The first feature-length sequel film, The Fall of a Nation, came out in 1916, a year after its predecessor, the seminal The Birth of a Nation. I mention this to indicate that sequels have been part of the movie business for almost as long as there’s been a movie business to be a part of. To the studios, taking a successful film and then doing it all over again is a good way to make money. Sequels are usually full of the elements that made the previous film a success. To entice viewers to pay money to see the new movie, the producers will usually include more of those elements. In other words, a sequel is often like the original film, but bigger and louder.

In that regard, You Only Live Twice is a very typical sequel. Beautiful women, exotic locales, the biggest fight scene yet, it’s all here. But somewhere along the line, you might start wondering, in between the exploding helecopters, erupting volcanos and the rocket blasting off into space, if James Bond hasn’t kind of forgotten the whole “secret” part of being a secret agent. It’s a fun movie to watch, but I can’t help but feel it’s a little too big and bombastic.

Like almost all its predecessors, the film opens with a pre-credits sequence. We start off in orbit where we witness an American space capsule get captured by a mysterious craft. The scene then shifts to a meeting between diplomats where American and Soviet functionaries level accusations and threats at one another. The British diplomat suggests they both investigate the Sea of Japan, where their tracking station lost contact with the pirate spacecraft.

In Hong Kong, Bond is making out with a Chinese lady. As he muses in bed, she gets off and causes the bed to fold up into the wall. A couple of gunmen burst in and shoot up the retracted mattress. They leave with the lady and the cops show up to find Bond dead.

I gotta admit, this is my least favourite of the pre-title sequences so far. It’s got very little action and while the spacecraft portion gets the plot into gear, the part with Bond himself only exists to explain the fil’s title. Bond is supposed to be faking his death to get S.P.E.C.T.R.E. to stop paying attention to him, but the bad guys see through the ruse very soon. So soon, in fact, that it hardly seems worth the trouble Bond went through in the first place.

The story then sees Bond dropped into the sea, then picked up by scuba divers and brought aboard a British submarine. M is already aboard and assigns him to find out what happened to that space capsule. There’s a deadline at play here since both the Soviets and the Americans are planning to send up other spacecraft in the coming weeks. Bond travels to Japan and is picked up by Aki, the beautiful aide to Bond’s contact in Tokyo. She takes him to the man, Henderson, who theorizes that it’s a third power that’s inflaming tensions between the East and the West. A slight continuity error here, as Bond tells Henderson he’s never been to Japan before, but in From Russia With Love, he mentioned being there with M. Before he can reveal more, Henderson is fatally stabbed in the back. Bond pursues and subdues the assassin before taking his place and letting himself be taken to the offices of Osato Chemicals. It’s in the executive offices that Bond’s disguise fails him and he fights and subdues a hulking brute. Incidentally, that brute is former pro wrestler Peter Maivia, the grandfather of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Bond swipes some stuff from a safe and then flees the scene. Aki picks him up and when Bond starts asking questions, she parks the car and runs off. Bond chases her and this leads to him meeting Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese Secret Service. He and Bond take a look at the picture and paperwork Bond swiped and figure out Osato is bringing in ingredients for rocket fuel. They also see a picture of a supertanker along with a note that the tourist who took the picture was liquidated. The rocket fuel manifest I can see why you’d want to keep under wraps, sure. But the picture of the ship and note about the tourist serve no purpose to the villains.  They’re there to give Bond a lead, but why wouldn’t Osato himself just burn the picture and note? Why keep either?

