You Only Live Twice

Sunday 26th January

Bond begins this film in Hong Kong faking his own murder with the help of the British Navy. No sooner as body is ceremoniously plopped into the sea a couple of sneaky individuals take it to a nearby submarine where the body bag is opened to reveal Bond completely fine and wearing an oxygen mask.  After a brief chat with M and Moneypenny he’s spat back out again near the Japanese coast, no rest for the wicked.

He tracks down the quite strange Mr Henderson, and while I was slightly disappointed not to find my old chemistry teacher on the other side of the door the disappointment didn’t last long as he’s quite literally and remarkably quietly stabbed in the back. Cleverly James catches the killer, disguises himself as him to use the getaway vehicle to try and gauge the enemy’s identity. Instead he manages to crack a safe jump in a getaway car with a random girl and end up being caught by the person he was trying to meet in the first place – all terribly confusing if you ask me.

Despite being a long way from England Q does not disappoint as he brings Bond a mecano helicopter; for someone pretending to be dead this is quite a stupid move, not only is it bright yellow it’s also extremely noisy attracting a stupid amount of attention to such a unique machine.  It can therefore not be considered surprising when four normal sized helicopters arrive with the apparent aim of shooting Bond out of the sky.  Proving size doesn’t matter James and his tiny flying machine prevail bringing them all down.

Back once more with his cat is number one; his love of fighting fish has moved on from goldfish to piranhas, though I can’t see his feeding this to the cat and although they do give him a new way of disposing of agents I believe they are further proof that the execution branch of SPECTRE is being to get bored and uncreative.

In an interesting racist twist; Bond must become ‘Japanese’ which apparently involves wearing a wig and a partial face mask to cover his eyes. He’s also forced to marry, as apparently this makes the whole thing less suspicious. A strange triple wedding where the minister reads from a take away menu before presenting the couples with lunch which since its Japan that have to eat with chopsticks.

Finally we get to see the face of the elusive number one who has been kept from the viewer since film two. Not only do we get to see him but he also reveals his real name and it’s not surprising he prefers to go by number one. Only a minute and a half away from starting the next world war Bond is seemingly powerless to stop the evil scheme; and the rocket launches. What number one and his rather bored looking cat haven’t planned on is the ninja army approaching to save Bond and destroy number one’s little hideout.

Honestly, I’m starting to tire of the concept of SPECTRE now; initially the idea that this film would be based around space related things was promising but I actually found it quite tiresome and difficult to maintain interest in this film.  Though since number one is still alive I can only assume there will be at least one more SPECTRE related adventure, unless the cat snaps and attacks him before number one can come up with a new plan.