James Bond Films

I are Bond Rockist.

He is NOT Roger Moore, and, while Sean Connery got it closest, we need a Bond who just don't give a fuck except for his mission and his jollies.

i can't get into it.

look yeah so roger moore is shit but the moore films are better.

The soundtrack to For Your Eyes Only is also totally brilliant but for different reasons.

In 2077, nobody will remember anything about McCartney except that he did the tune for Live And Let Die.

Thunderball would be an order of magnitude better if they never made him wear that dinky helmet when he uses the rocket belt.

The ones Lewis Gilbert directed are all fucking smashing, not a one of them makes a lick of sense and all end in ludicrous crowd-panic gunfights.

Goldfinger is played out. I blame cable.

Pierce Brosnan makes Timothy Dalton remind you of Sean Connery. I can't countenance any of his contributions to the series, I wish they'd retcon him out of existence. Everybody hates Lazenby because he's just about two ounces less totally awesome than Connery is, but OHMSS is one of the best Bond films ever made. Moore's perfectly enjoyable but he doesn't give you the impression that he's hatefucking all the bitches like Connery does, which I think is really part of the character.

Search: From Russia With Love (my favourite, just a fantastic thriller), The Living Daylights (Enormously underrated, some great set pieces and an actual plot), OHMSS.

Destroy: All Brosnons except for Goldeneye, License to Kill, most of the Moores.

Live And Let Die=Blaxploitation + The French Connection

The Man With The Golden Gun has got Christopher Lee (w/a 3rd nipple!), Tatoo, Britt Ekland & a American Motors-powered car chase!

I don't think I agree with the premise that Bond films are "mediocre;" I know I have shit taste in movies because I spent $25 to get the long cut of Lynch's DUNE, but there have been occasions when watching Connery films that I've had to catch myself and remember that there are probably lots of reasons we have color film technology, not just this one.

I do remember Daylights being pretty strong despite Dalton but License To Kill is a steaming pile. Horrific.

(signed)
JAMES BOND
DOUBLE
O
SEVEN

Favorite Moore scene: when he kicks the car over the cliff in For Your Eyes Only

but tombot is so largely otm! john barry, check. sheena easton, check. ohmss (art direction! dialogue!) and esp. soundtrack, check. i'd add:

thunderball remains the masterpiece, period. is too goddamn long for cable to ever play out. song best bond theme and best tom jones song at once.

live and let die is the only 100% successful moore film. next up is view to a kill. the first thirty minutes of the man with the golden gun are the best of the moore films.

lazenby rules. the only bond to ever play a spy actually playing someone else (prosthetic eyebrows don't count), a la h. bogart's bookstore nerd in big sleep or h. ford's decency commission dude in blade runner. his sissy-ass kilt get-up is fucking awesome, and he wears it like a pro. his only problem is that he's not connery. also: blofeld savalas is awwwwwwesome. all the blofelds rule, but man.

the cinematography, esp. the interiors, in the greats, like, say, frwl, is so accomplished and handsome it makes you wanna cry.

brosnan wasn't sooooo bad the first couple times around, before he started looking like fred mcmurray. there's no saying how good he might've been if there'd been no remington steele write-in campaign etc. & he'd gotten the role when he was really young enough (see also roger moore)

dalton is mostly just depressing but whoa! the living daylights while probably the worst is also the most entertaining of his bunch. wayne newton! benicio del toro! anthony fucking zerbe, for heaven's sake!

my favorite line in the entire series is in thunderball where bond is getting into his wetsuit and felix leiter says, "on you anything looks good." gayest moment ever. (though the ludicrous sped-up boat footage is close behind.) second favorite moment is in view when walken does his quintuple-take at bond's info under his desk.

if i ever get a car i'll call it the disco volante. peter sellers is the most underrated bond of all.

thing with connery is...:

dr no -- just plain bad
russia with love -- good
goldfinger -- played
thunderball -- YES. his best film.
you only live twice -- drags a bit, dunnnit.

that's only five films (i won't mention 'diamonds', total dud) and only four of them worth considering. it's not much of a golden age. i say it on every bond thread but 'living daylights' owns. 'license' IS really bad, but it's not dalton's fault.

