Bond Remastered - You Only Live Twice (1-disc) [DVD]

From the opening bars of the title song (surely the best Bond song ever) I'm back queuing outside the Carlton in Essex Road at a very tender age waiting to see the latest big thing. There's no other film that quite manages it (well maybe Zulu).

Connery is, and always will be, James Bond - I know a couple of the others have been quite good, Daniel Craig amongst them, but Connery is the best, even if he was too common for Ian Fleming. Let's face it if it wasn't for the films the books would have been long forgotten.

Anyway Bond's in Japan; someone's trying to start World War III by kidnapping spaceships; there's lot's of sinister Orientals (and some good ones); the baddies have lots of opportunities to just kill him but never quite get around to it; Donald Pleasence strokes his cat and there's a damn good punch up in a hollowed-out volcano. The music's fabulous (good old John Barry), the script is witty (good old Roald Dahl) and well, it's just splendid.

One star deducted for whoever's idea it was to disguise Connery as a Japanese fisherman - I mean, I know it's James Bond, but come on!

Ok - this is purely my own experience and I'm sure shared by others with a discerning eye - not needed to be deeply so I might add! This film has not been treated fully with the high definition process - in parts it looks extremely ropey, VHS quality. They are cheap for GOOD REASON I think.

Unlike others, who usually get it wrong - I'll NOT review the film - but WILL review the blu-ray.

Close -ups on faces are fine....that's the upscalers` showpiece, isn't it....but most everything apart from that is no better than DVD quality. I have a flagship Panasonic blu-ray player, and top LED screen by them also....I am a ' detail ' freak, and this is terrible. Another, which is arguably WORSE on account of it being a more modern film is ' The Spy Who Loved me ' - awful transition to blu ray. On BOTH these films, sky is grainy throughout, and many patches of low res action - even some stills are poor. However, it's not ALL bad news....On Her Majesty`s Secret Service is just fine! A proper job seemingly done.

To conclude, I'll just say what I've been telling friends all along - James Bond on blu-ray is VERY hit and miss....the modern stuff, great - but the older stuff....one has to make allowances sure, but they've still cut corners. ( With OHMSS being the exception in my opinion - and reviewers of THAT on Amazon ) Anyway, worth a tenner? Yeah, just about.
A more fair ' getting what you pay for ' price in my truthful, humble opinion would be 7 or 8 pounds.

Having said that, I have to collect them all! ( Didn't like the box set - and had already started with half the singles upon it's release )

ps - I do love the film, the whole package is classic Bond to me, the film will always get 5/5

You Only Live Twice is directed by Lewis Gilbert and written by Roald Dahl. It stars Sean Connery, Tetsuro Tamba, Teru Shimada, Akiko Wakabayashi, Mie Hama, Karin Dor and Donald Pleasence. Music is scored by John Barry and cinematography by Freddie Young.

Bond 5 and Connery once again tackles the role of 007. With American and Soviet space craft mysteriously vanishing from space, both nations are laying the blame at the other's door. Sensing a nuclear war could break out, M assigns Bond to Japan to investigate if there might be a third party stirring the hornets nest. Teaming up with the Japanese secret service, Bond uncovers evidence that SPECTRE is behind the plot to pitch the East and the West against each other.

This organisation does not tolerate failure.

Thunderball had broke box office records for Bond, gadgetry, outlandish stunts and a quip on the tongue had proved most profitable. It was planned originally that On Her Majesty's Secret Service would be number 5 in the series, but a change of tack to go for You Only Live Twice as the story gave producers Broccoli & Saltzman the scope for a giganticus enormous production. However, it may be set in Japan and feature a Bond/Blofeld conflict, but Roald Dahl's script bares little resemblance to Ian Fleming's source novel. Although a massive financial success with a Worldwide gross of over $111 million, Bond 5 took $30 million less than Thunderball. Strange since this is a better film. Can we attribute the drop to it being a space age saga? Maybe, the rebirth of sci-fi was a few years away, and of course Bond had lost some fans who had grown tired, like Connery, of 007 relying on gadgets instead of brains and brawn to complete his missions. There was also the rival Casino Royale production, as bad as it was, to contend with, while the spy boom created by Bond had been overkilled elsewhere and was on the wane.

Extortion is my business. Go away and think it over, gentlemen. I'm busy.

True enough that You Only Live Twice has flaws, though they are far from being film killers if you like the gadgets and hi-techery side of the franchise? Connery announced once production was over that he was leaving the role of Bond behind. He had been close to breaking point after Thunderball, but finally the media circus, typecasting, the fanaticism and the character merely being a cypher for outrageous sequences, led Connery to finally call it a day. His displeasure shows in performance, oh it's professional, very much so, but the swagger and machismo from the earlier films has gone. Although Dahl's script tones down the "cheese" dialogue and unfolds as a plot of considerable World peril worth, characterisations are thinly drawn, making this reliant on production value and action sequences. Thankfully both are top dollar. And the ace up its sleeve is the long awaited face to face meeting of Bond and Blofeld.

The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It's the last program you're likely to see.

Ken Adam's set design is fit to grace any epic in film history, as is Freddie Young's photography around the Japanese locales, Barry lays a beautiful Bond/Oriental score all over proceedings and Nancy Sinatra's title song is appealingly catchy. The action is excellently constructed by Gilbert (helming the first of three Bond movies on his CV), with the final battle at Blofeld's volcano crater base full of explosions, flying stunt men, expert choreography and meaty fights. Along the way we have been treated to Ninjas, Piranhas, poison, aeroplane peril and the awesome Little Nellie versus the big boy copter smack down! Then there's that Bond/Blofeld confrontation. Well worth the wait, with Pleasence visually scary with bald head (setting the marker for bald villainy to follow in TV and cinema it seems) and scar across his eye. Pleasence is also very low key with his menace, which is perfect, we don't want pantomime and the scenes with Bond work wonderfully well.

It made less than the film before it and it has fierce critics in Bond and Fleming circles. But it's a Bond film that pays rich rewards on revisits, where the artistry on show really shines through in this HD/Upscale age. 8/10