James Bond is dead, murdered while lounging in the bed of his latest sexual conquest.
Or so this film pretends for a few seconds, but given the title it's probably no surprise to anyone that rumours of Bond's demise are exaggerated. His 'death' is part of a scheme to allow him to be surreptitiously inserted into Japan, where he is tasked with investigating a mysterious space ship that recently hijacked a NASA vessel in orbit.
This was the last (at the time, anyway) Sean Connery Bond film, and seems clearly to have been planned as the biggest and most extravagant entry in the franchise to date. Its $10 million budget would not be exceeded by another Bond movie until five films and ten years later.
Honestly, I feel like that ambition occasionally works against the film. It's a big over-long, despite being 10-15 minutes shorter than the immediately preceding Thunderball, and I feel like Roald Dahl's screenplay leans too heavily on big action sequences and gadgetry and doesn't to enough to stitch them together into an interesting tale.
The fact that it is the third film in a row to climax with a big battle between hordes of SPECTRE goons and good guy soldiers/agents is certainly a misstep, I think. Or at least, it becomes one when you are watching the films in relatively quick succession, as I am. Probably when they were hitting theatres only every 1-2 years the "oh it's this again" factor was not so high!
And then there's the whole "let's disguise Bond as a Japanese guy", which I am not sure was a good idea even in 1967, and is certainly not one that has aged well, either way.
Ultimately though, this delivers an 'early Bond'-style adventure, with gadgets and smarmy comments and SPECTRE dreaming up crazy schemes. If that's your thing, it should tick the boxes for you.
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