12/25/2023 0 Comments Tv tropes atomic heartStill one of the biggest Bond films at the box office, adjusted for inflation, Thunderball took inspiration from one of Ian Fleming's more outrageous novels to produce what is arguably the first blockbuster Bond, with this tale of SPECTRE holding NATO to ransom with two hijacked atomic bombs delivering a sense of scope and grandeur that its (slightly) more grounded predecessors hadn't offered. This is a franchise that's always thrived on reinvention, after all. That being said, let whoever comes next reinvent Bond in their own way – and maybe even reintroduce a little more tongue-in-cheek humour. Once you've seen it, it's sort of difficult to imagine how else the Craig era could've ended – just having the tortured spy ride off into the sunset with Léa Seydoux's Madeleine (again), this time with little Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet) in tow, wouldn't have been anywhere near as satisfying. Though, like Spectre, some of its more outlandish elements don't integrate wholly successfully into the more grounded world of Craig's Bond, where this climax to his era really soars is in digging deeper than ever before into the secret agent's humanity and his vulnerability, even giving him a family – something, at last, to fight for, and to live for, and to die for, beyond just Queen and country. Perhaps the most controversial entry in the franchise's history, with fan reactions to its explosive ending ranging from outrage to those who felt killing off Craig's 007 provided a fitting send-off to his tragic take on the hero, No Time to Die didn't quite reach the heights of the actor's very best outings as Bond but was a marked improvement on its baggy predecessor. Your mileage may vary on the sci-fi tomfoolery that follows but just try and subdue a smirk when Q (Desmond Llewelyn) delivers that “attempting re-entry” line at the movie’s climax. The film’s first half is excellent, on a par with its immediate predecessor The Spy Who Loved Me, delivering a number of memorable sequences – Corinne (Corinne Cléry) being hunted by a pair of ravenous hounds, Bond’s encounter with the centrifuge – as Roger Moore’s 007 goes up against Michael Lonsdale’s urbane villain Hugo Drax, who delivers some of the very best one-liners in Bond villain history (“Mr Bond… you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you.”). It gets a lot of stick and while Moonraker is at points Bond at its absolute silliest – for all the ludicrous outer space antics, the ruthless killer Jaws falling in love and seeing the error of his ways is the film’s nadir – it’s actually far more substantial than many give it credit for.
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