Premise: James Bond tracks down some bombs stolen by SPECTRE, or something like that.
I've seen very few of the early Bond movies. Through a mix of coincidence and recency bias, I've seen every Bond movie from The Living Daylights (1987) on and only Goldfinger (1964) before that. I know I'll eventually get to the entire series, so the logical part of my brain says I should start at Dr. No and watch them all in order. I'm more into the Time Lord approach though. Except for more recent movies, it's more of an episodic series that I can watch in any order. So I will.
Even though it looks like most or all of the Bond franchise is streaming, I opted for Thunderball because...I'm actually not sure. I have a list of movies on a white board in my office and that ended up on it somehow. Anyway, with Sean Connery recently passed, it felt like a good pick. And it was! This movie is ridiculous. The gender dynamics certainly don't age well. The villains and gadgets are all silly. It all works though.
Sean Connery is a smooth operator. The villains all look like bond villains (I love the eyepatch and the cat). Of course, there's a shark pool. I love the stunts and action sequences. "The underwater fight sequence is bitchin'" per the notes I took while watching it. I also appreciate how quickly the movie starts and ends. The beginning is so abrupt that I had to double-check that Hulu didn't start me midway through the movie by mistake, and the end happens only moments after the action deescalates. I couldn't tell you what the story of the movie actually was, and I don't think that matters. I had fun, and that's why these movies are so enduring. Thunderball came out before people had a chance to think too hard about the formula of a Bond movie.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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