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 Posted:   Oct 28, 2024 - 4:32 PM   
 By:   henry   (Member)

NSNA isn’t my favorite Bond, but I don’t hate it, film and score.

 
 Posted:   Oct 28, 2024 - 6:03 PM   
 By:   BornOfAJackal   (Member)

Never Say Never Again is better than some of the Eon productions.

A View to a Kill certainly comes to mind.

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 28, 2024 - 6:10 PM   
 By:   villagardens553   (Member)

Lorenzo Semple wrote the screenplay. He also wrote the awful 1976 King Kong, so I went to see it with mixed expectations: excited about Connery but not about Semple.

The film has its charms: the opening would have been one of the best pre-titles Bond sequences except that it played with the song over it instead of an appropriate score; Connery was good, much better than DAF; the premise of an aging Bond was fresh but quickly dispatched.

Like the Moore films it was too jokey and the characters paled in contrast to their Thunderball counterparts: the villainess was too over-the-top, as was M, Algernon, and so on. Rowan Atkinson was out of place. And the updating actually dated the film: the video game sequence.

I really like Legrand, in general, but not here.

 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 8:18 AM   
 By:   spielboy   (Member)

In defense of NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN

good luck

 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 1:31 PM   
 By:   Eric Paddon   (Member)

To me the film just does not play like a real Bond film. It lacks the travelogue sweep, the plot is muddled and in the end I felt it came off more like something in the vein of "Our Man Flint" than 007.

 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 1:36 PM   
 By:   Justin Boggan   (Member)

From my Rejected Film Scores website:
http://rejectedfilmscores.125mb.com/supposedly.html

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN -- ?????. In the book The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, which I do not have and am only using an excerpt from, the producer (Jack Schwartzman) was not happy with Legrand's score, and brought in another composer. The excerpt does not name who, but says he had wanted James Horner, but Sean Connery vetoed that idea (coincidently just two years later Horner scored a film Connery starred in). [Michel Legrand.]

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 1:55 PM   
 By:   bladerunner76   (Member)

To me the film just does not play like a real Bond film. It lacks the travelogue sweep, the plot is muddled and in the end I felt it came off more like something in the vein of "Our Man Flint" than 007.


There's no real reason for this movie to exist as nothing else than Connery and McClory giving Cubby the middle finger

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 3:37 PM   
 By:   villagardens553   (Member)

I disagree: giving Cubby the middle finger would have been a bonus.

The Bond franchise started wobbling with Diamonds Are Forever and appeared to have no clue how to right itself--seriously flirting with legit spycraft in one film, flapping about in outer space in the next. If another party could come along and do it right--so much the better. Unfortunately, NSNA was too flawed, though it is a much better film than Octopussy.

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 5:02 PM   
 By:   Hercule Platini   (Member)

My personal feeling is that NSNA is one of those remakes that's better than the original. I don't know how many times I've watched Thunderball, but it always falls flat for me, even when I finally saw it theatrically a couple of years ago. NSNA has a lot wrong with it (Connery is far too old and looks it, Nigel Small-Fawcett is an unwise attempt at comedy relief, and these incarnations of M and Q just don't work), and Legrand's score is a major minus, but I do like the song, Barbara Carrera livens things up enormously, and the bike/car chase is decent.

Some years ago, someone was selling DVDs they'd made of NSNA that had a more traditional music score. Somehow they'd got hold of a copy of the film without Legrand's music (except for the tango) and had tracked it with cues from all the Eon scores (eg Gumbold's Safe from OHMSS over the switching-the-bombs sequence), including a modified Thunderball title sequence with History Repeating as the theme song. It did make the film feel a bit more like a "proper" Bond film to some extent, but the trouble is those cues are so familiar that some of them are distracting.

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 7:59 PM   
 By:   NO NAME   (Member)

https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/810718370397414015/

 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 9:12 PM   
 By:   Eric Paddon   (Member)

I disagree: giving Cubby the middle finger would have been a bonus.

The Bond franchise started wobbling with Diamonds Are Forever and appeared to have no clue how to right itself--seriously flirting with legit spycraft in one film, flapping about in outer space in the next. If another party could come along and do it right--so much the better. Unfortunately, NSNA was too flawed, though it is a much better film than Octopussy.


Disagree completely. "Octopussy" is not only the better film it also shows Moore at his peak level of comfort in the role and should have been the film for him to make his exit. I also think the more escapist tone of Bond in the 70s was frankly needed in an age where spy movies had become the dreary cynical "enemy within" stuff like Three Days of THe Condor etc. They may not have been better films than the classic ones but they were the right films for that time to continue the franchise and keep it successful. You couldn't do a 60s Bond movie in the 70s at that point.

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 29, 2024 - 11:21 PM   
 By:   Willgoldnewtonbarrygrusin   (Member)

Also: it is common nonsense to say that an entertaining film is always worse than a dreary serious one.

It all depends on how well it is made.

And if both kinds are great (like „Condor“ and „Live and let die“, for example) one can enjoy both.

 
 Posted:   Oct 30, 2024 - 4:46 AM   
 By:   CindyLover   (Member)

Also: it is common nonsense to say that an entertaining film is always worse than a dreary serious one.



Dune is entertaining and serious.

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 30, 2024 - 5:39 AM   
 By:   villagardens553   (Member)

It's presumptive to say that the 70s Moore films are entertaining just because they are light, or that "light" equals entertainment while darker spy films do not.

What is entertaining is up to each of us, and none of us speak for all.

Personally, I didn't find Moonraker or any of the Roger Moore films entertaining.

And keep in mind--not just my opinion--that many of the best films of the 70s were darker and entertaining. Just a few off the top of my head:

Godfather
Godfather 2
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Conversation
The Exorcist
Network
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Nashville
Apocalypse Now
Chinatown
Taxi Driver
A Clockwork Orange
The Deer Hunter
Barry Lyndon
All the President's Men
The Devils
Night Moves
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Badlands
Cries and Whispers
Carnal Knowledge
The Parallax View
The Conformist
Cabaret

 
 
 Posted:   Oct 30, 2024 - 6:48 AM   
 By:   panavision   (Member)

I disagree: giving Cubby the middle finger would have been a bonus.

The Bond franchise started wobbling with Diamonds Are Forever and appeared to have no clue how to right itself--seriously flirting with legit spycraft in one film, flapping about in outer space in the next. If another party could come along and do it right--so much the better. Unfortunately, NSNA was too flawed, though it is a much better film than Octopussy.


Disagree completely. "Octopussy" is not only the better film it also shows Moore at his peak level of comfort in the role and should have been the film for him to make his exit. I also think the more escapist tone of Bond in the 70s was frankly needed in an age where spy movies had become the dreary cynical "enemy within" stuff like Three Days of THe Condor etc. They may not have been better films than the classic ones but they were the right films for that time to continue the franchise and keep it successful. You couldn't do a 60s Bond movie in the 70s at that point.



Agree 100percent.

The latter 70s Bond were successful because they reflected what audiences wanted to see in a Bond film. From Russia With Love wouldn't have worked in the 70s.

Octopussy should have been Moore's last, although a flawed film, it's very entertaining and superbly filmed by John Glen.

 
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