“*gasp* It’s a new Bond! Yup, after a whole bunch of Sean Connery, it’s time for him to step aside, momentarily at least, for George Lazenby to try his hand. Watching them all in succession, yeah it is a lil jarring seeing a new face in the same role, just when I was getting used to our 007. I did like that this new one played with that a bit. There was a lot of teasing until Lazenby’s face was revealed, topped off with a one liner of course. I think Lazenby gets a bad rep, but he really just never had a chance to come into the role. Hell, it took Connery a couple movies to really get it right, and at this point, Lazenby’s a bit of a clone, not really making it his. But, as we all know, he backed out of his contract before continuing the franchise, so we’ll never know what could’ve been.
One thing that was cool was the bit of nostalgia factor in this one. Before fully handing off the role (which was at least the idea) there was a bit of a look back. First during the opening credits (more on that later) but there was also this nice scene where he held up mementos from previous adventures and the score changed accordingly to that film’s theme.
As Bond continues to travel the world by various means of transporation, we’re still finding new locations: the mountains via skis. Instead of beaches and bikini babes, we’ve got snow and bundled up snow bunnies. And while there was a the typical poker game early on, we’ve also got a new game: curling! Yeeeeeaaaah that was kind of a strange sight.
I just felt like this film dragged on a bit too much. You had two major stories going on, one framed within the other, and it was just a bit much. Either on its own could have been its own movie. Eh, we’ve still got a lot more to go.
I did rather like the opening credits. So, this movie’s theme song was actually put elsewhere, but the style of the credits was more along the lines of what I like. We’ve got more of the abstract silhouette type of visuals that I like, but there were also clips from the previous movies, again with the whole nostalgic baton passing. Def getting better”