Recommended James Bond films?

[LucasM]

i never got into the Bond films when they were being released.  I have seen, I think, three of them.  But I've long since run out of enough stuff to watch to fill my time, since the TBIs made it so reading is out of the question usually.

So I wanted to ask of any who have watched multiple Bond films:
* Which ones would you recommend?
* Which would you definitely recommend I AVOID?

Thanks! 

List of Bond films to make it easier:

1 Dr. No (1962) - - - - Seen
2 From Russia with Love (1963)
3 Goldfinger (1964)
4 Thunderball (1965)
5 You Only Live Twice (1967)
6 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
7 Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
8 Live and Let Die (1973)
9 The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
10 The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
11 Moonraker (1979)
12 For Your Eyes Only (1981)
13 Octopussy (1983)
14 A View to a Kill (1985)
15 The Living Daylights (1987)
16 Licence to Kill (1989)
17 GoldenEye (1995)
18 Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
19 The World Is Not Enough (1999)
20 Die Another Day (2002) - - - - Seen
21 Casino Royale (2006) - - - - Seen with RiffTrax
22 Quantum of Solace (2008)
23 Skyfall (2012)
24 Spectre (2015)
25 No Time to Die (2021)

Non-Eon films
1 Casino Royale (1967)
2 Never Say Never Again (1983)

[LucasM]

I double-checked in the booklet I've been keeping since the '80s of films I've seen (has come in VERY handy since the head injuries, as I don't remember many, and when I forget to look at it before starting a film, have found myself 1/2 an hour into a film and think, "I've seen this - and didn't like it then...").  In there, I found that I've actually seen almost half of the Bond films!  Last night I watched a couple more Daniel Craig ones.

So here's a list of only the Bond films I have not yet seen.  Likely an easier list to choose "Good"/"Avoid" with.  The films in brackets are not free with Prime, so I'd have to search out elsewhere if they are well-worth watching.

Thanks again to anyone who's got an opinion to share.

4 Thunderball (1965)
5 You Only Live Twice (1967)
9 The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
13 Octopussy (1983)
14 A View to a Kill (1985)
19 The World Is Not Enough (1999)
25 No Time to Die (2021)

Those not easily available:
[6 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)]
[7 Diamonds Are Forever (1971)]
[10 The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)]
[15 The Living Daylights (1987)]
[16 Licence to Kill (1989)]
[24 Spectre (2015)]

Non-Eon films
[1 Casino Royale (1967)]
[2 Never Say Never Again (1983)]

[LucasM]

After checking my "seen films" list and finding I'd seen about half of them, and then cutting what was left by what wasn't free with Prime?

I just thought, "fuck it: there aren't that many left - I'll just watch them all."  So I'm currently working my way through Thunderball.


Since I don't remember the ones I've seen, any recommendations for ones I might find it worth re-watching? 

[stethacantus]

Thunderball (1965)
One of the better early Bond films. Made back when the villains had some sort of ingenious plot rather than just a doomsday machine.

You Only Live Twice (1967)
The streak of good Bond films ended with this one. The script for it was given to Roald Dahl, the children's book author who wrote James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His idea was to completely throw out the entire plot of the novel the movie was based on and write his own plot, which was basically a retread of the plot from Doctor No.  I can only guess that the reason Eon decided to use his script was they needed him to write the script for ChittyChitty Bang Bang. A great musical, but the plot... a guy invents a magic car, drives it to Germany, parks it in a garage for the entire film, and finally retrieves the magic car once the adventure is over. You Only Live Twice is not a good Bond film, but it does have a good final act which began the series trope of Bond and an army of agents attacking the villain's base, and was responsible for popularizing the Ninja genre worldwide, which up to that point was only in Japanese films, where they had just phased the genre out.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Another of the weak Bond films. Too much of the novel was omitted in order to give the villain a by then overplayed doomsday machine plot.

Octopussy (1983)
By this time Eon had gone through all the novels and was going through the Bond short stories. Original plot: Bond is sent to arrest a double agent who has a pet octopus, who ends up being killed by the octopus before Bond has a chance to arrest him. New plot: a villain attempts to set off a nuke to frame NATO, and the Octopussy is the name of the film's Bond girl.  The action scene on the airplane at the end of the film is pretty thrilling, but otherwise is mostly weak, and you have Bond running around in a clown costume.

A View to a Kill (1985)
Rehash of Goldfinger. Considered the worst of the Bond films, but not really as bad as they say it was, and has a few good scenes. The regular cast really looks too old to still be in the series.

