It’s easy to look at the Roger Moore Bond films and sell them short. He was in a total of seven Bond films and four of them would rate near the bottom of most Bond film lists. However, the three that were good were very good. Two of them (The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only) are legitimate top-10 Bond films. Perhaps just outside of the top 10, but certainly knocking on the door, is Octopussy. It’s not quite at the same level as its predecessors, but it’s certainly better than the average Bond film and it has one of the more complex plot lines and a very engaging story.

Once again, the prologue serves as little more than a hook. It’s straight action as Bond attempts to blow up a Cuban jet plane, only to be captured but then escape. The sequence does have one of the series’ iconic scenes where Bond, flying a one man jet, flies sideways through the hanger before the guided missile that’s tailing him destroys it. It’s a fun sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the film that follows.

As for the rest of the film, it’s very good. It starts off with a good hook as 009, dressed as a clown runs away from a circus with two knife wielding twins following him. After getting a knife in the back, 009 manages to get to the English embassy, dying as he falls through the window and revealing a fake Faberge Egg. That sets off an intricately woven story where an insane Soviet General, bent on pressing the U.S.S.R.’s advantage in Europe, uses diamond smugglers as a cover in an attempt to blow up a nuclear device on an American military base in West Germany, thus inciting protests that will demand disarmament and leave Western Europe vulnerable to a Soviet invasion.

This was definitely a topical film for its time, as the Cold War was moving to new heights in the early and mid 80’s, and calls and protests for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Atlantic were becoming more common. John Glen, directing his second of five Bond films, was able to take both of those conflicting themes and take advantage of them to create a very dramatic film. While the action in Octopussy isn’t as intense as The Spy Who Loved Me or For Your Eyes Only, the tone of the film is much more intense and the stakes are realistically high. When you come right down to it, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker and even Goldfinger and Thunderball were all fantasy. Single madmen wiping out the human race to start new populations under the sea or in the stars, or other madmen trying to start nuclear wars unless their ransoms were paid are all stories that have incredibly high stakes, but are not really based in reality. The stakes in Octopussy were incredibly high, and at the height of the Cold War in the early 80’s, were certainly more plausible than the over the top stakes of the SPECTRE films and the earlier Moore films. This felt like something that could happen. General Orlov, the rogue Soviet General, whether due to propaganda or reality, felt like a person who could really exist, and this plan would have seemed very realistic to an audience in 1983, and would have had people on the edges of their seats.

Even with all of that said, Roger Moore does revert a little bit back to the silly side that is somewhere between Moonraker and For Your Eyes Only. He pulls out a lot more one-liners, some of which are funny, but others groan-worthy. His sidekick in India, Vijay, is a very likable character who plays well off of Moore’s light hearted style. However, when the stakes are highest, Moore knows how to ratchet up the appropriate amount of intensity.

One thing that added to the depth of this film was the number of strong villains that it had, and the fact that none of them overshadowed any of the others. The two main villains were Kamal Kahn, the smuggler, and General Orlov, the aforementioned rogue Soviet General. What helps is that they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum personality-wise. Kamal Kahn is a debonair, sophisticated aristocrat who does just as well in the casino as he does in his nefarious business dealings and is always focused on the bottom line, caring more about money than anything. Orlov is a brutish, blustering, brooding psychopath who doesn’t care about killing thousands of innocent people so long as he achieves his military goals. Along with these two are the knife wielding twins who assist them in transporting the bomb and Sadruddin, Kahn’s turban wearing henchman, who in one scene awakens memories of Oddjob using his bowler hat to decapitate a statue, by crushing a pair of loaded dice in his bare hands.

Many people include the character of Octopussy herself as a villain, but I disagree. Yes, she’s on the wrong side of the law in terms of being a smuggler, but she’s unaware of the plot to blow up the bomb at the circus, and in fact would have been one of its victims if not for Bond’s heroism. In fact, she allies herself with Bond almost from the moment that she meets him. Maud Adams makes her second appearance as a Bond girl after playing the doomed Andrea in The Man With the Golden Gun and she plays Octopussy as the most mysterious of all of the Bond girls and also the most sophisticated Bond girl this side of Teresa di Vicenzo. She also carries on the new tradition of strong and independent Bond girls, as she’s a woman who has made her own fortune, constructed her own army and stands up to Bond as well as Kahn as an equal. That motif did take a step back a little in this film, as Octopussy does become a damsel in distress when Kahn and Sadruddin kidnap her in the final battle, forcing Bond to rescue her.

There might not have been as much action in this film as its immediate predecessors, but the action that is in it is some of the most intense action in any Bond film to date. The fight between Bond and Sandruddin and one of the twins on top of the train is wonderfully shot and hard to beat in intensity. That is, until the final climax where Bond and Sandruddin fight on top of a flying plane. That’s one of my favorite Bond sequences of all time, and was shot utilizing very little green screen, so it feels very realistic.

I think what Octopussy offers was something that was started with For Your Eyes Only and that is realism. These films felt more realistic than any of the Bond films that came before them, and Octopussy took the realism to another level. Is it a realistic film? Of course not, but there is way more in this film that feels plausible than in any other Bond film to date. As the series moved into its third decade, audiences were starting to become more sophisticated and action sequences in other films were becoming more realistic. Bond had to keep up or be left behind, and Octopussy was the first big step in that direction.