[Note: This is part of a project I'm calling "A Century in a Month". The idea is that I'm going to start with a movie from about 100 years ago and pick a series of connected films until I get to the present. The rules I set this time are release years, per IMDB, can't be more than 5 years apart. I can't repeat the same connection although I can reuse the same type of connection. That means if I use "movies directed by Scorsese" to connect two, I can't use Scorsese as a connection again but I can use a director as a linking element again. I'm not really sure why I'm doing this, but it seems like a fun game.]
Connection to Dr. No: In the James Bond series.
Premise: James Bond does stuff in Japan.
Perhaps it’s cheap to use two James Bond movies as connectors in this “Century in a Month” project, but I don’t care. I’ve got a lot of James Bond movies to catch up on. You could argue that I’m doing the series no favors by watching them all in such a scattered order over several years. I largely agree, but I sure do like to watch these like one off adventures with no greater context. If step on Blofeld’s grand reveal that’s a fair tradeoff.
James Bond has never been a series concerned with aging well. Counterintuitively, that’s why they’ve remained popular. This movie’s understanding of how spacecrafts work is charmingly naïve in a very 1967 way. The embrace of Japanese culture is simplistic but kind of endearing. I do laugh at the idea that they could take a man like Sean Connery and expect to be able to make him blend in there. This is pretty mid-tier of the James Bond I’ve seen. Arguably though, one of the better balances of zany and serious.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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