The World Is Not Enough (1999)
So-so and forgettable.

No Time to Die (2021)
No idea why it had such a long running time with such a thin plot. Mostly an excuse to wrap up the Craig series by killing off a lot of major characters. But generally as good as the average Craig Bond film.

Those not easily available:
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)]
The best Bond film starring the worst Bond actor. Once you get past the fact Lazenby is playing Bond, you should enjoy it. But it is a crime they could not get Connery to do this. It should have been his swan song for the series, not the next film...

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)]
Not as bad as many make it out to be. But Connery basically walks through the role.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)]
When Ian Flemming  agreed to sell Eon the rights to the Bond books, one of the conditions was that they never adapt the novel The Spy Who Loved Me. It was a novel Flemming hated. An experiment where the main character was the Bond woman, and Bond was hardly in it. He did give Eon permission to use the title of the novel as long as they gave it an original plot. Which is basically the same plot of the film that followed it, Moonraker. Considered one of the better Bond films. And the first of the two films to feature Jaws.

The Living Daylights (1987)]
Based on a Bond short story.... and they actually use the entire story. Only this time expanding on it with a plot to trick MI6 into assassinating a Russian general.  A pretty good underrated Bond film with a surprisingly intelligent plot, a lot of good action scenes, and the villain is Joe Don Baker!

Licence to Kill (1989)]
My favorite of the Bond films.

[24 Spectre (2015)]
As good as any average Craig film.

Non-Eon films
Casino Royale (1967)]
They couldn't get Sean Connery to do this one, because he was still loyal to Eon. Without Connery they decided to make it a comedy. Then came up with the idea of having more than one character playing Bond and having different directors shoot the individual Bond stories. Then Peter Sellers quit before completing his part of the film. And then they tried to fix the mess in editing but only made it more of a mess.

Never Say Never Again (1983)]
Remake of Thunderball. Not as good as Thunderball, but better than the last two Roger Moore films.

[LucasM]

WOW!  Thank you stethacantus - that is awesome!    

And, after reading your write up, there are at least a couple in the 'less easily found' arena that I'll now be searching out to see, as they sound worth digging for a bit.

After your description, I realized I saw the Sellers 'Casino Royale' fairly close to when it came out, probably watched it with my dad on TV.  My dad liked Sellers' work, but I don't care for slapstick, so didn't like Sellers' films.  Prior to watching, I remember seeing in one of my dad's Playboys - in one of the occasional sex in film articles - Ursula Undress ( ) strapped to the table with the metal bands covering strategic areas, which was incentive enough to watch at the time (about age nine or 10).  But, just as you described, even then I found the film confused and lacking either humor or dynamic tension.

Thanks again for such excellent descriptions and reviews.

EDIT: Just looked it up: It wasn't Ursula Andress strapped to the table, it was Daliah Lavi.  Oh, well... still didn't matter to a 9 or 10 year-old me.

[LucasM]

Just finished the rest of the ones I'd found with the search function on Prime.

Thunderball - might have been OK if they cut about 90% of the underwater scenes (film would've been 1/2 as long, too).  To me, watching swimming, or poorly choreographed fight scenes underwater - which basically makes them slow motion - is not actually watchable.  It truly felt as bad as the mountain climbing *DEEP*HURTING* from MST3K.

Oh, and I fully agree on the Roger Moore films.  DAMN but those are shit!  First, the MASSIVE misogyny in them... not just in Bond (something new to the character, and unique to Moore's take on 007), but in the way the films were WRITTEN - the Moore films THEMSELVES are misogynistic.  Add on top of that a combination of 'special' effects which would have been right at home in the marionette shows "Fireball XL-5" or "Thunderbirds", and 'camp' (which I DETEST), and it really could not have a good outcome.  For fuck's sake: I turned off Octopussy BEFORE THE CREDITS, right after Bond's single-passenger plane ran out of gas and glided into a fucking service station in the middle of nowhere rolling to a halt right in front of the gas pumps (so saw ~7-8 minutes total before I simply couldn't stand any more)!  (Sadly, no vomit emoji here.)

One thing I noticed is that Pierce Brosnan's films just felt like long TV episodes.  He just doesn't seem to me like a film actor, and it seemed the films came down to his level.  Not sure why that is, exactly.  But combine his not-quite-there acting with Fireball XL-5-quality 'special' effects and his films just looks like TV, rather than a theatrical presentation.  The budgets for all these Bond films must've been TINY (beyond stunt work and trashed cars), as the miniature work and matte work are so phenomenally obvious.

