Moving right along into Thunderball, also known as “the movie where you can’t decide whether the underwater fight scenes are kinda awesome or excruciatingly awful.” I’m leaning towards the former, even with all the dramatic!!! scoring. We’re back in the tropics again, SPECTRE is up to their no-good evil-doing, and there are lots of babes. I think by now we’ve got the Bond formula down, so away we go!
Plot in twenty words or less: SPECTRE nabbed a couple of bombs, and is blackmailing the Brits and Americans for a gajillion bucks. Plus, SHARK TANK!!!
How it’s aged: I’d say about 1/3 is pretty fresh (mostly in the costuming department: Bond’s very hipster-y shorty shorts, Felix Leiter’s intriguing mod-rockabilly-Super American look, and Domino’s totally hotttt bathing suits), 1/3 is kinda-sorta still relevant (SPECTRE in this movie is sort of taking on North Korea levels of cray-cray by demanding a message to be communicated via EFFING BIG BEN), and 1/3 is just…. oh, no, do we have to go there? levels of embarrassing misogynist grossness (see: Bond telling the massage therapist he won’t rat her out for the incident on the spinal machine if she has sex with him: “my silence has a price”. Ugh)
Something that was just weird and/or WTF y’all: OK, so let me get this straight – one of the Big Scary SPECTRE-seized bombs that was supposedly going to obliterate Miami Beach was on the Disco Volante (I think this will be the name of my first album when I convene my future rock band, Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus) when it ran aground on the rocks, and all that happened was…..the boat exploding in flames? So much for total nuclear annihilation.
Obligatory feminist commentary: In this Bond movie, we get the first for-real Bond girl villian with Fiona Volpe, who doesn’t ever flip over to being on Bond’s side even after getting it on with him. Volpe ends up taking a bullet meant for Bond, while they were dancing in the Kiss Kiss Club. I’m trying to get more into some of the academic writing on James Bond films, and just read an interesting article on the the role of Bond girl villains (which apparently have not been a very consistent presence throughout the franchise). Garland makes the argument that Bond girl villains present a very different approach to sexuality from James Bond: where 007 keeps his sexy times and professional missions clearly delineated, Bond girl villains often don’t and are killed off as part of the storyline (Garland, T. W. (2009). “The Coldest Weapon of All”: The Bond Girl Villain in James Bond Films. Journal of Popular Film & Television, 37(4), 179–188.) Quoting from this article:
Having used sex to place Bond an immediately perilous situation, Volpe cannot help but taunt him because she wishes not merely to defeat him as her enemy, but also to express her desire to sexually possess him and humiliate him. Her open deception makes Volpe a formidable opponent, but ultimately leads to her death because, as the totality of her character, her duplicity produces an inherent contradiction between her mission and her desire (p. 182).
…Of course, this perpetuates all sorts of notions that Bond, as the manliest of men, can separate sex from work in a way that women are seemingly incapable of in most Bond movies. Which is why I think the most radical thing that could be done with Bond is to recast 007 as a woman in future films.
Completely hypothetical cultural reference points: Anyone else catch the part where Bond says “Strange as it may seem, I’ve grown accustomed to your face?” I’m going to go out on an (incredibly) obvious limb here and say this might have been a nod to My Fair Lady. Thunderball was released just over a year after My Fair Lady.
Superficial Thing that did not Amuse Me: What in the hell was happening with Bond’s hat after his meeting with the other 00 agents? He remarked, “I thought I had a hat” when leaving Moneypenny’s office and then shrugged it off, and I was like “ME TOO, JAMES, YOU PUT IT ON THE COAT STAND!” and then it never came back up. WHYYYYYYY?!?!?!?! This was a total Chekhov’s gun moment that was still driving me nuts the day after I saw it. If there was something subtle I missed, someone clue me in, please.
Superficial Thing that highly Amused Me: I know this is just my juvenile 5th-grade sense of humor speaking, but the scene with Bond on the spinal traction machine was so unintentionally suggestive I couldn’t stop laughing. Sorry, James.
Interesting and possibly dubious thing I learned from Wikipedia: So the whole SHARK TANK!!! aspect was no joke. Sean Connery was totally freaked out about filming the scene with the sharks and insisted on the use of a glass partition, and one got through and almost attacked him! Eeeek! And it gets weirder! Apparently someone brought what was allegedly a shark carcass on set (hey, we all know how this goes, right?) and IT ACTUALLY TURNED OUT TO BE ALIVE. OMG WTF!!!!!!!
Runner-up for on-set malarkey is that apparently when the yacht exploded, it shattered windows in Nassau, 30 miles away from filming.
Martini rating: Four martinis 
Administrative information concerning this viewing:
Drinks consumed: Rogue Dead Guy Ale
Food eaten: Sweet potato and black bean burritos
Viewed on: April 28, 2013
Viewing Partners: Sasha Holiday*, Boyfriend and Cat
*Not her real name. All my viewing buddies are getting Bond-girl aliases.
Recasting Bond as a woman would definitely be radical. It’d be so radical, in fact, that a female Bond would arguably be an entirely different character altogether. It’d be interesting to see, though.
I think THUNDERBALL is a good movie and a lot of fun, but it’s also the first Bond flick, I think, that feels like a little bit of a retread. I see shades of GOLDFINGER all over.