As far as this kind of thing goes, the extras are not bad. For instance, I learned that Roger Moore is quite a good laugh, both on set and off.

You do get a pretty good idea of what is involved in making a Bond film, rather than just a load of PR twaddle.

Having said that, not worth the money, really.

Has anyone picked up the all new bells and whistles Ultimate Edition James Bond DVDs?

Paul Greengrass on Bond: "Personally, I spit on those values. I think we've moved on a little bit from all that, the martini shaken, not stirred."

He's essentially an imperial adventurer of a particularly English sort.
I guess this is a valid comment although is it worth pointing out that Bond is half Scottish/half Swiss.

james bond would kill jason bourne with his own cell phone

the first bourne movie is exceptional but the second one starts to fall apart when he goes to moscow, I think. Maybe needs a rewatch.

james bond being of a "particularly english sort" is true inasmuch as bond clearly has class warfare issues spewing out of every pore

RIP Dr. No

nrq completely wrong about everything on this thread (except FRWL being good)

james bond would kill jason bourne with his own cell phone

^^^^ This, especially Daniel Craig.

Wow Stephen Berkoff is a giant ham isn't he...

Is Octopussy on telly or something? It's a shit film.

Actually what am I talking about, Octopussy is always on Telly.

It was, and it is. Roger Moore's eyebrow looks like it was making a space-launch attempt, it was so far up his forehead.

xp the ITV website keeps screwing up and listing the wrong Bond movie - for instance it said that Octopussy was on last week as well. Pointless trivia: Louis Jourdan looks like my secondary school Geography teacher.

It's a shit film.

Came out the same year as 'Never Say Never Again'. Connery's is by far the better film. Berkoff's performance is what saves Oct', from the conference room presentation to "Follow that car!". Walter Gotell on top form as always as Gogol. Moore puts in his absolute worst smirking ironic eyebrow raised take on Bond. At least he dialled it down for 'View To A Kill'.

peter sellers is the most underrated bond of all.

^^^ The scene where he plays baccarat against Orson Welles is the best 'Bond beats villain at cards' bit in any Bond film, official Eon prod or otherwise. Connery vs Adolpho Celli in 'tunderball is a pretty close second.

octopussy was on last week as well.

view ta kill is on today, as well as two anticipated footy matches. i ain't goin nowhere today

all the india stuff in octopussy is super boring and kinda racist

i loves me a good train chase tho

Poll for most racist line in a Bond film? "That should keep you in curry for a while" would probably top it.
Oct' train chase is good - although iirc the stuntman hanging off the train was seriously injured?

view to a kill... surely the second worst bond after man with the golden gun. DESPITE some memorable villains they fuck it completely up. I've still watched it probably ten times and I'll watch it again if it's on the telly

If you're in the UK it's on ITV1 at 3:50pm. Otherwise some ILXors might be liveblogging it here. I really have some work to get on with, but after roast pork and apple pie & custurd I will probably be sitting here going "buh" and counting the lines on R. Moore's forehead.

Oh man I was reading the Thunderball liveblog yesterday, we really shd do it again.

Moore himself said that by that point he was about "a few hundred years old for the part".

before Edge Of Darkness, Campbell also did half the episodes of Reilly, Ace Of Spies with the same writer, Troy Kennedy Martin.

Mask Of Zorro is on par with his Bonds, and he’s on a real action renaissance run right now (he’s released two films since turning 81 last October!). 2021’s The Protege, with Maggie Q and SamJack, is competent, 2025’s Cleaner is decent fun, and 2022’s Memory, about a hitman succumbing to dementia, is Pretty Good.

i have a lot of childhood nostalgia for Moore, his Bond movies are the ones i remember the most, watching on tv on a Saturday night while Mum & Dad entertained friends

i’m always fighting to remember that so many of them are TOO LONG and/or are deeply stupid or racist or Carry On Bond

but i do secretly love a great many of them

They are full of amazing moments and songs and vibes, but mostly shaggy and bad at full length. I remember For Your Eyes Only being better, a dry-run for the return to “serious” Bond - but it’s also pretty silly IIRC - I haven’t seen it since the 80s! I remember Topol rules in it.

