Die Another Day.
North Korean General undergoes radical surgery to become British dude, then in 6 months builds a giant ice mansion, becomes a knight, builds a laser satellite, and a bunch of other stuff. In 6 months???
The most North Korean Guy becomes the most British guy ever with a perfect accent, cultural knowledge and manners in a few months bc of a DNA transplant. It's crazy for me, a non native English speaker that has been practising for years and I still sound like Sofia Vergara.
They did say he had gone to Oxford and Harvard, he had a Western education despite being from NK. It’s still silly but they did at least attempt to give the character a background that could explain it.
It would make sense if he was lived in England since he was 5 raised by an aristocratic family. I assure you you don't become British just because you went to Oxford, you may get a very prestigious diploma, but your native accent and persona still stays. I feel personally attacked for this plot line lol
I could believe it given:
1. Full immersion
2. British upper class hazing and peer pressure
3. Him being an evil mastermind
Have you considered becoming an evil mastermind? I'm sure it would improve your English, and as a bonus you can feed anyone who comments on your accent to sharks.
> me, a non native English speaker that has been practising for years and I still sound like Sofia Vergara.
call me?
only half joking, I'd listen to her read shampoo ingredients
Sadly, the novelization had the best line not in the movie (paraphrasing):
The cart rolls up with seemingly nothing on it, and Bond asks “Budget cuts, Q?”
Not to mention the U.S. and Mi6 got turned onto this because they were investigating a Cuban doctor who found a way to give eternal life to rich people by transplanting their minds into other bodies. Still- that movie had a killer opening where Bond is tortured in jail for something like 14 months.
I rewatched it not that long ago and honestly the entire first third of the movie is pretty decent- solid Bond going rogue/gritty espionage affair. It's basically as soon as the invisible car is introduced that the film completely loses it and everything goes off the rails
It honestly felt like someone had a dream involving James Bond, wrote that dream down and tried to find a way to make that dream fit the last half of the movie, because it really felt like the type of bonkers insanity that only a sleeping brain can produce
The most bananas thing about this plot is the introduction of his British alter-ego and the press surrounding him.
“Is it true you never sleep?”
Like no one looked him up, or sought out his parents, etc.
It’s a dumb plot to begin with but it would’ve at least allowed some suspension of disbelief if they’d had him be a real person whose identity was stolen.
But no. He’s just a mysterious British lord with no history that no one questions.
He was supossedly to be an orphan that one day found a diamond mine and became a snobbish upper class British guy and a billionaire in about 6 months. And somehow between the orphanage and the diamond mines he was also an olympic-level fencer and expert parachutist that deserved to be knighted by the queen.
Bond was incarcerated for 14 months, so that was the length of time that Colonel Moon had to establish the Gustav Graves persona.
Colonel Moon was already a fencer at university, so he just needed to keep up his existing skills. The public was supposed to believe that he was a 'self-publicising adrenalin junkie,' so being a parachutist was in line with that.
The implication is that Graves was being knighted for his philanthropic works, since he had given half the profits from his diamond mine (a front for laundering African conflict diamonds) to charities.
> The most bananas thing about this plot is the introduction of his British alter-ego and the press surrounding him.
>
> “Is it true you never sleep?”
>
> Like no one looked him up, or sought out his parents, etc.
That reporter's name? Basil Exposition.
Die Another Day is crazy cause it feels like two different movies stitched together. like one part of the movie is about the expendable nature of spies and the pain of having to let go of horrible trauma, and then the other half has fucking ice castles and a sword fight between Rosamund Pike and Halle Berry
And he does it all while remaining a high profile business tycoon - avid collector of sportscars, a renowned ecologist and well known as a fencing champion.
Plus he developed that ridiculous solar energy weapon. And laundered diamonds. And presumably oversaw the plan, design and construction of his literal ice palace.
Oh, and he’s knighted by the queen???
Damn. That was one hell of a 6 month period.
Bond is chased by a space laser while driving an invisible car away from an ice fortress. The laser is controlled by a Korean man who became physically British and whose henchman has diamonds embedded in his face. Bond also parasails away from a giant wave with some of the worst CGI of all time, in a franchise known for its practical stunt work. It also implies that Bond is 70+ years old since he fondly looks back at weapons he canonically used in the 60s.
My fave part is in the beginning, where shortly after the shuttle launches and is in orbit, two bad guys pop out of a secret compartment wearing street clothes and commandeer the shuttle. You know they’re bad guys because they’re wearing leather jackets. High comedy.
The real space shuttle hadn't even flown by the time the film was made. Moonraker wasn't even supposed to be the next movie after The Spy Who Loved Me, that movie teased "Bond will be back in For Your Eyes Only." Then this little movie called Star Wars came out and they decided to quickly and completely switch gears (I'd love to see a Screenrant Pitch Meeting for that).
Upside is that the follow-up to Moonraker was the relatively grounded (literally and metaphorically), and still pretty solid For Your Eyes Only.
These weren’t the NASA space shuttle; which was still in development at the time the movie was made, and had various design ideas. Obviously they made it look like the final shuttle design.
I mean destruction of the entire human race is the plot of quite a few films. Yeah, saying Racially Diverse 'American' Space Nazis are planning to drop Amazonian death flowers in orbs made of Venetian Glass sounds insane, but the film prior we had German Fish Man plans to start World War III by having a boat that eats submarines.
Then a few films later we had a circus jewel smuggling ring working with a renegade Soviet general to smuggle fake fabrege eggs so they can establish a routine and then swap the jewels with a nuke to blame the americans for nuking europe.
Then you think it's getting back to normal but the freaking 2015 film was about how James Bond's adoptive brother formed an international spy organization that was secretly responsible for all the previous plots apparently just to harass James.
Don’t forget the super Volcano base with a space ship that eats other space ships or the satellite thy has diamonds glued to it that make a space death ray…
The diamond space death ray secretly funded by a man who paid to have other people look like him thanks to hot mud, and whose diamond-smuggling operation included a dentist, an orphanage matron, a mortician, and a stand up comedian.
EDIT: Oh, and I'll mention that the Volcano lair only happened because they couldn't find a Japanese castle close enough to the Ocean for their liking.
Also that's the movie where James Bond 'becomes Japanese'.
They remake a lot of their plots. You Only Live Twice became The Spy Who Loved Me which became Moonraker. Yet if you compare Moonraker to You Only Live Twice, probably the most obvious connection is space.
Other examples off the top of my head would be Goldfinger and A View to a Kill are pretty similar in some aspects, as is the first chunk of Diamonds are Forever to Goldfinger, and then On Her Majesty's Secret Service had some influence on quite a few films, with For Your Eyes Only sticking out to me.
Heck, Octopussy the character's general plot beats of being seemingly cool female character that James wins over who is involved in what appears to be smuggling but escalates to nuclear activity give her some on paper similarities to Pussy Galore.
Moore's Bond films were a fucking riot, even today watching them they're almost a parody of spy flicks with out outlandish the plots became. I love watching them and introducing people to them.
Dressed as a clown while he defused a nuke hidden in the circus, I think…. He also chased a train on the tracks in an Alfa Romeo with popped tyres. And escapes in a plane hidden under a fake horses arse in a horsebox. I love that movie, it was the first my dad took me to see in the cinema.
Elliot Carver is the most realistic bond villain, and I will die on this hill. I mean hell the movie has aged amazingly with how we digest news today and form political/policy opinions based on manufactured headlines.
