Bondlets: Thunderball

1965

When I watched all the Bond films in order crystal clear patterns emerged on how they swung away from what didn’t work, and tried to build on and expand what did.  It was also obvious that sometimes they over shot the mark and over blew what had been well received into something they desperately needed to swing away from.

That long winded description is why Sean Connery’s fourth outing as 007 was one of the key reasons we were able to watch as many Godzilla films as we did without my daughter asking to head back to the other long lived movie series we were working our way through.

The goal of Thunderball appears to have been “Goldfinger but more so.”

The inherent problem with that idea is Goldfinger was excessively “more so” on its own.

The resulting battle against Largo ended up overly confusing her and keeping her from being sure what was going on for much of the set up.  Still, it was a Bond film and she was excited by the early action scenes, kidnapping escape and appearance of Q.

Her attention was also caught by the events in and around the shark infested swimming pool. 

Though she did find that notion a bit silly, which is saying quite a bit in the cinematic world of MI6.

Then the movie transitioned into excessively complex and well shot scuba scenes.

Extraordinarily long …

Highly repetitive…

And filled with characters that all look the same

scuba scenes.

She didn’t completely zone out, looking at the screen often enough to conjecture that the camera man appeared to have gotten bored too and was filming random shots of sea life.

“Ooh a lobster!”

“Hey, fish!”

“Whoah, cool octopus!  Let’s film it and maybe the movie will end in the mean time!”

Getting her back into the series will be tough, but luckily I have the “pretty girl” from King Kong’s Toho appearances (Mie Hama) and a big pile of Ninjas to help me out.

Bondlets Index