In a brilliant opening sequence, Bond wakes up in a bed with a beautiful woman, dreams of a past mission, and then stares at himself in the mirror, sighing at his reflection. Later, M (Edward Fox, replacing Bernard Lee) sarcastically notes that Bond failed the annual fitness test. Bond is sent to a “health farm” (Shrublands) run by a dubious Dr. Kovacs, where his massage is interrupted by an assassination attempt via a mechanical snake.
Look at the famous “Riding the Bomb” sequence in Dr. No ? Never Say Never Again reverses it. Bond is forced to ride a nuclear warhead on a test drive through a missile silo, but it’s not heroic; it’s terrifying. The camerawork is shaky, the lighting is harsh, and Connery’s face is a mask of genuine panic. Never Say Never Again -James Bond 007-
This “geriatric Bond” (a harsh but intended reading) works brilliantly because it adds stakes. We feel his exhaustion. The final underwater fight—shot in the actual Bahamas with poor visibility and dangerous currents—looks less like a ballet and more like a desperate, ugly struggle for survival between two old men (Connery and a 50-year-old Brandauer). The director was Irvin Kershner , fresh off the massive success of Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back . Kershner was a character-driven director, not an action set-piece conveyor belt. He brought a grimy, textured realism to the Bond world. In a brilliant opening sequence, Bond wakes up
In the 1960s, Ian Fleming collaborated with screenwriters Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, and Ivar Bryce to develop a film script. When that project fell through, Fleming turned the script into the novel Thunderball . McClory sued, winning the literary and film rights to the Thunderball story. The 1965 EON film Thunderball was only made because McClory allowed it, retaining the right to remake the film after ten years. Kovacs, where his massage is interrupted by an
In the sprawling, martini-soaked history of cinema’s longest-running franchise, one film sits on a peculiar throne: a bastard child, a legal loophole, and a glorious act of cinematic rebellion. That film is Never Say Never Again .
This is a Bond who needs naps. A Bond who struggles to pull himself up a rope. A Bond who relies on wit and cunning rather than raw physical dominance. When he fights the massive, silent henchman Lippe (Pat Roach) in a kitchen, he wins not by karate chops, but by encasing the man’s leg in concrete and jamming a parsnip into his neck.
By the late 1970s, McClory decided to exercise that right. Simultaneously, Sean Connery—who had famously sworn he would “never again” play James Bond after the exhausting shoot of You Only Live Twice (1967) and the disastrous The Shaws of Kilbride fiasco—was offered a king’s ransom. The offer was a staggering $5 million (over $15 million today) plus a percentage of the gross, making him the highest-paid actor in Hollywood at the time.