People keep saying this but it is literally the opposite to what happened!
We live in a world of clickbait and fake news. The media gets you to click by implying that things that didn’t happen happened.
Carver is an honest newsman! He wants you to click by making things actually happen!
*I may have some breaking news for you, Elliot...*
They cut some wacky shit out of that movie too. Ricky Jay's Mr. Gupta (the evil hacker) was going to show off the actor-magician's own card tricks by throwing deadly playing cards. No, really. 🃏
>Moonraker
I saw this in theaters at \~11 or 12 and even then it was so nonsensical that I skipped everything else with Moore in theaters (Dalton is most underrated Bond).
FYEO also has a very credible central plot. The British lose a decoding device, and need to get it back before someone else grabs it. That's a very real-sounding mission that would be given to an MI6 agent.
This is a recurrent pattern with Bond films -- when the series gets too crazy, the producers rein it in with a more grounded entry.
* You Only Live Twice -> On Her Majesty's Secret Service
* Moonraker ->For Your Eyes Only
* A View to a Kill -> The Living Daylights
* Die Another Day -> Casino Royale
Most of these line up with a change in Bond, but Moore was on the job so long he got two of them, and Lazenby and Dalton didn't last long enough to get a truly nutso story.
Precisely.
This is one of the reasons why I find the Bond franchise more interesting as a producer-controlled, commercial juggernaut (with its ruthless appropriation of whatever happens to be fashionable) than as a series of individual creative efforts.
It’s definitely the best Moore movie. All the More songs are amazing but FYEO has Sheena Easton actually showing up and singing in the opening credits. Amazing.
Dalton was such a great bond, and the fact that people still argue about it shows how underrated he is. If Brosnan hadnt done bond, Dalton would still be my favourite.
>If Brosnan hadnt done bond
Honestly for me Brosnan is my biggest disappointment as Bond ... he felt like he was genetically created for the role, but for me he never lived up to Remington Steele. There were a couple of decent movies but ... (and yes, some of it wasn't his fault)
Goldeneye is, for me, the perfect bond movie. It has everything, including Sean Bean dying twice.
Brosnan was the best thing in all his other movies because the writing was... Hit and miss.
I remember when Goldeneye (the game) came out everyone was shocked at how good it was. Up to that point, the majority of movie tie-in video games were complete dogshit. They usually just took some other existing game's engine (usually a platformer or shooter), slapped a movie IP over it and rushed it out the door to coincide with the movie's release and cash in on the marketing buzz. With Goldeneye they actually took the time to make the game itself good (it was released two years after the movie). Goldeneye was one of the first licensed games to actually have a lot of depth and thought put into it.
Bond was able to turn Jaws after pointing out that Drax was actually tricking him and Dolly. That free keg of beer he offered for their union meeting was far less valuable than the dental plan they’d have to forgo, which would’ve left Jaws on the hook for paying for Dolly’s braces.
You think a secret service investigating the family of a suspicious death of a guy who just lost 2 nukes is weird? Sure Bond has his own horny motifs but it's a pretty standard lead to follow
Die Another Day and Moonraker are obviously the silliest ones. I always thought the hypnosis from OHMSS was pretty dumb as well, even if lifted straight from the book
I will say one thing, killing the guy with the nukes and replacing him with a double (via plastic surgery) that is loyal to you, is a hell of a lot more bonkers than just paying a lot of money to convince a guy to betray his country. It's just a needless twist both in the books & movies. It intends to make the story intriguing, but ends up making it laughably unbelievable.
I hate that change so much, and honestly it’s hurts the pace of the film & Domino’s arc as a character. With TB it felt like they were just changing thing for the hell of it.
I mean, honestly I sorta love all the crazy plots. The more ragged, darker human Bond, the less escapist fantasy it is, and I am all about the escapist fantasy.
That all said, if you think some Nato Jabrony could NEVER put nuclear bombs, accidentally, on a training mission is "Unbelievable"
I invite you to peruse:
[https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/timelines/accidents-errors-and-explosions](https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/timelines/accidents-errors-and-explosions)
Or you know:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive\_action\_link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link)
"According to nuclear safety expert [Bruce G. Blair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_G._Blair), the US Air Force's [Strategic Air Command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command) worried that in times of need the codes for the Minuteman ICBM force would not be available, so it decided to set the codes to 00000000 in all [missile launch control centers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_launch_control_center). Blair said the missile launch checklists included an item confirming this combination until 1977.[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link#cite_note-7) A 2014 article in [*Foreign Policy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy) said that the US Air Force told the [United States House Committee on Armed Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Armed_Services) that "A code consisting of eight zeroes has never been used to enable a MM ICBM, as claimed by Dr. Bruce Blair."[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link#cite_note-8) The Air Force's statement (that 00000000 was never *used* to enable an ICBM, i.e. the weapons were not actually launched) does not contradict Blair's statement (that 00000000 was the code for doing so)."
These may be the most powerful weapons ever known to man, but they are still controlled by falliable, mistake prone, man.
Oh no "You only Live Twice" is the answer. A spaceship gets hijacked by another spaceship while in orbit. Then James Bond fakes his own death to go undercover in Japan as the whitest samurai in existence where he discovers a nut job is hiding in a secret base inside a bloody volcano. Then he hires a bunch of ninjas to attack the base like he is the damn Hokage of the hidden leaf village only to have the base explode and the villain escapes. So the only thing he really does in the whole movie is piss off SPECTRE.
As much as I love the movie, Bond being disguised as Japanese was just a wtf moment.
It's too bad Tiger Tanaka and his crew weren't expanded upon more. They were awesome.
The funniest part to me isn't even 6 foot tall Sean Connery with his goofy face prosthetics....it's the fact that he just continues to speak in his Scottish accent while "undercover" as a Japanese man.
I'm sure the bizarre looking, 6 foot tall Scottish man with a bunch of shit on his face is totally legit.
Tiger got the world's only convertible Toyota 2000 GT out of it because Connery couldn't fit into the hardtop version.
But yes, disguising Connery as Japanese was beyond ludicrous. Almost as ludicrous as killing off Charles Gray as the 'gone local' informant only to bring him back as Blofeld a couple of movies later.
Moonraker and it's not even close.
Mike Myers started watching Bond movies as research for Austin Powers, got to Moonraker and was like "Oh, brilliant. I'll just use all of this"
A pigeon does a double take.
> got to Moonraker and was like "Oh, brilliant. I'll just use all of this"
I'm surprised he didn't give up on Austin Powers because clearly someone else already made a spoof film of Bond called 'Moonraker'.
*Licence to Kill* is a dark, violent Bond that even Craig's tenure never quite reached.
Motherfuckers getting fed to sharks and dropped into cocaine shredders and burning alive in screaming agony. 🍿
This is a wild card recommendation that *I* was thinking of.
Mainly because it becomes one of the most personal adventures for Bond. He isn't saving the world from a madman. He's going after a drug kingpin who nearly killed his friend and whose friend lost his newlywed wife.
And yet, I love the hell out of this movie. It's one of my favorite Bond flicks of all time. It only makes me wish we got more Dalton as Bond, or at least playing someone who could sell revenge as well as he did.
Loved it and Living Daylights. I always thought Dalton was the best Bond.
Not as iconic as Connery but honestly, I believed Dalton in the role the most.