There are some things that were unintentionally hilarious in some of the ones I saw today.  The worst, I think it was in a Brosnan one, but Bond and the female lead are trying to climb out of a missile silo, with - of course - a massive explosion behind them.  And, with the fireball coming up underneath them, climbing a fucking LADDER, they beat the expanding fireball out of the tube!  Just amazing that the film-makers thought people would accept that as remotely legit.  [Even 'clicking one's BIC' demonstrates how full of shit that is.]

Then... after I finish the last of the ones I'd found doing a search for "Bond 007", I'm looking on Prime further, and they have in a "we think you'll like" section... all the other ones that did NOT turn up with a friggin' search (why they didn't turn up, I don't know).   That was with the exceptions of "Spectre" from 2015, and "Never Say Never Again" from '83.  So thankfully I can watch the other worthwhile ones you pointed out, stethacantus (and, for the hell of it, see how long I last with the other Moore films... not very long is my educated guess).

[The Lurker]

Goldeneye's probably my favorite of the Brosnan run, though that might just be nostalgia talking.

[LucasM]

Goldeneye's probably my favorite of the Brosnan run, though that might just be nostalgia talking.

Thanks for the recommendation, The Lurker.  Since I likely rented it around when it came out on home video (so: >25 years ago, and very shortly after my first head injury), it may be worth a revisit.

[stethacantus]

Thunderball - might have been OK if they cut about 90% of the underwater scenes (film would've been 1/2 as long, too).  To me, watching swimming, or poorly choreographed fight scenes underwater - which basically makes them slow motion - is not actually watchable.  It truly felt as bad as the mountain climbing *DEEP*HURTING* from MST3K.

I would have put Thunderball within the good Bond films. S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s plot to steal nuclear missiles was smart, not like the later films where the villain's scheme was just a doomsday machine for Bond to blow up. Emilio Largo was among the top Bond villains. Domin was among the best of the Bond women. And it had sharks! The early films were more about spycraft than action scenes, and you don't really get good action until On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The action scenes were just about the only thing that made the Moore films bearable, or even entertaining. Also to be considered is that the underwater fight scenes were novel and groundbreaking in 1965. Maybe boring by today's standards, but audiences back then would have been thrilled. I would not qualify them as deep hurting. The deep hurting scenes in the MST3K films, whether characters walking through a sand storm, climbing a cliff, or taking a loooooooooong drive somewhere, is meant to be padding. It is a break in the story where characters are on their way to the next scene and the plot comes to a standstill. The underwater scenes in Thunderball are the plot. I don't think they were as long as they were for padding, but because moving through water is sort of unavoidably slow. There is an actual edit of Thunderball where the underwater scenes were edited. But only on VHS. When the Bond films were released on home video, the masters were edited so that the movie would fit on a T120. Those were the video tapes that are only 2 hours on SP. The next tape would have been the T140 which would have cost an extra $3. And if you are releasing 10,000 copies, that is an extra $30,000 the distributor would have to pay for the blank VHS tapes. ( A lot of VHS releases were edited or time compressed. The VHS release of Tim Burton's Batman cut the line "Where does he get those wonderful toys" to just"...those wonderful toys", as well as micro cutting a lot of other lines and action scenes, which I understand they did whenever the music paused so that the edits would not be audible. ) About 15 minutes were cut from Thunderball, all of which were almost all in the climatic underwater fight scene.

[LucasM]

I agree the underwater scenes in Thunderball might have been something to see for people of that era.  But I'm from that era, and they would've bored me then, too.  Each of those scenes went on too long for what was needed for a smoothly-flowing plot (the plot grinds to a halt each time they are underwater).  I think most of the earlier films had simple core plots, but to me, that one was just, "steal something and hold it for ransom."  Since they were prepared to pay the ransom if Bond failed, the likelihood of the nukes falling into dangerous hands that would use them was nil.  So no tension in that regard.

Plus, the amount of screen time given to them stealing the nukes underwater was WAY more than the scene needed for people to go, "oooh... NOW I get it: they are stealing the nukes underwater!"  I'm not averse to detail - I inherited my dad's mechanical engineering brain, and examined Harryhausen films on Super8 frame-by-frame before doing my own animation as a teen.  But, like I think Kevin (Servo) said with one of the spy MSTs as a faux nun burritoed a woman and sent her down a line to the ambulance to abduct her, "they were very keen to show exactly how this was done - whatever 'this' is."

