Bond Films: Never Say Never Again

Never Say Never Again is the only non-EON Bond film I am watching for this little marathon. When it was released, it just sort of blurred together with the other Bond films of that era as they floated through the premium cable channel of my childhood. In retrospect, it holds up pretty well, better than Octopussy and A View To A Kill, perhaps even with For Your Eyes Only. This is hardly a surprise since it's basically a remake of Thunderball, updating the backdrop from the mid-Sixties to the early Eighties, and substituting an older, semi-retired Bond, Connery at 52, hardly more ridiculous than Roger Moore at 55 (or so) at the time.

The basic plot of Never Say Never Again is: not quite the exact same plot of Thunderball. In this version, Bond is basically training 00s and partaking in training himself. With nary a mention of SPECTRE directly, he takes a break and goes to a health spa, where he spies upon Fatima Blush tending to the air force pilot who has been given retinal surgery to subvert security clearance for loading nuclear warheads on what is meant to be a training flight. Instead of crash-landing the plane, the missiles are dropped in the ocean and the officer is dispatched by Fatima. Bond, following clues, meets the pilot's sister (the girl, played by a young Kim Basinger) who is moll to Largo. There is a weird showdown scene where Bond kills Fatima after she demands he write a note stating she was the best sex he ever had. The girl is put on the auction block for slavers, Bond rescues her, and then gets launched in a sort of flying platform in order to dive to where the missiles are kept. In the resulting fight scene - much reduced from Thunderball's epic scuba combat scene - Bond is nearly killed by Largo before the girl, as in Thunderball, spears him.

I'll skim over the few details I know about how this movie came to exist - basically, legal wrangling about story rights to Thunderball - to simply state: this is solid Bond film, and like its predecessor basically gets all the elements in the right proportion. It's interesting in that Connery is once again Bond, albeit over ten years on from when he last played the part, and the secondary cast is played entirely by different actors than the EON films. The result is a sort of alternate-reality Bond, where you can see the formula played out with different ingredients. It isn't better or worse; it's different, and despite the animosity between the two factions at the time, a worthwhile addition to the Bond canon.