there an unfair comparison to the previous 5 Connery Bond films? Yes. But an even more unfair comparison is this to the next 5 Connery/Moore films, none of which can stand up next to this.
Compare the relationships Bond has with Solitaire, with Agent XXX and the one with Tracy. Tracy is a true equal- the only person really worthy to marry Bond. Who else in the entire series was the driver in getting Bond out of a jam? And, as Shaz pointed out, her car kicked ass– probably my second or third favorite Bond car behind the Aston Martin in the entire series. She saved his ass! Compare that with the sexism of “Oh, the little woman can’t drive the big truck” in Spy Who Loved Me. What was so perfect–beginning the film with her suicide attempt–this is a broken woman. Bond is a broken man. Seriously. Bordering on sociopath. But somehow they seem to fix each other– like the way Sasha healed Raskolnikov’s soul in Crime and Punishment. Which is why her murder is so intensely tragic.
Swank-mo-tron: As I’m watching these movies over again, I think this film has, once and for all, eclipsed Goldfinger as my favorite James Bond film. Lazenby is perfect, Savalas is fiendish, Diana Rigg is incredible, the emotional core of the film is the strongest of any Bond film. Out of 4 martinis, this film gets 5. Or 6. Or maybe one giant martini that adds up to 8. In my opinion, at this point, unless Skyfall blows my mind, this is the best James Bond film ever made.
Shaz-Bot: I’m not sure if I can rate this one above Goldfinger, although I did very much enjoy it. I think some of the skiing action scenes went on too long, and I didn’t like how they had to dub over Lazenby’s voice when he was doing the impersonation thing. Those aside, the movie gets props from me for a lot of the little moments. The subtle nod to Connery’s performance at the beginning, as well as Ms. Moneypenny crying at the altar when Bond is married are icing on the cake to an excellent film. I’ll give it 3.75 out of four Martinis, but with an extra olive for good measure.
Citizen-Bot: I’m with Swank. I mentioned when we did Goldfinger the heresy that it might not be the best. I’m still waiting for a final viewing of Casino Royale so I can compare them more in context, but this has the potential to be the best of all of them. 4 Martinis, which makes the average above four: our cup runneth over of vodka and vermouth. As well it should.