The next day, Bond meets with Mr. Osato himself, pretending to be an industrial executive named Fisher. Bond accomplishes nothing but getting x-rayed, revealing to the villains that he’s carrying a concealed Walther PPK pistol. After Bond leaves, Osato decides to have him killed. But in front of the building, the hitmen fail to gun him down when Aki shows up and Bond jumps into her convertible. This is the exact same thing he did the night before while escaping the same building, so the screenplay gets no points for originality. The gunmen then follow her car through the streets of Tokyo, popping off shots as they go. Through crowded streets. In broad daylight. Once the chase leaves the city, Aki contacts Tanaka who sends a helicopter equipped with a magnet that hoists the villains’ car away and drops it into the waters of Tokyo Bay. What blows my mind is that Aki called this the “usual reception”. So this is something her agency has presumably done before. For a secret spy agency, it doesn’t seem that secretive.

Bond and Aki travel to the Kobe docks where they find the tanker taking on liquid oxygen, used for rocket fuel. A score of dockworkers attack them. It’s a nice sequence, beautifully filmed. Bond covers Aki’s escape but is knocked out and captured himself. When he wakes up, he finds himself tied to a chair in the room of Helga Brandt, Osato’s aide who he met in his earlier meeting with the man. Threatened with torture, Bond, still pretending to be Fisher, tells her he’s a corporate spy after Osato’s secrets. Brandt falls for his charms and releases him so that they can make out. Afterwards, she and Bond take off in a small plane. She traps him in the back while she disables the aircraft and jumps out with the only parachute. Bond muscles his way out of his restraints, manages to bring the plane down safely and escapes as it explodes.

Look, I may sound like an idiot complaining about something that’s pretty much become a trope of this series, but what was the point of all this? If Brandt was gonna kill Bond either way, why go through the whole rigmarole with the plane? Why not kill him when he was in her room aboard the tanker, tied up? Or after, when she could have called upon those dockworkers? It’s not like there was any need to make the guy’s death look like an aerial accident.

But no, Bond escapes this ridiculous deathtrap and gets back to Tanaka’s place where he finds Q has arrived with Little Nellie, an autogyro armed to the teeth with machine guns, missiles, flamethrowers and aerial mines. I’m of two minds about the vehicle. On the one hand, I again wonder about how secret you’re supposed to be while flying this thing. On the other hand, if I was given the choice of any vehicle in the James Bond series to take as my own, I’d pick this one. Sure, one of Bond’s cars would probably be a more practical choice, but Little Nellie would be the most fun.

Bond reconnoitres a remote Japanese island where the supertanker is believed to have dropped off its cargo. At first, he finds nothing of interest as he flies around. However, four S.P.E.C.T.R.E. helicopters show up and attempt to shoot our hero out of the sky. Using his autogyro’s superior maneuverability and weapons, Bond destroys all four. It’s a great sequence and, for my money, the high point of the film.

We leave Bond for a little while and see that S.P.E.C.T.R.E. head Ernst Stavro Blofeld is supervising this operation personally. Another space capsule, this one Russian, is seized and this inflames tensions between the US and the Soviets. Blofeld then confirms that the man Osato met with earlier in the film was James Bond, which, as I said before, really makes the whole “faking Bond’s death thing kinda pointless. What’s particularly off is that Bond is identified by the fact that he was carrying his Walther. Is he the only secret agent with that brand of gun? I was under the impression, in Dr. No, that Bond had been ordered to carry the gun because all 00 agents were assigned one. But anyway, Blofeld punishes Brandt’s failure to kill Bond by having her dropped into a pool of piranha fish.

We then return to Bond who is taken to a large estate where Tiger trains his operatives to be ninjas. I think this might be the first instance of ninjas being seen in a movie from the English-speaking world (if you know of an earlier instance, please mention it in the comments.) Here’s where the film kinda gets crazy stupid, as Bond undergoes surgery to look more Japanese. It’s hardly convincing. Afterwards, Bond shacks up with Aki. As they sleep, an assassin climbs into the rafters and lowers a piece of string down towards Bond. He trickles poison down the string, and it’s a nice, tense moment. But both Bond and Aki shift in their sleep and the poison hits her lips instead of his. She quickly dies and Bond dispatches the assassin. The next day, another assassin tries to kill Bond during staff practice. For a secret ninja training facility, this place has got some really awful security. All this while Bond looks like the least believable Japanese man since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Now fully trained as a ninja, Bond is sent to the island where he previously tangled with those helicopters. To blend in with the villagers there, he marries a local girl who’s an operative of  Tanaka’s. He told Bond she had a face like a pig, but either this was a rib or Tanaka has seen some very attractive pigs in the past. The woman’s name is Kissy Suzuki, though the only way to know that is to watch the end credits, because she’s nevr named in the film. Incidentally, this is also why I never mentioned Aki’s last name. Neither the film or the credits gives her one, and she’s not in the source novel either.