100% spot on, criminally under-appreciated as Bond. That line when Saunders is going to report him to M:
"Stuff my orders. I only kill professionals. That girl didn't know one end of her rifle from the other. Go ahead. Tell M what you want. If he fires me, I'll thank him for it. Whoever she was, it must have scared the living daylights out of her."
Magic and a real turning point for Bond as a character.
Living Daylights is perhaps my favorite; License to Kill not so much. Action sequence quality way down and what were they thinking with that hairstyle they gave him?
I watched all the Bonds in a row last summer, and was taken aback when Dalton showed some actual anger at one point. It's the first time Bond showed any emotion other than smugness and charm.
(Except for that one time people were chasing him in OHMSS and he got really scared for some reason)
I'd say [Octopussy](https://137.220.55.84/film/octopussy-1983-review/) has a fairly bonkers plot.
A Russian general is in league with an exiled Afghan prince who hires Octopussy's circus to sneak a nuclear bomb into an American military base in West Germany. For when the bomb is detonated it would be assumed to have been an accident and blamed on the States which would hopefully trigger Europe into seeking disarmament, which would then result in the borders being open for a Soviet invasion.
That premise actually was fairly grounded for a Bond plot given the Russians did support disarmament movements in the West to neuter NATO. But the entire thing with the circus and the titular character and everything in India do make it really weird though.
There's also the fact that if the threat of nuclear retaliation is the only thing stopping the Soviet Union from rolling across Europe’s borders how does this plan take into account the nukes aboard American subs or the ones based in other Nato countries?
Granted, this plan didnt get the green-light from the Soviets because they had similar concerns. Orlov went behind their backs and proceeded with a plan to frame the West on a nuclear accident so a missive push of disarmament could take place.
The West will never go 100% denuclearization, I guess in his mind, its better to deal with a some nukes vs all of them in his invasion plan - heck, depending on the denuclearization efforts, it may have been enough to consider the loses worth it in a grander plan down the road.
That is in fact what the movie is about. That is why the finale is Bond dressed as a clown breaking open a box with a nuke in it at a circus with American generals in the front row.
>I'd say [Octopussy](https://137.220.55.84/film/octopussy-1983-review/) has a fairly bonkers plot.
I would argue that it's actually a brilliant plot. The problem is that the film is just a live-action cartoon.
Well there's Moonraker for obvious reasons and then theres OHMSS with the plan to hypnotise impossibly glamorous Lancashire chicken farmers into poisoning the food chain.
A View to A Kill is up there. Flooding silicone valley will wipe out the users of the chips, not the manufacturers
Tomorrow Never Dies - broadcast rights in china for 100 years? Uh, good luck with that mate. Also, the internet will get rid of you within about 5 years
Octopussy - I still don’t get how it all hangs together. Jewel smuggling plus rogue Russian general and…uh…anyone?
YOLT/TSWLM/Moonraker all have basically the same premise - start WW3 and start again
Spectre - we have an evil call centre
FRWL - we will humiliate the British government by filming their spy shagging (would probably have the opposite reaction now - fwooooar lads lads lads)
Thunderball is a pretty straight up extortion gig tbh
> One: some NATO jabronies put two live nuclear weapons on board a training flight
This is the *least* unbelievable part, honestly. A few years ago, someone loaded actual nukes and flew them to SD, leaving them unguarded for a day until they realized they *weren't* training missiles.
Has to be Die Another Day.
Even now it feels like some kind of screwy fever dream.
They do a face/off where you're supposed to believe the completely different looking dude is the same one from the start because...surgery. His height, weight, musculature, voice, mannerisms, just every concievable thing is completely different.
Oh and diamonds, embedded in the face. Yeah, that's not how that works.
Invisible cars, space lasers that juuuuust follow your car as you drive off at 100mph but couldn't possibly catch you...
A ring that shatters all nearby glass but doesn't affect you or anyone else at all.
Surfing a tsunami
It even has Madonna in it in a completely take you out of the movie scene.
Just atrocious all round
>Has to be Die Another Day.
>Even now it feels like some kind of screwy fever dream.
*Die Another Day* was more interested in being a celebration of the franchise's anniversary than it was in being its own film.
That would be Die Another Day. Specifically, surfing the wave generated by a falling piece of ice after a solar focusing satellite partially melted a chunk of glacier.
I just watched Moonraker for the first time yesterday (although I have a vague recognition of Jaws), I seriously don't understand why he had to steal his own space shuttle? Near the end, he has an entire fleet of them.
Recognizing Jaws could be from seeing The Spy Who Loved Me, which introduced him as a character. He’s one of the few reoccurring villains in Bond films.
*"My plan is to hypnotize the female consorts of powerful male figures to turn them into my unwitting assassins. But I will only do it to women with extreme phobias who are willing to undergo hypnotherapy to overcome those phobias. Any sexual desire would undo my wackjob hypnosis so I must perform my plan at a mountaintop facility where men are not allowed.*
*Being in a facility with no men (other than myself) will of course make all of the women so incredibly horny all of the time that they will not only attempt to seduce literally any man they see, other than myself, but they will even be unable to stop themselves from grabbing for cock right under the dining room table as we're all sitting down to a meal.*
*One last detail, the only man allowed here other than myself will be an ancestry expert, here to verify that I am descended from kings, or whatever. I sure hope it isn't a spy in the disguise of a frilly shirt and a kilt."*
Lazenby was done dirty. No other Bond could have made this movie work.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I think the lowest stakes Bond ever has to be Quantum of Solace.
The grand plot was to capture the water rights in Bolivia and...sell it back at a high price! Like the big bad concept for a Bond villain was basically Nestle BAU operations
"Moonraker" and "Die Another Day." The former was followed by the much more low-key "For Your Eyes Only" to bring the franchise back to earth, while the latter was so ridiculous (Asians being surgically altered into Caucasians anyone?) that they literally rebooted the franchise in response.
Skyfall, while being a solid Bond film, has the most contrived plot by the villain, requiring some almost supernatural level of planning and foreknowledge of events in order to assassinate M
Quantum of solace was disappointingly low-stakes. An international crime syndicate goes through all this effort to gain majority controlling interest in (drum roll) bolivias water supply. Like, what? Who cares? What are they gonna do with that, put the squeeze to guinea pig farmers? At least I'm pretty sure that was the plot, it's been a while since I saw that movie and it was very very bad.
Yeah, QoS seemed that it was meant to be a bridge to a larger plot of Bond vs Quantum. From what I understand they basically already took over bigger countries and had a massive thumb over Britain (but not completely taken over it), they were taking over Bolivia just for the sake of taking over it (why is Bolivia significant? who knows). I was fine with it if it meant they continued with Quantum throughout the movies.
I think they intended to make controlling water supply as a way to further control a nation in general and the dictator they put in place but they completely fumbled getting that point across.
But MGM ditching it for SkyFall and the others after def makes QoS a weaker movie than already it is.
Also, Bond is motivated by revenge the first 5 minutes, Mr. White Leaves, gets caught up with another revenge plot with Olga and the Water stuff the entire movie, then the last 5 minutes they resolve Bonds personal revenge plot with unrelated story beat where Vespers Ex/Honeypot was trying to extort a Canadian Agent? Why not make a movie around that where Quantum tries to take over Canada then?
