During the writing of this piece, I went back and read the Wikipedia article for the book. It sounds SO much better!
The more you have of anything, the more likely it is that the creators will get lazy and go for a shameless cash-in. Hey, that reminds me of when I watched You Only Live Twice!
The Cast Phones It In.
Oh, no. OH, NO!
The most glaring problem in this movie has to be the cast, which is a crying shame.
You Only Live Twice is Sean Connery’s fifth outing as James Bond, and the film relies on him far too much to carry the load. Sure, he has some funny lines here and there, but his performance is more of a repetition than an evolution of the character. This shouldn’t be a thing because most of these early films have a loosely connected story arc that involves SPECTRE. If the villains can change things, why not our protagonist?
Sadly, the Bond girls are representative of every inane criticism of this franchise. Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi), Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama/Nikki van der Zyl), and Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) are just there to be a lay, help Bond with his yellowface routine, and zig-zag between being a lover and a killer. The screenwriters who have worked on this franchise are more than capable of creating decent female characters, so why didn’t they try to do that here?
I guess we’ll have to look up exactly who wrote this when we get to the plot section!
As for our primary villain, You Only Live Twice marks the first full appearance of Ernest Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence), and he’s okay. I’d like to say more, but he’s just there to be a maniac hell-bent on world domination. He isn’t even as memorable as his underlings from the previous films!
The Plot Is Repetitive And Silly.
The franchise already dealt with the Space Race in Dr. No.
I know. One could say the same thing about all of these films, but the problems in this one are far too glaring to ignore. First things first, let’s see who wrote this, shall we?
Roald Dahl? The same guy who wrote virtually every early childhood-defining story of the 20th Century?! No.
The film opens with the capture of the Jupiter 16 by an unidentified metal dong spaceship. For some reason, the U.S. thinks that the Soviets are involved… except that the ship landed in the Sea of Japan. Under normal circumstances, this would dispel that idea because it’d be almost impossible to sneak a communist space program under the nose of Allied Intelligence. However, these people are dumb, and the plot hinges on that.
By the way, why didn’t the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union consider SPECTRE?
For some reason, Bond has to fake his death in order to handle the situation, even though that makes no real sense. Everyone who is remotely associated with SPECTRE or the Soviets knows who he is, so they are going to see that he’s very much alive when he waltzes through the door. Why bother other than because title?
To make matters worse, it is strongly implied that Communist China is behind all of SPECTRE’s actions, which raises the same irritating problem that plagued Goldfinger. If we take each of these films as a part of one story, the Chinese have participated in nuclear terrorism on two separate occasions. Shouldn’t the world try to do something about that?
I know that I’m not supposed to think so hard, but I didn’t have to do that when I was watching Thunderball. The plot may be a bit absurd, but at least the screenwriters tried to craft a convincing threat for Bond to foil at the last minute.
Quick! Say Something Nice About It!
That’s cool, I guess.
Are there things that I like in You Only Live Twice? Mildly.
The helicopter fight in the middle is pretty neat. At first, I wondered why a single trigger pull fired every single missile in a particular box when one or two could bring down an enemy chopper, but the fight scene works well regardless.
And yes, Bond’s ninja and astronaut backup is a nice touch. I don’t think that Japanese Intelligence trains its operatives in old-timey martial arts, but it fits the atmosphere of the movie.
It’s also kind of interesting that all of the pseudo-offensive lines were given to Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Temba). In our current era of wokeness, that wouldn’t fly at all.
With all of that said, I have to resort to an old refrain. You don’t get a cookie for the technicals if the story doesn’t work.
Conclusion.
I’m afraid that I have your mojo, Mr. Powers… er, I mean, Bond!
If you’ll pardon the pun, You Only Live Twice doesn’t really live up to the 007 name. The characters just aren’t there, the story is an absolute mess, and anything interesting in it is easily hampered by a number of distracting problems. If you want a more entertaining version of this story, you should watch the Austin Powers Trilogy. At the very least, you’ll get more laughs out of it.
Fortunately, things about to get a whole lot better!
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