Well… to be honest I’m not really sure here of some details… but the story was ok enough, Bond-wisse, and the girl was actually a decent and quite capable sort. Shocking.
The plot: The St Georges is a British “electronic surveillance ship” disguised as a fishign boat. A big buoy-bomb or something sank it. “The First Sea Lord and Vice Admiral” go to Mi6 about the ship being there in the afternoon and only “floating debris” in the morning. It’s such a huge problem because it “was equipped with ATAC”, and as Bond helpfully informs me the Atac system, or “automatic targeting attack communicator”, “uses an ultralow frequency coded transmitter to order our submarines to launch ballistic missiles”.
Since M is on leave Bond has to deal with the Minister (of Defence, I presume) who clarifies: “if that transmitter were to fall into the wrong hands, it would render our entire Polaris fleet useless”, even worse, “our own submarines could be ordered to attack our own cities”.
Since it was a British spy ship off the Albanian coast, “an official operation was out of the question” meaning a salvage operation. So they asked “Sir Timothy Havelock, the marine archeologist, to secretly locate the wreck” and he did, but “heand his wife were killed by a Cuban hit man, Hector Gonzales. The Greek police were able to identify Gonzales from a description given to them by Melina, sir Havelock’s daughter”.
It’s now Bond’s mission, “operation undertow”. He has to talk to Gonzales “to find out who hired him”.
Near Madrid, Bond is caught by Gonzales’ men but frees himself when a crossbow bolt kills Gonzales. Bond escapes and meets melina and her crossbow, here to avenge her parents.
When Bond’s Lotus car blows up they take hers, which Google helpfully tells me was a bright yellow 1981 Citroes 2cv and it’s a long chase. They may be “out horsepowered”, as Bond puts it, but they make it nonetheless.
The roll over and people help them while a bus slows down the bad guys then Bond drives, thanks to the helpful local people giving them a push. They roll over again, but nothing will stop htem :-p
Melina is determined: “I’m hal-Greek, and Greek women, like Elektra, always avenge their loved ones”.
The Minister is not happy the mission seems failed, and is not eager to tell the Prime Minister, “she’ll have our guts for garters” and I don’t doubt it, Iron Lady indeed. But, Bond saw a man there to pay off Gonzales, and will identify him using Q’s “identigraph”… honestly, “this 3D visual identigraph” uses Bond’s description like someone drawing an identikit, only it’s… that image would be totally useless to me, but the machine prints a perfect copy of the man.
Q finds a match easily, “by patching into the photographic files of the Surete, Interpol, Cia, The Mosssad and the West Germany police” … do they all know their files can be accessed by this identigraph?
The man is Emile Leopold Locque, vicious murderer, already convicted and escaped, and now works for Greek smugglers. Probably Belgian. The Italian Secret Service (wow, we have one?) thinks he’s in Cortina. Mi6 have a man there, Luigi Ferrara or Ferrari; personally I think that “Tofana 10am” could have been a bit vague but they meet right away, of course. Ferrara introduces Bond to his “reliable Greek contact”, who has a chalet there and is very rich. Ferrara says that Aris Kristatos is “very reliable”, helped them before and the British even “gave him the King’s medal for resistance fighting during the war”. Kristatos knows Locque as Milos Columbo’s man. He says Columbo deals in drugs, slavery, murder… known as “the dove”, and “once we were like brothers, now he hates me”.
No surprise there, since we’ll learn that he’s the real villain and he keeps blaming it all on Columbo. He even tells Bond that Columbo is so well connected that he won’t be able to arrest him and will have to kill him. Brother indeed.
Columbo will approach Bond to avoid this, to prove to him that he’s the ‘not all that bad, just a common smuggler’ one and Kristatos is the criminal. Columbo takes Bond to Kristatos’ warehouse in Albania accompanied by his men, and there’s a big fight, shooting and even everything around Bond blowing up but he stands like it was nothing.
Locque drives away, Bond runs up a staircase that not even Rocky and gets there first and kills him.
Bond goes to Melina’s boat in Greece. They meet underwater and when she sees him she leaves her oxygen down there and goes up with him. I have no idea why she did it, but it sure will come in handy afterwards.
Bond tells her Kristatos killed the Havelocks because he didn’t want them finding the St Georges before he did, so he wants to look at Havelock’s diary. She knows it’s written in a code only she knows, so why she gave it to him first is a mystery.
Havelock went down in their “two-man submarine” so now they do the same and find the ship (that Kristatos still hasn’t found in all this time)
Bond takes the Atac system, which looks pretty much like a bg calculator, and uses its destruction timer to stop the man attacking them. There is another battle between their submarine and another one and then they’re back on her ship… only Kristatos is there with his men.
For whatever stupid reason, instead of killing them Kristatos has them all tied up and dragged around by his ship, that goes back and forth a few times to… what? Make them drown? He thinks they’ll die hitting some rocks? It was all very silly, all that “turn around, we go again” thus loosening the rope, giving Bond the chance to cut it and secure it at an underwater rock. A man falls in the water and is eaten by sharks right away (but they didn’t touch Bond and Melina).
Kristatos has the brilliant idea to “run them down” and when he can’t see them he thinks “the sharks have them” and goes away. All very futile and meaningless.