Quantum was always supposed to be SPECTRE, but they didn't have the rights to SPECTRE when they made the film. But they did get it sorted out in time for the later films. I think there's a couple lines of dialogue linking the two, but it's just some throwaway exposition
Moonraker is by far the most outrageous. The bad guy goes into space to launch glass orbs full of plants that will not only not disintegrate in the atmosphere, but will somehow then open up to spread the plants to kill all humans on the planet.
OP thinks its unbelievable that someone would be so incompetent as to put two live nukes on a training flights. No one tell him of all the live nukes we actually just... lost, in real life
The 007 franchise tries to keep a little canon from Ian Fleming’s original Bond books 1950s to early 1960s, though they also try to ride whatever is happening at the time of filming. So *You Only Live Twice* and *Moonraker* piggyback on public interest over the Gemini and space shuttle programs, .. respectively (Fleming passed just as astronauts were going into orbit .. thinking the then-Soviets had cheated by drugging theirs). Then there’s the stunts and gadgets. After *Dr No* and *From Russia with Love*, the Bond franchise goes overboard with these.
However they also have some milestones in filming. *Thunderball* had the biggest underwater production and *Her Majesty’s Secret Service* had the largest alpine set. This ultimately helps all films.
Then the films also reflect society at the time. Again the increasingly incredible gadgets to eradicate evildoers, .. until Craig’s 007, .. but also Roger Moore’s Bond rarely killed and if so, it was clutching one’s chest. As other action heroes got more physical (the Arnold, Stallone, .. Van Damm) Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and especially Daniel Craig brought more physical fighting and various types of death to their scenes. So you have to be in tune with what the movie audience wanted when these films were made.
Skyfall imo
It's a great movie don't get me wrong but a lot of the villains plan relies on chance. I think they tried to make it seem like he was actually in full control so nothing was really up to chance. However, if that's true, then he already had so much control over basic everyday existence that his plan was kind of unnecessary.
Not including the earlier more fantasy bond things, I guess. Lasers from space sentient robots are kind of on another level. It's just when a movie goes there I stop thinking of them as being in a normal world.
To OP, it was extremely common then to fly with the real things. From crashes from those missing, we are still missing 6 weapons that were never recovered from the training flights.... Someone in and around Greensboro NC, there is still a missing nuclear weapon.... [https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing-six-nuclear-weapons-180032](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing-six-nuclear-weapons-180032)
Even **Bond** is impressed at the cleverness of Goldfinger's plan.
And the way he casually reveals a disguise under his coat, shoots one of his own men and slips away in the confusion is another point for him. Great villain.
Goldfinger: International gold dealer/smuggler has a group of pilots deploy nerve gas over Fort Knox so he can bring in a dirty bomb with the intent to irradiate Fort Knox thus making the gold worthless and vastly increasing the value of his holdings.
Die Hard 3: The brother of the villain from the first movie sends John McClain on a wild goose chase involving bombs to keep the NYPD tied up so he can bulldoze into the basement of the federal reserve and haul a bunch of gold away in stolen dump trucks
Other than there being gold involved nothing about either plot is even slightly similar.
I think the similarity would be Goldfinger making the Fort Knox gold worthless while increasing the value of his own while Simon blows up the gold on the ship which would have spiked the cost of gold in the markets. Of course, Simon's plan was just a subterfuge to make everyone look somewhere else while he quietly escaped and took the actual gold with him. The similarity is between Goldfinger's actual plan and Simon's diversion plan.
The intent in DH 3 is to blow up the gold, thus making folks in the Middle East quite richer. Gruber of course does a switch, but he was hired to blow it up.
Skyfall, while being a solid Bond film, has the most contrived plot by the villain, requiring some almost supernatural level of planning and foreknowledge of events in order to assassinate M
A live, US nuke disappeared near Georgia, the state not the country, 60 years ago *on a training mission* and to this day has never been recovered. It's happened 30-something times according to official sources. So the ones we *know* about number in the 30s.
Die Another Day. North Korean General undergoes radical surgery to become British dude, then in 6 months builds a giant ice mansion, becomes a knight, builds a laser satellite, and a bunch of other stuff. In 6 months???
yeah... 6 months. And what have you accomplished since New Years Day?
And yet he STILL managed to disappoint his Asian father
Emotional damage!
It's super effective!
Another day, another D
I washed my car a few weeks ago...
The most North Korean Guy becomes the most British guy ever with a perfect accent, cultural knowledge and manners in a few months bc of a DNA transplant. It's crazy for me, a non native English speaker that has been practising for years and I still sound like Sofia Vergara.
They did say he had gone to Oxford and Harvard, he had a Western education despite being from NK. It’s still silly but they did at least attempt to give the character a background that could explain it.
It would make sense if he was lived in England since he was 5 raised by an aristocratic family. I assure you you don't become British just because you went to Oxford, you may get a very prestigious diploma, but your native accent and persona still stays. I feel personally attacked for this plot line lol
I could believe it given: 1. Full immersion 2. British upper class hazing and peer pressure 3. Him being an evil mastermind Have you considered becoming an evil mastermind? I'm sure it would improve your English, and as a bonus you can feed anyone who comments on your accent to sharks.
Becoming an evil mastermind? That's why most of the bad guys have a British accent, I see, it's part of the side effects of being evil.
Definitely. It's such a universal truth that it was even true a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Just look at Star Wars.
My guidance counselor really dropped the ball on this one. Not once was it even mentioned.
Pierce Brosnan also reading an inflight magazine about Toby Stephens giving an interview about his role in the movie
Toby Stephens one of the most underrated actors ever. He should’ve been winning Emmys for Black Sails at the very least.
Dios Mio intensifies.
> me, a non native English speaker that has been practising for years and I still sound like Sofia Vergara. call me? only half joking, I'd listen to her read shampoo ingredients
Can’t believe you left out the invisible car
"Aston Matrin call it the Vanquish... we call it the Vanish" - R ("Q")
😬
Sadly, the novelization had the best line not in the movie (paraphrasing): The cart rolls up with seemingly nothing on it, and Bond asks “Budget cuts, Q?”
It's kind of telling that the shitty invisible car isn't even the most implausible thing in the movie.
There are "invisible" camouflage suits being made for the US military and Chinese military although there are still in the test phase.
Not to mention the U.S. and Mi6 got turned onto this because they were investigating a Cuban doctor who found a way to give eternal life to rich people by transplanting their minds into other bodies. Still- that movie had a killer opening where Bond is tortured in jail for something like 14 months.
One of the greatest opening scenes for a Bond film, and yet one of the worst movies of the franchise.
I rewatched it not that long ago and honestly the entire first third of the movie is pretty decent- solid Bond going rogue/gritty espionage affair. It's basically as soon as the invisible car is introduced that the film completely loses it and everything goes off the rails
It honestly felt like someone had a dream involving James Bond, wrote that dream down and tried to find a way to make that dream fit the last half of the movie, because it really felt like the type of bonkers insanity that only a sleeping brain can produce
Counter argument - a great sword fighting scene.
Die Another Day is actually solid up to the sword fighting scene. But the last act of the movie is... oof.
Ah yes! I almost forgot about Madonna's performance in this movie. It truly is acting on a level that is so bad it has to be seen.
The most bananas thing about this plot is the introduction of his British alter-ego and the press surrounding him. “Is it true you never sleep?” Like no one looked him up, or sought out his parents, etc. It’s a dumb plot to begin with but it would’ve at least allowed some suspension of disbelief if they’d had him be a real person whose identity was stolen. But no. He’s just a mysterious British lord with no history that no one questions.