With the nuke stealing, three relatively short shots was all that was needed: loading the nukes onto the floating platform, the platform moving a bit (this scene could be cut in half with a shot of Bond, elsewhere, in between to show they traveled a long ways), and them unloading.  My guess is that they weren't doing it specifically as filler, but more so, "we paid a LOT for these underwater props, and by god we're going to get out money's worth!"  But it leads to the same outcome.

To me, the climactic underwater fight just - well - wasn't.  When Bond was swimming out to take out whoever he did to end the film, he passed by the large group of people 'fighting' where they were basically holding each-others' hands and swaying back and forth in the water like they were dancing.  No harpoons.  No knives.  Not even trying to kick each-other.  Just didn't look particularly dangerous, and actually decreased any dramatic tension for me during what was supposed to be the climax of the film.

For me, of the earlier Bond films, of the few that I recently watched in order to have seen them all, the one I enjoyed most was Diamonds Are Forever.  It seemed there was more complexity to the plot, even though at its core it was still a retrieving a stolen item story.

I've actually finished all but Spectre, the only Bond film Prime doesn't appear to have.  It was fun, and interesting to see in a compressed time frame, the range of how this iconic character was presented, based partly on the decade that the films came out.

Overall, I'd have to say I prefer Craig's portrayal, even though he appears emotionless much of the time.  Not sure if that preference is from the level of details in the story, or that he is the only Bond to not be a sexist douche (or outright violent misogynist like Moore's)... probably both, actually.

I also know that the earlier ones (with the exception of Moore's) were representative of 12-year-old's fantasies and were largely as sexist as they were because the society was that sexist.  For me, that's still hard to get past.  And, actually, it is not just that Craig's Bond has more detail to the stories, or that he's not a sexist douche, it is that Craig's Bond was the first one to actually act like an adult in how he interacts with others.  And, actually, where ANY adults in the films treated others like they were adults, with actual psychological depth.  [i.e. Earlier Bonds to me, were at best 2-dimensional]

That's sort-of like how Whedon's TV shows went: Buffy was high school, Angel was first getting out on your own and getting a job, and Firefly was full-on adults managing a mortgage and family.  Early Bond was immature, Brosnan was starting to get the hang of adulting, and Craig is full adulthood.

I think with my background in psych, I likely look at the films differently than most.  And with that, I'm likely looking for different things.  Hell, in the big action scenes I often tuned out waiting for the next real plot aspect to show up.  Chases and fights and explosions really don't do anything for me unless there are characters with enough depth that I care what happens (another potential reason I liked Craig's)... which, I suppose, means that in part I likely chose to finish watching the wrong movie series. 

[crowstar]

My all-time favourite is Die Another Day
In my opinion, no one can replace Pierce Brosnan as BOND

[Cyrusso]

No time to die I dare say might be the BEST Bond movie. For once, we see James Bond at his weakest point, and at his most emotionally vulnerable.

[Susquehanna-2222]

Spy Who Loved Me.  Best Bond film EVER.  I'm one them-there Roger Moore lovers.  One time in a theater before the film started the announcer says ok by a show of hands who's the best Bond?  Roger Moore?  I gave a hearty yussah with hands to Allah.  I got voted down decidedly when he followed with how about Sean Connery?  After that I was peppered with lasers by those wiseasses in the projection booth.  Pricks lol.  I should have stood up turned around and pretended to be peppered with machine gun fire.  Anyhow TSWLM had the BEST soundtrack by THE Marvin Hamlisch, the best theme ever with Carly Simon, the best villains, a cool ski chase in the beginning.  An awesome water-base.  That testosterossa vs helicopter sequence was badass with Caroline Munroe!  Jaws and everything.  I mean come on, that smirk Roger has while skiing in front of the green screen?  PLUS Connery was just plain mean-spirited.  Roger's the best and I think he's starting to get more respect.

[Cyrusso]

I recommend:
On her majesty's secret service - The only Bond movie to feature the most obscure Bond of them all... George Lazenby. Great story, great music, great movie.

Moonraker: This is usually considered the black sheep of the entire Bond franchise, but I'm rather fond of it anyway. I say give it a watch, as it's the ONLY time the Bond series goes into straight up 100% Sci-Fi territory.

For your Eyes only: This was a serious attempt at course correction after the not so great reception of Moontaker... so if Moonraker wasn't quite your cup of tea, For your eyes only will most likely be a great watch. 

The Living Daylights: Of the two Timothy Dalton movies, this is the one I still enjoy immensely. Great story and plot, that's a lot more complicated and interesting than most other Bond films.