Bond and Kissy explore the island trying to find the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. base. Early in their exploration, they encounter poison gas which they avoid by swimming underwater past it. I only mention it because from this point on, the film abandons Bond’s Japanese disguise because it… washed off, I guess?

Eventually, Bond and Kissy reach the top of the island’s volcano and discover that the lake in it’s crater is actually a sliding metal roof that conveniently opens, allowing Bond to sneak into the base after sending Kissy back to the village to get Tanaka and the rest of the ninjas. Incidentally, we’ll later learn that the crater has concealed cameras and machineguns equipped to help ward off interlopers. But for some reason, they missed the two even though they were moving around without cover on a sunny day.

As inexplicable as that seems, it’s about to get even stranger. You see, Bond snoops around and finds the room where the captured American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts are being held. He breaks them out and they subdue the flight crew of the spacecraft that’s been capturing the space capsules. Since the Americans launched another mission into space earlier that day, the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. rocket is about to take off. Bond puts on a spacesuit and plans to let himself get blasted into space where he can screw up the villains’ plans from there. He makes it all the way to the rocket before he gives himself away by trying to enter the capsule with his air conditioner first. He gets brought to Blofeld instead.

I have a lot of questions about all this. Some of these are:

1. After Bond freed the two astronauts and the two cosmonauts, there were five of them. Bond is the least qualified to operate a spacecraft. So why is he the one who they decided to send up into space?
2. Two of his allies accompanied bond all the way to the capsule. I can accept nobody recognizing them as the freed captives (this is an enormous base with a lot of people in it), but wouldn’t one of them have told bond how to properly enter a spacecraft?
3. What happened to the freed captives after the subterfuge is discovered?
4. Why was S.P.E.C.T.R.E. keeping the Americans and Soviets alive anyway? They have no need of them for their plan* and Blofeld has a bunch of piranhas that need feeding. And considering the whole “Bond disguises himself again” thing leads to nothing, they’re not required for the plot at all. Bond could have been discovered sneaking arounf and brought to Blofeld without all this nonsense.

* = The director of this movie, Lewis Gilbert, returned to the Bond franchise to direct The Spy Who Loved Me ten years later, a film where another villain keeps a bunch of captives alive when he has no reason to.

This is the first time Bond meets Blofeld and, after not seeing his face in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, we finally get to see what he looks like. If you’re wondering where the inspiration for Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers series comes from, you need look no furthur. He allows Bond to witness the launch of the rocket that will once again capture an American spacecraft and lead the US and the USSR to war with each other. All for the benefit of a third power (presumably China, though it’s only implied and never specifically stated.) After the rocket launches, Tanaka and his men arrive with Kissy. The latter has supplemented her earlier wardrobe with a blouse and a pair of shoes though pants, apparently, weren’t an option. The automated defenses in the crater start firing at the invaders, but Bond uses a weaponized cigarette in the control room to wreak havoc and shut down the defenses. This allows the ninjas to make their way into the volcano lair.

