You Only Live Twice

Red = Spoilers 

The fifth Bond film in the series and the second to last with Sean Connery is “You Only Live Twice”. I like it. Although, it doesn’t rate as high on the list as some of the other originals. It has a certain feel to it because it’s set in Japan. And there’s ninjas, but not the ninjas you’re expecting. They’re training like samurai, with swords, but it’s kind of inconsequential, because they’re taking guns with them… 

What’s it about? So, we start with James Bond, in a bed with a beautiful woman, of course, when the woman gets up, goes over and presses a button and the bed closes up into the wall with James inside of it. Suddenly, two men rush into the room and start shooting at the bed. They run out of the room and two British agents rush in to find James dead and bleeding and the credits start rolling. We later find out that he had faked his own death to go on a mission for MI6 to Japan. SPECTRE has hijacked an American space shuttle, and the Americans are blaming the Russians. The Russians deny everything, and the Americans say if it happens again, it’s an act of war. Meanwhile, Bond is in Japan, getting closer and closer to Blofeld’s volcano bunker. Blofeld is the one behind hijacking the space shuttles. He’s trying to cause a war between Russia and the US. Bond eventually tells Aki to go back and get Tanaka and all the men he has and to come back, and then he gets inside the bunker. Once inside, he frees the astronauts and imitates one of the astronauts going on the current mission. Blofeld catches him and has Bond brought to him. Blofeld’s plan to hijack the new American spacecraft is on schedule when Bond creates a diversion and opens the volcano bunker so Tanaka’s men can get in. Blofeld’s men get defeated and Bond figures out how to destroy Blofeld’s spaceship. 

What’s good? I think it’s a good script. Well put together. The classic Bond one-liner from this movie? When the guy gets thrown into the piranha tank, and they devour him, and Bond goes “Bon Appetit…” That’s classic Bond right there… 

What’s bad? The tracking on the one shot when he’s fighting on the roof. They’re flying away in a helicopter to get that shot. I don’t know why they did that. That’s a completely unnecessary shot. They could’ve just filmed the scene and had it been a regular fight scene and it would’ve been good. I don’t know what they were going for there. 

The acting? It’s as good as any other Bond movie I’ve seen. Maybe Moneypenny was phoning it in, but everybody else was doing a good job. 

The effects? The effects were fine. For 1967, they did as good as they could. The green screen looked like a green screen, but what are you gonna do? The guns looked like smoke caps coming out of pop shooters, or however they used to do practical smoke effects back in the day.  

Sean Connery as James Bond? And as usual, the Sean Connery James Bond was getting his thing on with any woman that was in the vicinity. There were at least three different women that Sean Connery had sex with in that movie. How many illegitimate children does James Bond have? 

The appearance of Blofeld. You Only Live Twice is the first time that they show the face of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s face, or Number 1. The supervillain mastermind of SPECTRE that is always stroking his white cat.   

Shooting that guy out of the tube in the beginning. In You Only Live Twice, the Navy shoots a guy out of a torpedo tube like a torpedo. Those things are pressurized. You can’t shoot an actual person out of there. It would crush him like a bug.  

Every Bond movie ends with a lifeboat. It just seems like every Bond movie ends with Bond and some chick, floating in a lifeboat somewhere. I’m gonna have to check, but I’m pretty sure every Bond movie ends in a lifeboat… 

Breaking into the volcano near the end. You know, for an “impenetrable” secret base, those guys sure blew the door off and got in there, PRETTY EASILY. I’m just saying, Blofeld might want to ramp up security a little bit before he starts calling things “impenetrable”. 

Blofeld stroking the cat with all his might. And he was sure going at that cat with all he could. I kind of felt bad for the thing, with all the noise around it. It was going crazy, trying to climb up his shirt and everything. You could see how scared it was. Not to mention he was stroking its face off a few minutes before that… 

So, yeah. Go and see You Only Live Twice. It’s not the best one of the original Bond films, but it’s one of the better films, and that’s good enough to make it worth seeing. And as usual, keep on watching, with a smile on your face…