This review of You Only Live Twice (1967) is part of a wider rewatch of the James Bond series to mark its 60th anniversary. 007 has always been my favourite movie franchise, and I wanted to see where each film ranks within the series. Please check out the main blog post for my rankings of this and the other twenty-four official films and links to the movie reviews for the rest of the franchise.
Long Review and Film Summary
This film is one of my all-time favourite Bond movies – Along with Goldfinger and others yet to come. The storyline is a bit far-fetched, but not as much as Moonraker will be. It starts with a US spaceship being ‘kidnapped’ in outer space. During a meeting, the US thinks it’s the USSR (Russia), and the UK representative (who seems a little bored) believes it could be Japan. It’s 007’s (played by Sean Connery) job to find out who is doing this before it turns into an all-out war. We find out it’s Mr. Osato (played by Teru Shimada), a Japanese industrialist from OSATO Chemicals, working with Blofeld (played by Donald Pleasence) from Spectre. Bond works with Tiger (played by Tetsurō Tamba), the Head of the Japanese secret service, as they believe a fishing island is being used for the launches after seeing a picture that Bond steals from the safe at OSATO. To get close to it, 007 must join his Ninja training school and take a wife to have good cover on the island. This is where some parts of this film are problematic; it makes clear that men are superior to women, and Bond marries Kissy Suzuki (played by Mie Hama) although he could have easily married Aki (played by Akiko Wakabayashi) an agent with the Japanese SIS. According to From Rewatch with Love, their characters seem interchangeable throughout the film; the actresses were changed around before filming. One thing I am a sucker for is a Q (played by Desmond Llewelyn) scene. In this film, we only really get one gadget in this film (other than the safe-cracking tool that Bond happens to have on him), but it’s a good one. Little Nellie, a gyroplane that’s a sort of flatpack plane built on location in Japan by Q and his team. Towards the end of the movie, we get inside the base where the kidnapping spaceships are launched from inside a volcano. It has a cool Monorail running around the outside and a metal roof to disguise it. The final few scenes where the ninjas infiltrate the base are epic. The fighting, explosions, and Bond blowing up the CCCP-marked ship before it swallows the US spaceship. This film rules and rockets to the top of my list, just below Goldfinger… for now anyway.