FILM REVIEW: You Only Live Twice

[diebitter]

You Only live twice was Connery's 5th adventure as Bond, and was particularly exotic, even for a Bond, being set in and around Japan. It has some spectacular sequences - including the hollowed out volcano with ninjas falling from the ceiling on ropes, space ships, the Little Nelly gyrocopter, and stuff like rocket-launching motorbikes and cars picked up by helicopters with electromagnets and dropped from great heights into the ocean.

It's a fun film, and is a definite swing from the serious Bond in Dr No and From Russia with Love, through the more energetic and less realistic films of the superb Goldfinger and Thunderball, to this, which was pretty much outright fantasy.


You Only Live Twice is a conundrum to me. I really like it, but it is probably the beginning of the overblown aspect of Bond that makes it campy. You can't watch Blofeld and the volcano now without thinking Dr.Evil, and stuff like piranha pools that consume meat in seconds are definitely campy.

However, there is more here than meets the eye. The music is truly beautiful, and probably the instrumental 'mountains and sunsets' (done as the song 'you only live twice' by Nancy Sinatra) is about the finest piece of music John Barry composed for this or any other films. There is spectacular camerawork, with one exceptional shot being an overhead of Bond running across the roof of a factory, being chased. The camera pulls up and away, further from the action, and the actors look smaller and smaller, and still we see Bond doing his stuff, and taking out the bad guys with fist and kick only. Also, the close in fighting scenes are hard and exciting, and all-in-all it's a kick-ass adventure. And it's got ninjas!

(Personal note: I saw this as a kid at the cinema in a double bill with Thunderball (one of many, many rereleases before Bond got to the TV), and when I got home, I demanded a haircut just like James Bond. And when I got it, I felt sooooooo cool!)


You Only Live Twice - the only way to live!

OVERALL: 3/5 (Definite watch if you get a chance)
plus I'd recommend at the cinema or big widescreen TV with a DVD version.

[samjjones]

Good review. I think this is definitely one of the better Bonds. The gyrocopter sequence is one of the best in the whole series, IMO.

[[censored]]

[ QUOTE ]
It's a fun film, and is a definite swing from the serious Bond in Dr No and From Russia with Love, through the more energetic and less realistic films of the superb Goldfinger and Thunderball, to this, which was pretty much outright fantasy.


You Only Live Twice is a conundrum to me.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is where the bond films went from being awesome to simply being good or 'ok' in IMO. Connery was so great that he could still excel in a campy environment however once the mantel was passed to lessor hands the campy feel has truly been the worst thing about the Bond films.

[send_the_msg]

this was always one of my favorite bond films. surprisingly i always like the one with timothy dalton, cool car scene

[Blarg]

There were so many cool things about this movie that it blew my mind as a kid, and much of it is still great today.

The gyrocopter was sensational. One of my favorite action sequences in films. The opening sequence was shocking and very cool. Bonds fights were scary. The women were crazy sexy. At the time, the special effects in space were gripping and awesome, and the astronaut getting casually clipped off and released out into space got a startling and scary fate of the type such heroes didn't usually get at all. The ninja assasination attempt with the poison coming down the thread to Bond's mouth was nail-bitingly good second by second. That his cool chick got it was a heartbreaker, because even as a little kid I already had an emotional investment in boning her, though I didn't even know what that was. I was very sad to see her go.

The whole milieu was just exciting. This was back before most people had even heard of kung fu or ninjas, and there was almost nothing Asian that didn't have a sense of heightened possibilities about it to the average American, of unknown and perhaps unknowable weirdness. The typical Bond blending of sex into it didn't exactly hurt the tension or appeal. Bond seemed exotically adrift in a world well outside his comfort zone, which made everything seem like a bigger, stranger gamble, with a less certain outcome. I couldn't wait to see what came next! In a way, this Bond had the devotion to pure screen fun and surprise that I found in Raiders of the Lost Ark many years later, with a fictive world that was even more exotic and immersive.

Your note about the music is spot on. YOLT has a fantastic theme song that has held up very well. It's evocative and has longing, yet is still somehow lush and strangely celebrative of its hanging just on the cusp of sadness. It hits beauty and melancholy, without succumbing to melancholy, at the same time in a way that's hard to describe. A very cool mix of adult feelings.

The movie loses some tone with the invasion at the end, but it's still fun and exciting, and the movie has built up such enormous goodwill preceding it that the slackening of pace and believability is easily forgiveable. We've already gotten our money's worth well before the end. YOLT is a big favorite of mine, and remains for me one of the most fun movies I've seen. After nearly 50 years of Bond films, and the change of virtually anything Asian from completely unknown to playing now at your local theater and being served up in sushi joints in food courts like hamburgers, the bizarreness and uniqueness of the film is no longer apparent, so the initial impact it had upon release is no longer possible. But it was tremendous good fun then, and still is today.

[diebitter]

Very well said - your notes of the music are exactly how I feel about it, and your notes of the exotic nature of the East in the context of the age it was made were spot on too.

I think we'd all be interested in some Blarg reviews of other other films now /images/graemlins/smile.gif