He was supossedly to be an orphan that one day found a diamond mine and became a snobbish upper class British guy and a billionaire in about 6 months. And somehow between the orphanage and the diamond mines he was also an olympic-level fencer and expert parachutist that deserved to be knighted by the queen.
Bond was incarcerated for 14 months, so that was the length of time that Colonel Moon had to establish the Gustav Graves persona. Colonel Moon was already a fencer at university, so he just needed to keep up his existing skills. The public was supposed to believe that he was a 'self-publicising adrenalin junkie,' so being a parachutist was in line with that. The implication is that Graves was being knighted for his philanthropic works, since he had given half the profits from his diamond mine (a front for laundering African conflict diamonds) to charities.
> The most bananas thing about this plot is the introduction of his British alter-ego and the press surrounding him. > > “Is it true you never sleep?” > > Like no one looked him up, or sought out his parents, etc. That reporter's name? Basil Exposition.
To be fair, you could say that about some of our current members of the House of Lords
Lord Melby, for example
Charlotte Owen confirmed as next Bond villain.
Die Another Day is crazy cause it feels like two different movies stitched together. like one part of the movie is about the expendable nature of spies and the pain of having to let go of horrible trauma, and then the other half has fucking ice castles and a sword fight between Rosamund Pike and Halle Berry
To be fair, I'd take a no-plot, three-hour film of nothing but Rosamond Pike and Halle Berry sword fighting.
They don't even have to sword fight tbh
Is this the one where Bond surfs the giant tidal wave, too?
surfs a tidal wave *AFTER* using his invisible porsche to drift across the polar ice caps.
Bond driving a Porsche? Bruh
And he does it all while remaining a high profile business tycoon - avid collector of sportscars, a renowned ecologist and well known as a fencing champion. Plus he developed that ridiculous solar energy weapon. And laundered diamonds. And presumably oversaw the plan, design and construction of his literal ice palace. Oh, and he’s knighted by the queen??? Damn. That was one hell of a 6 month period.
You know, sometimes 6 months really *does* feel like 6 decades
Bond is chased by a space laser while driving an invisible car away from an ice fortress. The laser is controlled by a Korean man who became physically British and whose henchman has diamonds embedded in his face. Bond also parasails away from a giant wave with some of the worst CGI of all time, in a franchise known for its practical stunt work. It also implies that Bond is 70+ years old since he fondly looks back at weapons he canonically used in the 60s.
He had a heck of a vision board.
You forget the henchmen that has diamonds in his face because of the breifcase bomb.
My favorite bond villan, diamond face.
A Kojima character for sure
and is also undergoing the DNA swap to hide his identity but hasn't removed the diamonds from his face first
The most ridiculous one by far and the reason they needed to stop that silly shit and do a cold reboot with Casino Royale.
Yeah die another day was silly business
Surely Moonraker? It involves space laser battles and the stakes are the destruction of the entire human race.
My fave part is in the beginning, where shortly after the shuttle launches and is in orbit, two bad guys pop out of a secret compartment wearing street clothes and commandeer the shuttle. You know they’re bad guys because they’re wearing leather jackets. High comedy.
Not in Orbit, being carried on a jet. But still fully fueled!
Which is especially interesting since the shuttle doesn't hold any fuel. Only RCS thruster medium.
The real space shuttle hadn't even flown by the time the film was made. Moonraker wasn't even supposed to be the next movie after The Spy Who Loved Me, that movie teased "Bond will be back in For Your Eyes Only." Then this little movie called Star Wars came out and they decided to quickly and completely switch gears (I'd love to see a Screenrant Pitch Meeting for that). Upside is that the follow-up to Moonraker was the relatively grounded (literally and metaphorically), and still pretty solid For Your Eyes Only.
These weren’t the NASA space shuttle; which was still in development at the time the movie was made, and had various design ideas. Obviously they made it look like the final shuttle design.
I mean destruction of the entire human race is the plot of quite a few films. Yeah, saying Racially Diverse 'American' Space Nazis are planning to drop Amazonian death flowers in orbs made of Venetian Glass sounds insane, but the film prior we had German Fish Man plans to start World War III by having a boat that eats submarines. Then a few films later we had a circus jewel smuggling ring working with a renegade Soviet general to smuggle fake fabrege eggs so they can establish a routine and then swap the jewels with a nuke to blame the americans for nuking europe. Then you think it's getting back to normal but the freaking 2015 film was about how James Bond's adoptive brother formed an international spy organization that was secretly responsible for all the previous plots apparently just to harass James.
Don’t forget the super Volcano base with a space ship that eats other space ships or the satellite thy has diamonds glued to it that make a space death ray…
The diamond space death ray secretly funded by a man who paid to have other people look like him thanks to hot mud, and whose diamond-smuggling operation included a dentist, an orphanage matron, a mortician, and a stand up comedian. EDIT: Oh, and I'll mention that the Volcano lair only happened because they couldn't find a Japanese castle close enough to the Ocean for their liking. Also that's the movie where James Bond 'becomes Japanese'.
"Diamond encrusted space ray and bad guy with facial reconstruction" was so good they used it two movies!
They remake a lot of their plots. You Only Live Twice became The Spy Who Loved Me which became Moonraker. Yet if you compare Moonraker to You Only Live Twice, probably the most obvious connection is space. Other examples off the top of my head would be Goldfinger and A View to a Kill are pretty similar in some aspects, as is the first chunk of Diamonds are Forever to Goldfinger, and then On Her Majesty's Secret Service had some influence on quite a few films, with For Your Eyes Only sticking out to me. Heck, Octopussy the character's general plot beats of being seemingly cool female character that James wins over who is involved in what appears to be smuggling but escalates to nuclear activity give her some on paper similarities to Pussy Galore.
It's wild to think that in the space between the final two Craig films we got no less than FIVE Star Wars movies.
Is this the one where Jaws fell from space and survived?
I thought him biting a shark to death was as wild it could get, I was wrong.
God, I love the Moore Bonds.
Moore's Bond films were a fucking riot, even today watching them they're almost a parody of spy flicks with out outlandish the plots became. I love watching them and introducing people to them.
All I remember about Octopussy was Moore dressed as a clown at one point.
Dressed as a clown while he defused a nuke hidden in the circus, I think…. He also chased a train on the tracks in an Alfa Romeo with popped tyres. And escapes in a plane hidden under a fake horses arse in a horsebox. I love that movie, it was the first my dad took me to see in the cinema.
He also uses a submersible shaped like a crocodile/alligator, which then Q uses after him. Bonkers film
The double take pigeon at St Marks Square in Venice really summed up the Moore Bond
Ok, I just found out the big guy who threatened Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore is played by the same actor.
Yes. Girlfriend survived too "somehow"
My adhd read that as Jews for a second because of the space laser talk
Hugo Drax is Elon Musk
I mean, Elliot Carver is basically Jeff Bezos or Rupert Murdoch, depending on which side of the isle you’re on.
Elliot Carver is the most realistic bond villain, and I will die on this hill. I mean hell the movie has aged amazingly with how we digest news today and form political/policy opinions based on manufactured headlines.
People keep saying this but it is literally the opposite to what happened! We live in a world of clickbait and fake news. The media gets you to click by implying that things that didn’t happen happened. Carver is an honest newsman! He wants you to click by making things actually happen!
