And so begins my January Project of watching all 25 James Bond films in a single month.
I'm excited for this project, I've had it on my radar since sometime early last year, and the top of 2022 seemed like the right time to do it. I could count on one hand the number of Bond films I've seen all the way through. It's quite possible that Daniel Craig's Casino Royale is the only one. I know I've seen clips and bits and pieces of others, but there has been a twinge of shame in my heart at times that I have watched Austin Powers movies far more than I've watched Bond films.
So here we go, today we start at the beginning with
DR. NO, in which James Bond travels to Jamaica, to unravel and thwart the plans of the titular Dr. No, a rogue scientist bent on using radio beams to disrupt a USA rocket launch in nearby Cape Canaveral.
First of all, Sean Connery is the absolute most 45-year-old-looking 32 year old this world has ever known. I simply cannot believe he was 31-32 at the time of filming. It's absurd. I cannot wrap my head around it. Perhaps Connery is an old soul by nature, but even just on a purely physical level, my mind is boggled that Connery in this movie is younger than I am now.
He's a great Bond, no doubt. Let me establish this - the first 30 minutes of this movie is some of the greatest compact introductory storytelling I've ever seen on screen. Not a moment is wasted, every scene clips by briskly, it's a masterclass in "show, don't tell". You learn so much about Bond in Act One without any exposition dumps, and that's a remarkable feat .
The middle of the movie slows WAY down. It's enjoyable all the way through (one of the shortest Bond films in the canon), but I feel as though a good bit of material could have been excised. Oddly I feel as though the movie is inverse of standard pacing - the further we get in and towards the climax, the slower it goes, until we reach a painfully slow "Bond escapes from his captor" scene, underscored with no music whatsoever, that left me scratching my head as to the artistic choices. But, they had a small budget. Maybe they ran out of money for music. And maybe they'd bought too much film and were determined to use it all.
Dr. No is a throwaway villain, but aren't they (mostly) all in spy films? I didn't realize that SPECTRE gets introduced this early. The movie wraps up INCREDIBLY quickly, the denouement is like falling off a cliff. But it's fun and satisfactory and Bond saves the Bond girl (Ursula Andress, n i c e). A really good entry. I'm a James Bond fan.
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