You Only Live Twice is a film that is loaded with contradictions. It’s the weakest of the Bond films to date, and yet it has the best climax. The sexism and misogyny are over the top, and yet Bond finds himself married at the end to a woman who wouldn’t give in to his lust and made herself his equal. There is a sense over the course of the film that Sean Connery is growing tired of playing this role, and yet he delivers some of his best acting in of the series.

This film might also have been one of the most influential Bond films of all time from a production design standpoint. This is the film in which Bond finally comes face to face with SPECTRE’s #1, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. His costume, makeup and accent are what Mike Myers would later base Dr. Evil upon for the Austin Powers movies.

 

The lair in which Blofeld launches his rockets clearly served as the inspiration for the artists at PIXAR when they created Syndrome’s lair in The Incredibles. Both lairs were inside volcanoes, both launched rockets out of them, and both had mono-rail systems  that used ball-shaped pods to carry people back and forth. What’s also interesting is that the PIXAR artists used the cinematography from this film as influence as well. There are shots of the lair in The Incredibles that look like they came right out of You Only Live Twice.

You Only Live Twice was influential in another way as well, as it’s not unreasonable to look at it as a science fiction film, as well as a spy film. It opens in space with a United States space craft getting swallowed up by a rocket from SPECTRE. Other scenes taking place space would happen throughout the film. Obviously by today’s standards the scenes shot in space look rather rudimentary. In fact, just a year later Stanley Kubrick would release 2001:  A Space Odyssey and it would have much more sophisticated special effects, and would be much more influential as a straight Sci-Fi film. You Only Live Twice, however is the earliest film I can think of that tried to have a realistic scene in outer space.

One other point needs to be made regarding this installment in to the franchise. This is the first Bond film tin which Bond is actively trying to stop World War III. SPECTRE is stealing U.S. and Soviet space craft in an attempt to get the two countries into a shooting war so that the SPECTRE organization can fill the power vacuum left behind and dominate the world. This is a motif that we would see again in Bond films, and it is a classic motif for the franchise. It works so well because the threat of nuclear annihilation at the time was very real. There were no higher stakes than that and the filmmakers always did a good job of pressing that advantage.

Otherwise, from a writing and storytelling standpoint, this is definitely the weakest of the Connery films so far. The story isn’t as deep as its predecessors and it lacks the clever dialogue that helped make those other films so entertaining. Structurally, it follows the model of the films that came before it, but it’s not fresh in any way. It feels, dare I say, formulaic. It also lacks the energy of its predecessors and appears to be ready for the inevitable shakeup that would come in the next film.