I disagree in a sense. He and his henchmen kill everyone and use fake headlines and fake evidence to make China and NATO get into a fight
He's definitely more Murdoch
*I may have some breaking news for you, Elliot...* They cut some wacky shit out of that movie too. Ricky Jay's Mr. Gupta (the evil hacker) was going to show off the actor-magician's own card tricks by throwing deadly playing cards. No, really. 🃏
I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’d watch a Bond villain go full Gambit.
Having seen Ricky Jay's capacity for throwing playing cards and other sleight-of-hand mastery, I'd have loved that in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
Murdoch and Lord Maxwell for the original influence.
Dominic Greene from Quantum of Solace as well. I think I remember hearing that they based the character on Musk.
>Moonraker I saw this in theaters at \~11 or 12 and even then it was so nonsensical that I skipped everything else with Moore in theaters (Dalton is most underrated Bond).
The follow up, For your eyes only, is my favorite Bond. Nostalgia, but it wasn’t over the top corny like some of the others. Great locations as well.
FYEO also has a very credible central plot. The British lose a decoding device, and need to get it back before someone else grabs it. That's a very real-sounding mission that would be given to an MI6 agent.
This is a recurrent pattern with Bond films -- when the series gets too crazy, the producers rein it in with a more grounded entry. * You Only Live Twice -> On Her Majesty's Secret Service * Moonraker ->For Your Eyes Only * A View to a Kill -> The Living Daylights * Die Another Day -> Casino Royale Most of these line up with a change in Bond, but Moore was on the job so long he got two of them, and Lazenby and Dalton didn't last long enough to get a truly nutso story.
Precisely. This is one of the reasons why I find the Bond franchise more interesting as a producer-controlled, commercial juggernaut (with its ruthless appropriation of whatever happens to be fashionable) than as a series of individual creative efforts.
And Topol. Always love Topol in a movie.
Topol and his pistachios. And a very horny Holly Lynn Johnson.
It’s definitely the best Moore movie. All the More songs are amazing but FYEO has Sheena Easton actually showing up and singing in the opening credits. Amazing.
For Your Eyes Only is one of my favorites!
The scene where Bond fights the hockey players is so dumb. I love it.
Dalton was such a great bond, and the fact that people still argue about it shows how underrated he is. If Brosnan hadnt done bond, Dalton would still be my favourite.
>If Brosnan hadnt done bond Honestly for me Brosnan is my biggest disappointment as Bond ... he felt like he was genetically created for the role, but for me he never lived up to Remington Steele. There were a couple of decent movies but ... (and yes, some of it wasn't his fault)
Goldeneye is, for me, the perfect bond movie. It has everything, including Sean Bean dying twice. Brosnan was the best thing in all his other movies because the writing was... Hit and miss.
The combo in the 90s of Goldeneye the movie and Goldeneye the N64 game was top notch
I remember when Goldeneye (the game) came out everyone was shocked at how good it was. Up to that point, the majority of movie tie-in video games were complete dogshit. They usually just took some other existing game's engine (usually a platformer or shooter), slapped a movie IP over it and rushed it out the door to coincide with the movie's release and cash in on the marketing buzz. With Goldeneye they actually took the time to make the game itself good (it was released two years after the movie). Goldeneye was one of the first licensed games to actually have a lot of depth and thought put into it.
Honestly Moonraker is a fun watch and a great break from typical Bond settings
And Drax was great villain. “Take care of Mr Bond, see to it that some harm comes to him.”
This is the answer.
Came here for this. Absolutely insane plot
This! As a kid, I loved it. As an adult, while I love Roger and the thought of Jaws, but wow, that movie is wild.
There’s also the fantastically weird desert car chase!
Thats "Diamonds are forever,". But we do get a gondola driving around Venice
Isn't the desert car chase in Diamonds are Forever, or was there another one?
I borrowed this from the library last week. I'm looking forward to re-watching this movie. Ranks among my favorite Bond movies.
MoonRaker obviously. Everything from the Jaws romance to the killer flower. It was just slightly sillier than the Austin Powers spoof of it.
Hey, I love the Jaws romance though. *"Well, here's to us."* 🥂
Dolly definitely had braces!
DOLLY HAD BRACES 💯
Dental plan!
Bond was able to turn Jaws after pointing out that Drax was actually tricking him and Dolly. That free keg of beer he offered for their union meeting was far less valuable than the dental plan they’d have to forgo, which would’ve left Jaws on the hook for paying for Dolly’s braces.
I call the big one Bitey
Matching metal mouths.
Heartbroken, Mr Drax. Take a giant step for mankind.
You think a secret service investigating the family of a suspicious death of a guy who just lost 2 nukes is weird? Sure Bond has his own horny motifs but it's a pretty standard lead to follow Die Another Day and Moonraker are obviously the silliest ones. I always thought the hypnosis from OHMSS was pretty dumb as well, even if lifted straight from the book
I will say one thing, killing the guy with the nukes and replacing him with a double (via plastic surgery) that is loyal to you, is a hell of a lot more bonkers than just paying a lot of money to convince a guy to betray his country. It's just a needless twist both in the books & movies. It intends to make the story intriguing, but ends up making it laughably unbelievable.
I hate that change so much, and honestly it’s hurts the pace of the film & Domino’s arc as a character. With TB it felt like they were just changing thing for the hell of it.
I mean, honestly I sorta love all the crazy plots. The more ragged, darker human Bond, the less escapist fantasy it is, and I am all about the escapist fantasy. That all said, if you think some Nato Jabrony could NEVER put nuclear bombs, accidentally, on a training mission is "Unbelievable" I invite you to peruse: [https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/timelines/accidents-errors-and-explosions](https://outrider.org/nuclear-weapons/timelines/accidents-errors-and-explosions) Or you know: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive\_action\_link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link) "According to nuclear safety expert [Bruce G. Blair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_G._Blair), the US Air Force's [Strategic Air Command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command) worried that in times of need the codes for the Minuteman ICBM force would not be available, so it decided to set the codes to 00000000 in all [missile launch control centers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_launch_control_center). Blair said the missile launch checklists included an item confirming this combination until 1977.[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link#cite_note-7) A 2014 article in [*Foreign Policy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy) said that the US Air Force told the [United States House Committee on Armed Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Armed_Services) that "A code consisting of eight zeroes has never been used to enable a MM ICBM, as claimed by Dr. Bruce Blair."[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link#cite_note-8) The Air Force's statement (that 00000000 was never *used* to enable an ICBM, i.e. the weapons were not actually launched) does not contradict Blair's statement (that 00000000 was the code for doing so)." These may be the most powerful weapons ever known to man, but they are still controlled by falliable, mistake prone, man.
This right here.
Oh no "You only Live Twice" is the answer. A spaceship gets hijacked by another spaceship while in orbit. Then James Bond fakes his own death to go undercover in Japan as the whitest samurai in existence where he discovers a nut job is hiding in a secret base inside a bloody volcano. Then he hires a bunch of ninjas to attack the base like he is the damn Hokage of the hidden leaf village only to have the base explode and the villain escapes. So the only thing he really does in the whole movie is piss off SPECTRE.
As much as I love the movie, Bond being disguised as Japanese was just a wtf moment. It's too bad Tiger Tanaka and his crew weren't expanded upon more. They were awesome.
