12 Things You Learn Rewatching You Only Live Twice
Bond at his most cringe-worthy.
Our weekly series revisiting every single James Bond movie continues with Sean Connery's fifth outing, 1967's You Only Live Twice. If the previous effort, Thunderball, started to show the series going in ambitious (and not entirely successful) new directions, this Lewis Gilbert-directed Bond flick tried to reinvent the formula once again with decidedly more mixed results.
Thunderball certainly had its issues, though You Only Live Twice is the first Bond film generally accepted by fans to be a bit of a middling affair. Much has been written of the film's tone-deaf representation of Japan, to say nothing of its peculiar treatment of its leading ladies, polarising central villain and mish-mash of plot elements that don't really cohere.
Is it entertaining? To a point, sure, largely due to Connery's steely presence and some fun set-pieces, though it's certainly one of the most-dated of the early Bond films. If you've not seen it in quite a while, you might be shocked at just how iffy some of the choices are...