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Comments
Perhaps could explain why Safin and his plan seem so poorly thought out. If he's just some nihilistic bloke why does he care about buyer ships?
83 and 87 yes. The only intrigue and danger from AVTAK was how Bond was able to make a quice
1985 is the weak link, but not weak enough to bring down the whole era.
What's wrong with Octopussy?
Stupid, convoluted story. Iron curtain fantasy on "Little Johnny" level, plot holes and continuity problems (I leave those out here) galore. A fair bit of what would today be considered racism (I cut them some slack for this, given it was over 40 years ago, and the "keep you in curry" line is at least funny). The circus story with the train going directly from East Germany to a U.S. air base in West Germany, without being thoroughly checked by either side, is preposterous, as is the notion of the MI6 boss accompanying an agent to Checkpoint Charlie, which was heavily observed by the Stasi (in fact, there is an extensive report by them about the filming, identifying the actors). Tarzan yell. Telling the tiger to sit. Gorilla costume. Clown costume. Octopussy's girl troupe. Balloon scene. It's definitely the silliest of the Bond movies. And silly equals funny only to a very limited extent.
The PTS is pretty good, followed by a mediocre theme song. And from then on, it keeps going down the drain, apart from a few good lines ("No, ma'am, I'm with the economy tour"). I'm always wondering if I prefer AVTAK in reality, and maybe I do. At least OP is somewhere down there at the bottom of my rewatch scale, along with TWINE and DAD
It is no surprise that when NSNA came out five months after OP, most of the reviews I read at the time considered NSNA far better (at least here in Germany). I definitely still do.
If anything, NSNA makes Octopussy look like Citizen Kane in comparison. Even though McClory had an ace in the hole with Connery as Bond - it still wasn't enough to give EON the fight he was hoping for. It reeks of a film made out of desperation - a desire to one up Cubby Broccoli and EON productions. It failed in that regard since Octopussy beat it at the box office. But even now it's a strange movie where the performances come across as hammey at times, it has an awful score, and the changes they make from Thunderball often come across as inferior. It's especially disappointing when considering that McClory and Co had a unique opportunity to do something different from EON's series but no - they opted to make a worse version of a film that was nearly 20 years old at that point.