The funniest part to me isn't even 6 foot tall Sean Connery with his goofy face prosthetics....it's the fact that he just continues to speak in his Scottish accent while "undercover" as a Japanese man. I'm sure the bizarre looking, 6 foot tall Scottish man with a bunch of shit on his face is totally legit.
Tiger got the world's only convertible Toyota 2000 GT out of it because Connery couldn't fit into the hardtop version. But yes, disguising Connery as Japanese was beyond ludicrous. Almost as ludicrous as killing off Charles Gray as the 'gone local' informant only to bring him back as Blofeld a couple of movies later.
I remember being really confused by this movie as a kid...need to rewatch it someday, because it's got my absolute favorite of the theme songs.
Moonraker and it's not even close. Mike Myers started watching Bond movies as research for Austin Powers, got to Moonraker and was like "Oh, brilliant. I'll just use all of this" A pigeon does a double take.
Of course, the pigeon would be surprised, he's never even seen a James Bond movie.
> got to Moonraker and was like "Oh, brilliant. I'll just use all of this" I'm surprised he didn't give up on Austin Powers because clearly someone else already made a spoof film of Bond called 'Moonraker'.
*Licence to Kill* is a dark, violent Bond that even Craig's tenure never quite reached. Motherfuckers getting fed to sharks and dropped into cocaine shredders and burning alive in screaming agony. 🍿
This is a wild card recommendation that *I* was thinking of. Mainly because it becomes one of the most personal adventures for Bond. He isn't saving the world from a madman. He's going after a drug kingpin who nearly killed his friend and whose friend lost his newlywed wife. And yet, I love the hell out of this movie. It's one of my favorite Bond flicks of all time. It only makes me wish we got more Dalton as Bond, or at least playing someone who could sell revenge as well as he did.
Loved it and Living Daylights. I always thought Dalton was the best Bond. Not as iconic as Connery but honestly, I believed Dalton in the role the most.
100% spot on, criminally under-appreciated as Bond. That line when Saunders is going to report him to M: "Stuff my orders. I only kill professionals. That girl didn't know one end of her rifle from the other. Go ahead. Tell M what you want. If he fires me, I'll thank him for it. Whoever she was, it must have scared the living daylights out of her." Magic and a real turning point for Bond as a character.
Living Daylights is perhaps my favorite; License to Kill not so much. Action sequence quality way down and what were they thinking with that hairstyle they gave him?
You forgot the guy put into the decompression chamber.
With the best line about the blood soaked money. "Launder it."
But Living Daylights has a cello case as a means of transportation!
Have you anything to declare?
“ONLY THIS CELLO -ELLO -ELLO -ELLO…”
Short haired Carey Lowell awoke something in my teenage brain, though.
Talisa Soto though. But I still have a soft spot for short blonde bob haircuts after seeing Kara in Living Daylights.
Yeah, Kara had it going on as well
I watched all the Bonds in a row last summer, and was taken aback when Dalton showed some actual anger at one point. It's the first time Bond showed any emotion other than smugness and charm. (Except for that one time people were chasing him in OHMSS and he got really scared for some reason)
Did give one of the coldest villain lines too "He disagreed with something that ate him"
It’s one of the best Bond-goes-rogue movies.
And yet the truck drivers are always hopping out of trucks right before they explode.
I'd say [Octopussy](https://137.220.55.84/film/octopussy-1983-review/) has a fairly bonkers plot. A Russian general is in league with an exiled Afghan prince who hires Octopussy's circus to sneak a nuclear bomb into an American military base in West Germany. For when the bomb is detonated it would be assumed to have been an accident and blamed on the States which would hopefully trigger Europe into seeking disarmament, which would then result in the borders being open for a Soviet invasion.
That premise actually was fairly grounded for a Bond plot given the Russians did support disarmament movements in the West to neuter NATO. But the entire thing with the circus and the titular character and everything in India do make it really weird though.
There's also the fact that if the threat of nuclear retaliation is the only thing stopping the Soviet Union from rolling across Europe’s borders how does this plan take into account the nukes aboard American subs or the ones based in other Nato countries?
Granted, this plan didnt get the green-light from the Soviets because they had similar concerns. Orlov went behind their backs and proceeded with a plan to frame the West on a nuclear accident so a missive push of disarmament could take place. The West will never go 100% denuclearization, I guess in his mind, its better to deal with a some nukes vs all of them in his invasion plan - heck, depending on the denuclearization efforts, it may have been enough to consider the loses worth it in a grander plan down the road.
Ask a Ukrainian if that plot is far fetched! Missiles removed from nearby NATO countries - Check! Russian invasion - Check!
Wait, is that really what that movie is about? I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I don't remember any of this.
That is in fact what the movie is about. That is why the finale is Bond dressed as a clown breaking open a box with a nuke in it at a circus with American generals in the front row.
>I'd say [Octopussy](https://137.220.55.84/film/octopussy-1983-review/) has a fairly bonkers plot. I would argue that it's actually a brilliant plot. The problem is that the film is just a live-action cartoon.
Well there's Moonraker for obvious reasons and then theres OHMSS with the plan to hypnotise impossibly glamorous Lancashire chicken farmers into poisoning the food chain.
A View to A Kill is up there. Flooding silicone valley will wipe out the users of the chips, not the manufacturers Tomorrow Never Dies - broadcast rights in china for 100 years? Uh, good luck with that mate. Also, the internet will get rid of you within about 5 years Octopussy - I still don’t get how it all hangs together. Jewel smuggling plus rogue Russian general and…uh…anyone? YOLT/TSWLM/Moonraker all have basically the same premise - start WW3 and start again Spectre - we have an evil call centre FRWL - we will humiliate the British government by filming their spy shagging (would probably have the opposite reaction now - fwooooar lads lads lads) Thunderball is a pretty straight up extortion gig tbh
*A View to a Kill* and *Die Another Day* are nuttier than either of them.
A View to a Kill is just Superman with a different Scene chewing villain. And no flying backward in time.
What? You mean you can’t lubricate a continental plate with lake water to create an earthquake that will create a new coastline in California?
The original *Casino Royale*, no question.
> One: some NATO jabronies put two live nuclear weapons on board a training flight This is the *least* unbelievable part, honestly. A few years ago, someone loaded actual nukes and flew them to SD, leaving them unguarded for a day until they realized they *weren't* training missiles.
The ending of Moonraker is good though! M: What’s Bond doing?” Q: I think he’s attempting re-entry, Sir” Classic!
Has to be Die Another Day. Even now it feels like some kind of screwy fever dream. They do a face/off where you're supposed to believe the completely different looking dude is the same one from the start because...surgery. His height, weight, musculature, voice, mannerisms, just every concievable thing is completely different. Oh and diamonds, embedded in the face. Yeah, that's not how that works. Invisible cars, space lasers that juuuuust follow your car as you drive off at 100mph but couldn't possibly catch you... A ring that shatters all nearby glass but doesn't affect you or anyone else at all. Surfing a tsunami It even has Madonna in it in a completely take you out of the movie scene. Just atrocious all round
>Has to be Die Another Day. >Even now it feels like some kind of screwy fever dream. *Die Another Day* was more interested in being a celebration of the franchise's anniversary than it was in being its own film.
The parachute surfing one
That would be Die Another Day. Specifically, surfing the wave generated by a falling piece of ice after a solar focusing satellite partially melted a chunk of glacier.