On last watch, I thought Casino Royale had a lot more Brosnan-era silliness than I remembered - except done well. It’s the movie Brosnan should have made. The rest are risible to fine; every one except Spectre has good things in it.

Walter Chaw recently interviewed Martin Campbell, and the piece might double as recommendations of his work: https://filmfreakcentral.net/2025/03/nobody-does-it-better-ffc-interviews-martin-campbell/

Also, reading up on Campbell's new film Cleaner, I gotta say what intrigues me most about it is that someone made an action movie in 2025 that is only 97 minutes long (to Veg's point--yes, even most of the good Bonds are too long).

been rewatching these in order, most of them for the first time since i was a teenager. my favorite connery ones are the same as i remember them being whereas the roger moore ones have all flipped so far. moonraker is kind of amazing? i remembered all the ridiculous space stuff at the end but forgot about the earlier venice segment which is just full of great bits. whereas the spy who loved me drags really hard in the first half before the memorable final act.

weirdly excited to get to octopussy which is the only one from this era i have no memory of watching and thus probably didn't

Moonraker goated for the double taking pigeon alone. The pre-credits freefall fight with Jaws is terrific action too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCwH1G_QEE

https://theasc.com/articles/the-freefall-filmmaking-of-moonraker

saw some shit online about how writers tasked with rebooting bond post-daniel craig are stymied because bond *died* in the last one

why on earth would they care about that any more than they care about bond looking like seven* different people over the years and presumably being in his nineties now

continuity is a curse

yeah that is real rmde shit. like there’s only 1 linear story to tell and it can only be told this way :/

if it was me running it i’d read that & get a new writers room ASAP lol

i know nothing of comics but i gather that their writers realized this 60+ years ago

iirc Calvin failed the 1st grade 10 years in a row without growing an inch

Frank King was a writer tbf

I don't know much about Bond, but when I saw this story in passing I could have sworn it was the current person tasked with writing the novels that was struggling. Maybe the books care more about continuity? Anyway, it feels like the Craig Bonds took themselves more seriously, were less cartoonish, so maybe that's why they are suddenly concerned about the sacred timeline? Whatever, just make Bezos Bond. Heck, make his wife Bond. Make them both Bond. Make Bezos the villain and his wife Bond, or vice versa. Or Bezos could play Bond, his wife could be the Bond girl, get Elon to play the villain and Trump could play himself as the president. And they can all take and spend as much as they want. They could film the whole thing in space over the course of decades, like a sci-fi "Boyhood."

set the movie at the MI6 training academy and have like six different Bond candidates all vying for 00 status and then SHOCK they thought it was a training mission but it's REAL. whoever the audience likes the most gets to be in the next movie.

Pete Davidson wins

Anthony Horowitz, the novelist commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write three official 007 books, echoed the concern.

He said: "The last time we saw Bond, he was poisoned and blown to smithereens – how will they get past the fact he is dead with a capital D? I think that was a mistake, because Bond is a legend. He belongs to everybody, he is eternal – except in that film. If I was asked tomorrow to write the script, I wouldn't be able to do it. Where would you start? You can't have him waking up in the shower and saying it was all a dream."

The martinis fortified him against the nanobots, which then reassembled him after he got blown to smithereens. Easy-peasy.

just open with the last five minutes of No Time to Die and then pull back to Bond watching the movie in a theater saying "not how I would have done it!"

if they're struggling so much with this then i'm actually really glad they killed him

the first season of Sledge Hammer! ended with the main character destroying the entire city and presumably killing every single person in it and they wound up doing a second season anyway. if they can figure it out I'm sure the geniuses behind "James Bond" can

im certain that it's canon that bond is just the 007 alias, right?

in terms of movies etc anyway

the first season of Sledge Hammer! ended with the main character destroying the entire city and presumably killing every single person in it and they wound up doing a second season anyway. if they can figure it out I'm sure the geniuses behind "James Bond" can

― frogbs,

Just the analogy I was looking for.

