[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.