Of course Bond’s motto is “we’re not dead yet”! They were both unarmed and with their legs free - on purpose - so to avoid the ship they swim down and use Melina’s oxygen that she left before. The bad guys discussed their plans in front of Max, Havelock’s parrot, 30 years together, who “repeats everything” but apparently only when and what he chooses since he did not repeat anything important when the bad guys were there, but now he does for Bond, all he has to do is mention the Atac and Max helpfully supplies “Atac to St Cyril’s!” Smart parrot!
At one St Cyrils Bond learns from Q that there are 439 St Cyrils in Greece at least, so Bond asks Columbo who joins him. It’s an abandoned monastery where they used to hide from the Germans. Bond climbs up there and almost falls a few times because of a bad guy very intent on killing him but that didn’t call anyone else…
Once up there Bond sends ‘the basket’ down and brings them up, it’s electronic. They all fight, Columbo is very keen on stopping Kristatos and he’s the one to kill him while Bond is trying to change Melina’s mind. Their buyer arrives and it’s Gogol, so Bond takes the Atac and throws it down the mountain making it go a million pieces. “That’s detente, commander. You don’t have it, I don’t have it”. Gogol laughs and goes away.
So, why did Kristatos destroy the St Georges? I guess he did it and it wasn’t a simple accident of catching a random floating bomb… he destroyed a ship hoping they had no time to destroy the Atac - also it means he knew it was a spy ship and had the Atac system - then he killed those trying to find it, and all to try and sell it, even before he knew if there were buyers? Of course there were, but still… also, Gogol took advantage of the system being on the market, he couldn’t “lose such a remarkable opportunity” to obtain th Atac transmitter, but he also said (to his own “comrade secretary”) “there will be no direct involvement”. He contacted Kristatos for the sale… but what about this Erich kriegler? He is a East German biathlon champion, he tries to kill Bond a few times - in Cortina with a rifle, skiing after him and also riding a motorbike after him and down the ski slopes, forcing Bond once again to escape with his acrobatic skiing, we even see them down the ice track, behind a bob! Rumour has it that Erich is “a defector from East Germany” but at the end Kristatos calls him “the voice of the kgb”, which makes it look like Gogol did indeed have some kind of “direct involvement” in place…
Of course the film will end with Bond and Melina together, and with them swimming naked “for your eyes only, darling” in the moonlight, leaving his communicator with Max, so when Q and the Thatcher try to speak with him, they talk with Max instead. Well, she was well acquainted with parrot jokes, I believe…
Still, there were of course other women, as it often is: there was Austrian countess Lisl von Schlaf, who was actually from Liverpool. Columbo told her he was a spy and she was to learn more about him. They sleep together then they’re attacked during a morning walk on the beach where Locque kills her and threatens Bondwith a gun when Columbo’s men arrive to take him away so that Columbo can explain that Locque works for Kristatos, that the guy got the medal “but other people died for it” because he was a double agent.
Then there was young Bibi, training as an ice-skater who is really young and Bond does have limits, thank God, even after he found her showering in his rom and getting into his bed eagerly waiting, and he to insist to get her to put back on her clothes and go out!
About Melina, I appreciated that hers were not just tough words but she actually meant business; when Columbo worried that “we are only five men” and she added “and one woman” it was not just words, she helped with one man and she savedthem against a hidden guard, her crossbow is quite lethal in her hands.
I liked that it’s not Bond who stops and later kills Kristatos, but Columb, and apparently Bond also knows ice skating since he says he saw Bibi’s trainer Miss Brink skate :-)
Last details: Locque also killed Ferrara; M.Thatcher may be Prime Minister, and yet as a woman she’s the one cooking for her husband; Columbo survives and Bibi and her trainer take care of him, so maybe he’ll be her next sponsor; Columbo reminds me quite a lot of Gabbani with the head-structure of Columbro; Bibi told Kristatos that she knows what he wants “but you’re too old for me!”; Columbo’s sarcasm “by using a British agent to do his dirty work for him, your government might give him another medal”; Bond is also attacked on the ice rink by a few hockey players, 3 or 4; after entering Bond’s bed uninvited, Bibi calls Erich beautiful and Bond calls her “fickle” :-p
Moneypenny has a special drawer with a big mirror to do her lipstick before Bond arrives;
Before the theme song, we saw Bond bringing flowers to his wife’s grave when a helicopter comes for him; his pilot is killed and the helicopter is remote-controlled by a bald man in a wheelchair with a white cat: must be Blofeld, he tries an evil laugh guiding the helicopter like a video game but I think Bond gains control again, he raises the wheelchair with the helicopter’s ‘foot’ and drops him into a huge industrial chimney, and this time it should truly be his end.
The opening titles state “Roger Moore as Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007”
James Bond is Roger Moore
Melina is Carole Bouquet
Columbo is Topol
Kristatos is Julian Glover
Lisl is Cassandra Harris
Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell
Q is Desmond Llewelyn
General Gogol is Walter Gotell
Claus is Charles Dance (I didn’t see him there, he was one of the bad guys chasing Bond)
The Prime Minister is Janet Brown
“James Bond will return in Octopussy”
ITA Agente 007 solo per i tuoi occhi
No comments:
Post a Comment