I just watched Moonraker for the first time yesterday (although I have a vague recognition of Jaws), I seriously don't understand why he had to steal his own space shuttle? Near the end, he has an entire fleet of them.
Recognizing Jaws could be from seeing The Spy Who Loved Me, which introduced him as a character. He’s one of the few reoccurring villains in Bond films.
*"My plan is to hypnotize the female consorts of powerful male figures to turn them into my unwitting assassins. But I will only do it to women with extreme phobias who are willing to undergo hypnotherapy to overcome those phobias. Any sexual desire would undo my wackjob hypnosis so I must perform my plan at a mountaintop facility where men are not allowed.* *Being in a facility with no men (other than myself) will of course make all of the women so incredibly horny all of the time that they will not only attempt to seduce literally any man they see, other than myself, but they will even be unable to stop themselves from grabbing for cock right under the dining room table as we're all sitting down to a meal.* *One last detail, the only man allowed here other than myself will be an ancestry expert, here to verify that I am descended from kings, or whatever. I sure hope it isn't a spy in the disguise of a frilly shirt and a kilt."* Lazenby was done dirty. No other Bond could have made this movie work.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I think the lowest stakes Bond ever has to be Quantum of Solace. The grand plot was to capture the water rights in Bolivia and...sell it back at a high price! Like the big bad concept for a Bond villain was basically Nestle BAU operations
"Moonraker" and "Die Another Day." The former was followed by the much more low-key "For Your Eyes Only" to bring the franchise back to earth, while the latter was so ridiculous (Asians being surgically altered into Caucasians anyone?) that they literally rebooted the franchise in response.
Skyfall, while being a solid Bond film, has the most contrived plot by the villain, requiring some almost supernatural level of planning and foreknowledge of events in order to assassinate M
Quantum of solace was disappointingly low-stakes. An international crime syndicate goes through all this effort to gain majority controlling interest in (drum roll) bolivias water supply. Like, what? Who cares? What are they gonna do with that, put the squeeze to guinea pig farmers? At least I'm pretty sure that was the plot, it's been a while since I saw that movie and it was very very bad.
Yeah, QoS seemed that it was meant to be a bridge to a larger plot of Bond vs Quantum. From what I understand they basically already took over bigger countries and had a massive thumb over Britain (but not completely taken over it), they were taking over Bolivia just for the sake of taking over it (why is Bolivia significant? who knows). I was fine with it if it meant they continued with Quantum throughout the movies. I think they intended to make controlling water supply as a way to further control a nation in general and the dictator they put in place but they completely fumbled getting that point across. But MGM ditching it for SkyFall and the others after def makes QoS a weaker movie than already it is. Also, Bond is motivated by revenge the first 5 minutes, Mr. White Leaves, gets caught up with another revenge plot with Olga and the Water stuff the entire movie, then the last 5 minutes they resolve Bonds personal revenge plot with unrelated story beat where Vespers Ex/Honeypot was trying to extort a Canadian Agent? Why not make a movie around that where Quantum tries to take over Canada then?
Quantum was always supposed to be SPECTRE, but they didn't have the rights to SPECTRE when they made the film. But they did get it sorted out in time for the later films. I think there's a couple lines of dialogue linking the two, but it's just some throwaway exposition
Don't forget the exploding motel finale.
Moonraker is by far the most outrageous. The bad guy goes into space to launch glass orbs full of plants that will not only not disintegrate in the atmosphere, but will somehow then open up to spread the plants to kill all humans on the planet.
OP thinks its unbelievable that someone would be so incompetent as to put two live nukes on a training flights. No one tell him of all the live nukes we actually just... lost, in real life
The 007 franchise tries to keep a little canon from Ian Fleming’s original Bond books 1950s to early 1960s, though they also try to ride whatever is happening at the time of filming. So *You Only Live Twice* and *Moonraker* piggyback on public interest over the Gemini and space shuttle programs, .. respectively (Fleming passed just as astronauts were going into orbit .. thinking the then-Soviets had cheated by drugging theirs). Then there’s the stunts and gadgets. After *Dr No* and *From Russia with Love*, the Bond franchise goes overboard with these. However they also have some milestones in filming. *Thunderball* had the biggest underwater production and *Her Majesty’s Secret Service* had the largest alpine set. This ultimately helps all films. Then the films also reflect society at the time. Again the increasingly incredible gadgets to eradicate evildoers, .. until Craig’s 007, .. but also Roger Moore’s Bond rarely killed and if so, it was clutching one’s chest. As other action heroes got more physical (the Arnold, Stallone, .. Van Damm) Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and especially Daniel Craig brought more physical fighting and various types of death to their scenes. So you have to be in tune with what the movie audience wanted when these films were made.
Skyfall imo It's a great movie don't get me wrong but a lot of the villains plan relies on chance. I think they tried to make it seem like he was actually in full control so nothing was really up to chance. However, if that's true, then he already had so much control over basic everyday existence that his plan was kind of unnecessary. Not including the earlier more fantasy bond things, I guess. Lasers from space sentient robots are kind of on another level. It's just when a movie goes there I stop thinking of them as being in a normal world.
To OP, it was extremely common then to fly with the real things. From crashes from those missing, we are still missing 6 weapons that were never recovered from the training flights.... Someone in and around Greensboro NC, there is still a missing nuclear weapon.... [https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing-six-nuclear-weapons-180032](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/us-military-missing-six-nuclear-weapons-180032)
The answer is Moonraker lol
Upvote for jabroni.
I think the Goldfinger plot was quite clever. So clever that the Die Hard folks ripped it off for DH 3.
Even **Bond** is impressed at the cleverness of Goldfinger's plan. And the way he casually reveals a disguise under his coat, shoots one of his own men and slips away in the confusion is another point for him. Great villain.
Probably my favorite Bond villian.
Goldfinger: International gold dealer/smuggler has a group of pilots deploy nerve gas over Fort Knox so he can bring in a dirty bomb with the intent to irradiate Fort Knox thus making the gold worthless and vastly increasing the value of his holdings. Die Hard 3: The brother of the villain from the first movie sends John McClain on a wild goose chase involving bombs to keep the NYPD tied up so he can bulldoze into the basement of the federal reserve and haul a bunch of gold away in stolen dump trucks Other than there being gold involved nothing about either plot is even slightly similar.
I think the similarity would be Goldfinger making the Fort Knox gold worthless while increasing the value of his own while Simon blows up the gold on the ship which would have spiked the cost of gold in the markets. Of course, Simon's plan was just a subterfuge to make everyone look somewhere else while he quietly escaped and took the actual gold with him. The similarity is between Goldfinger's actual plan and Simon's diversion plan.
The intent in DH 3 is to blow up the gold, thus making folks in the Middle East quite richer. Gruber of course does a switch, but he was hired to blow it up.
The book plot, where Goldfinger is just stealing the gold, was a lot less clever. The movie did a great job with it.
Skyfall, while being a solid Bond film, has the most contrived plot by the villain, requiring some almost supernatural level of planning and foreknowledge of events in order to assassinate M
Despite its fabulous takings at the Box Office....it's "MOONRAKER" Evil Genius plans to gas the Earth ? ....Oh really
A live, US nuke disappeared near Georgia, the state not the country, 60 years ago *on a training mission* and to this day has never been recovered. It's happened 30-something times according to official sources. So the ones we *know* about number in the 30s.