007 Dreams: You Only Live Twice

As I wrote in my piece on Goldfinger, there are basically three Bondkinos that vie for first place in the lengthy series. You Only Live Twice is one of them. This is the one in which a helicopter picks up a car full of baddies with a magnet and drops it into the ocean, which Bond watches on a small TV screen built into his girlfriend's car.

>it's just so much more interestin'
>than what?
>than life

Naturally, this is superior surrealism. You Only Live Twice might be the Bondkino that tips its hand most obviously, with the title song stating "you only live twice/or so it seems/one life for yourself/and one for your dreams", and there's more pure dream logic in this one than ever. It's also the first instalment to completely disregard the plot of its source novel, keeping only a few names and concepts. The main plot, involving SPECTRE hijacking space rockets to push the US and USSR into nuclear war, is all new and all the better for it, not least because it allows for the creation of Ken Adam's greatest masterpiece: the volcano lair.

This might be the only series in which the auteur is the set designer, not any of the directors or writers.

Here Bond meets Blofeld for the first time, and he's clearly not the same person we nearly saw two times before at all. The back of his head was clearly visible with hair in From Russia With Love, but here he is completely bald and sports a massive scar, and dresses like Mao Zedong, which is ironic because, like Goldfinger before him, he's actually being sponsored by the Chinese, who he has the brass balls to try to extort more cash out of at one point.

What do the Chinese know about business and geopolitics, amirite?

No matter though, as he is played by Donald Pleasance and his personality and attitude are entirely in keeping with prior depictions: he's detached, emotionless and calculating, and has a Darwinistic approach to motivation and management that involves feeding his underlings to piranhas.

thot status absolutely patrolled lmao

It's this coldness that makes Blofeld Classic such a great antagonist and a counterpoint to the more venal, greedy or rage-filled Goldfingers and Largos, so of course they fucked it up and turned him into a pantomime baddy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Nonetheless, here he is excellent and, despite neglecting to have Bond shot out of hand (of which Austin Powers would make much hay), pretty smart. Not only is his base guarded by helicopters and mounted gun turrets, but his control room is protected by steel shutters and he has a monorail prepped for escape and a failsafe switch to destroy the volcano should it fall into enemy hands. He's much better prepared than in Diamonds Are Forever, where he lets the goodies find his base because he literally added it to a floor map in the Willard White pent house.

DURR HURR I'M RETARDED

Twice also wins on musical score, with its inexorably building SPECTRE rocket theme, making it both the best looking and sounding instalment to date. On the minus side, henchman Hans is totally generic and the villainess seems like a less interesting rehash of Thunderball's Fiona, right down to the red hair. She does, however, go to the trouble of trapping Bond in a plane and parachuting out, leaving him to crash to earth, which is a wonderfully elaborate way of not shooting him that makes Blofeld and Largo look like amateurs. This makes no sense whatsoever. All I can think of is that maybe she was thinking of legitimately switching sides, then just decided not to at the last minute, which would at least be consistent with the powers of persuasion hitherto demonstrated by Bond's dicc.

it's not you it's meeeee

The Little Nelly chase is possibly the best Bond chase of all too, and the mass battle in the volcano is a lot of fun and mayhem, not to be matched until The Spy Who Loved Me's sub pen battle. Despite the training sequence (with live targets) shown in From Russia With Love, SPECTRE goons don't seem to have much of a head for strategy and mostly run around a lot firing randomly. Maybe Blofeld killed all the good ones for being late or mispronouncing things.

a cautionary tale of manlet rage.

What we can certainly say is that this was the end of the series as we know it, the last time continuity was observed until the Craig abominations. Connery would return to finish off SPECTRE in Diamonds Are Forever, but it wouldn't be the same. I guess we had to wake up sometime.