A huge battle breaks out between S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and the ninjas. Blofeld, Osato and Bond get out of the control room to a monorail car where Blofeld pulls a gun and shoots Osato to show Bond the price of failure. The villain takes a shuriken to the hand before he can shoot Bond and rides off in the monorail car. Bond realizes he has to make his way back to the control room and cuts through Blofeld’s living quarters, where he fights the henchman Hans. Bond ends up dumping him in the pool of piranhas and gets to the control room just in time to use the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. spacecraft destruct button before it can capture the American space capsule. Blofeld activates the base’s own self-destruct control which causes the volcano to erupt. So everyone evacuates the base, Bond and Kissy end up on a raft in the ocean, the British submarine from the beginning of the movie shows up and the movie’s over.

While the film has a lot of fun elements and is a pleasant watch, it’s dragged down by quite a few problems. First and foremost is Sean Connery. This was his fifth Bond performance in six years and his worst. He’s mostly going through the motions here, hardly injecting any energy into his scenes.

Another problem is the women. The producers decided early on in the film’s production that they wanted three Bond Girls in this film, and I think that’s too many this time out. Helga Brandt is just a warmed-over version of Thunderball’s Fiona Volpe. She has less screen time and just isn’t as fun to watch. About the only thing interesting about her is how she gets killed.

Aki fares better, as we see a lot more of her. But the romance between her and Bond is perfunctory. She meets Bond, they talk, she replaces the masseuse working him over, he’s happy to see her, and then they’re a couple. There doesn’t seem to be much of a spark between the two. It’s like the writers didn’t think out this plot thread much beyond “She’s attractive, so naturally Bond likes her”. Sadly, this is not the only time I’ll have this complaint about a Bond romance.

And then there’s Kissy Suzuki who, honestly, doesn’t really need to be there. Instead of killing off Aki two-thirds of the way through the film, they could have let her live and assume Kissy’s story function. After all, Henderson was killed early in the film to remind viewers of the stakes in the adventure, so Aki’s death really adds nothing on that score. Worse, Kissy actor Mia Hama’s limited English led producers to reduce her role and expand Aki’s, so the character really doesn’t make much of an impression.

Tiger Tanaka makes a better impression. He’s a good ally to Bond, much like Kerim Bey was in From Russia With Love. And unlike Bey, he doesn’t get killed. I do find it odd to see the head of the Japanese Secret Service leading ninjas in an assault operation though. It’s as if M decided to lead a hundred British commandos in a raid on an enemy base to back up Bond.**

** = If anybody reading this ends up writing the next Bond film for Amazon, please make M lead a hundred commandos to help out Bond. I’ll watch the living %$&# out of that movie!

Then there’s the villains. Blofeld is good. I like Donald Pleasence in the role. After teasing the guy for two films, his reveal is a good payoff. I totally buy this character as the head of such a powerful organization. The facial scar he has was supposedly Pleasence’s idea. And he hardly ever blinks when playing the character, which gives Blofeld a wonderfully creepy presence. (Anthony Hopkins use the same non-blinking trick when playing Hannibal Lector decades later.) Although Pleasence would not return to the role in subsequent Bond films, when the character appeared in video games, he was made to look like Pleasence’s version.

Unfortunately, the rest of the villain line-up drops off a cliff, quality-wise. I’ve already mention my feelings on Helga Brandt. Osato is a non-presence in the film. He’s not menacing, not interesting and not memorable in any way. He doesn’t even get an interesting death. But at least he gets a few lines, which is more than I can say about Blofeld’s bodyguard Hans. If I had to describe Hans in one word, that word would be “there”. As in, he’s there. There’s not much more I can say about him. He has no personality whatsoever, no quirks, no deformities or interesting weapons. He’s just a goon who fights Bond and dies. You could replace him with the Samoan guy Bond fought in Osato’s office and lose nothing.

I mentioned. In my review of From Russia With Love, that some Bond films are more fanciful than others. This is definitely one of the more fanciful ones. My friend Claire summed it up when I discussed the film with her aftr we watched it. She said this film was the basic, entry-level Bond film. If there’s a “standard” Bond film, this is it. That doesn’t make it a bad film, but honestly, there’s better.