The second-season premiere perfunctorily explained that it and following episodes were set "five years before" the explosion

and yet he was still partners with someone he would not actually meet until 5 years later

I mean if they actually cared about continuity in a Bond film (which...really?), they not only killed Bond, they killed him in the timeline before 80% of the other Bond films. Which means tHeY wErE all a DrEaM

Lock thread before fan theorists show up

The 1967 film version of Casino Royale solved this twice. The original James Bond retired and his name and number were given to someone else so there'd be a 'James Bond 007' in the Secret Service. Then when the original James Bond was "bombed bullied and baited out of retirement" he made every other agent in the service James Bond 007, even the women.

I agree with all continuity dismissal but if they REALLY want to go that way it's easy enough: zombie bond. This would have the added advantage of making the character more like the culture he represents as well.

Why not lean in even further and have AI Generated Bond?

Bond defeats Mr Blockchain

Reworking of The Three Doctors with Dalton, Brosnan and Craig as different incarnations of Bond

....with secret villain George Lazenby!

He’d probably be able to keep the secret from himself if on set next year or later.

But any formal return to the series would detract from the way his roles in The Man From Hong Kong and Never Too Young To Die are in dialogue with his first work.

ghost bond, and all the old ghost villains from prev movies too. great film, would watch.

I ain't scared of no Bond

for your eyes only - this is the first moore one that's matched my memory of it, which is that it's unmemorable other than the monastery climbing setpiece at the end. the ski chase is alright but it's a retread of OHMSS right down to using a bobsled track as the funny escalation. i don't think there's any fun spy gadgetry in the whole film either, other than the admittedly funny facial identification computer bit

i fucking love that ski chase

It's the closest Moore ever got to the literary Bond and is interesting for that reason, I figure. It's also the first one I ever saw thanks to cable TV in the early 80s. (I remember ads for _Moonraker_ in 1979 but didn't see it then.)

Mentioned on the wikipedia thread a while back:

French filmmaker Robert Bresson admired the film: "It filled me with wonder because of its cinematographic writing ... if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have done."[93][94]

I remember For Your Eyes Only as not the best Bond, but maybe the vibiest. Like, an easy film to just have on in the background and pay only occasional attention to. Plus, the Sheena Easton theme is pretty.

Eyes does have the 2CV chase, with disco bond music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OstFSgoBuM

The poster was controversial at the time because it has buttocks. To my eyes it shows Bond as a tiny scared little man being effortlessly menaced by a powerful manifestation of his greatest fear - geese women - but I suppose that in 1981 buttocks were just too rude.

I admire Octopussy and The Living Daylights because the plots have a hallucinatory, dream-like quality. I recall individual events, but I still can't mentally process how the second film goes from the Czech border to Afghanistan and there's also a frozen heart, and I just can't piece together how the first film switches from a genuinely creepy cold war thriller set in West Berlin, and then Q balloons into a compound in India.

The individual sequences make sense, but how do the characters move from one to the next? They're like dreams.

The greatest rapture of my life was afforded me on a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush.

re-watched 'No Time to Die' last night and good lord is it long

also the little girl actress was really good for however old she was (and however much she was being exploited)

also i saw a kitty online that looked like rami malek

https://i.postimg.cc/wxDX9Pz4/ramicat.jpg

French filmmaker Robert Bresson admired the film

A highly accomplished director is going to see every film they watch with a totally different perspective than any average person who sees the same film.

lmao

i think he just liked the babes

octopussy - ok yeah definitely never seen this one before, i would have remembered all the circus stuff at the least. nice to finally reach a new-to-me one, though it's just okay. moore looks like he's aged way more than 2 years since for your eyes only. i've seen the next one so i knew how severe this gets but didn't expect how all-at-once it happens. my favorite gag was the reveal that bond diegetically knows what his theme song sounds like.

the only things i remember from octopussy are that maud adams was the title character, that maybe bond (maybe?) encountered her on her boat, and the way louis jourdan admonishingly purred 'octopussy . . .'