With The Man with the Golden Gun performing poorly, and long time producer Harry Salzmann departing, the Bond franchise needed a win and it needed it quick. With almost double the budget of its predecessor and a whopping $7.5 million spent on marketing, as well as returning You Only Live Twice director Lewis Gilbert, Greg D. Smith wonders: could the studio score a hit and recover their former highs?

I often mention budget in these pieces, and I make no apology for repeating it here because my god, but you can see the vast increase in budget in almost every frame of this movie. A couple of slightly dodgy (by contemporary standards) back projection effects aside, this is a movie that is gorgeous to look at and stands up well to the HD Blu Ray treatment.

The opening scene, aboard a Royal Navy nuclear submarine about to be ominously hijacked is leagues ahead of similar scenes in earlier movies. The atmosphere is brilliant and the set really well-designed, giving a palpable sense of actually being there rather than on a sound stage somewhere, and that helps to really immerse the viewer in the action from the off.

It also likes to subvert expectations early – cryptic references to ‘Agent XXX’ are revealed to refer to Barbara Bach’s Major Amasova rather than her lover, Sergei Barsov, himself appearing in the ‘behind the head in bed with a girl’ pose we have grown used to seeing from Bond in the opening shot of a film. There’s also the moment later when you’re convinced two scientists are about to be fed to the sharks by villain Stromberg, only for his assistant to be dumped in there instead (one could argue this is somewhat undermined by them then being killed by him anyway, but still).

When we first see Bond himself, he is of course in the aforementioned ‘in bed with a girl’ pose, but must quickly depart following a message sent to his (now digital) watch and then settle into perhaps one of the most infamous opening sequences of the entire franchise.

Yes, that chase across the mountain slopes on skis, pursued by a bunch of goons, is cinematic history. It looks amazing as well, save for the occasional close up of Moore clearly on a sound stage, but that’s forgivable given the intensity of the sequence, the time it was made and the fact that Moore would already have been pushing 50 at this point. The final stunt is etched into the memory of just about every person who’s ever seen it: Bond leaping from a sheer drop and opening a Union Flag parachute as the Bond refrain plays and then transitions into Carly Simon’s inimitable rendition of theme tune ‘Nobody Does It Better. It is, for many, the quintessential Bond opening, and it’s hard to argue against its quality. And it genuinely builds from there for at least the first two parts of the movie.

For starters, there’s Bach, who manages by dint of writing and her own on screen presence to be so much more than we are used to expecting from the ‘typical Bond girl’. Not only is Amasova a Russian agent, but a damned good one. She is very much Bond’s equal for much of their opening scenes, the two sparring regularly and scoring points off one another in a way that builds chemistry while also heightening the tension for the viewer who knows the truth about Bond which Amasova must figure for herself – that it was he who killed her lover in a mission in Austria. There’s none of the doe-eyed nonsense we got from Agent Romanova in From Russia With Love, where the ‘Russian Agent’ not only gets put forward as wanting to defect because she’s fallen for Bond but then actually does so. Amasova and Bond do end up together, but again because they have mutual interest, not just because she falls helplessly into his arms.

While we’re on the subject of the women in this movie, it does rather veer from one extreme to the other on the Bondian scale. At times, it can feel positively progressive (by the standards of the franchise), especially with regards to Amasova. At others, it veers into familiar territory, with Bond being offered the sexual company of random women just because he’s there and so are they and what else is a British Secret Agent supposed to do to pass the time?

In terms of action sequences, it once again has a rather schizophrenic feel – the opening sequence is majestic, as discussed, and many of the submarine sequences are similarly excellent. The extended chase sequence which follows Bond and Anya’s first visit to Stromberg’s lair, posing as a marine biologist and his wife, is more like the endless parodies of Bond that would follow than any Bond fan might like to admit. There’s a motorcycle that chases them with a rocket in its sidecar, then a car with Jaws and some disposable goons, then a helicopter, then the iconic Lotus Esprit does its party piece and turns into a submarine and they get chased underwater by more henchmen. It’s all very ‘waves of anonymous bad guys in various modes of transport’, feeling more like a modern videogame than an actual movie sequence.

Plot wise, it’s a bit of an odd duck as well. Invested so heavily in the relationship between Bond and Amasova, and the secret that will inevitably come between them and the fallout of its revelation, the actual villain starts to feel a little sidelined. Stromberg is not an especially memorable or interesting adversary – perhaps partly due to the original script having featured SPECTRE and Blofeld, written out as part of the ongoing legal tussle with Kevin McClory over Thunderball. His plan, to use nuclear submarines captured in a giant boat to destroy the world and create a new undersea paradise feels ill-formed, vague and nonsensical even for a Bond Villain, and we spend so little time with him that his motivations – beyond ‘I really like fish’ – seem unclear. In HD, it’s apparent that there was a suggestion of webbing on Stromberg’s hands, which presumably explains the character’s apparent disdain for handshakes, but the script never mentions it so one must assume it’s a plot point that was dropped by the studio for some reason. It might have gone some way to explain his obsession.

I also can’t help but notice the striking similarities in basic plot elements to You Only Live Twice – which given the director, can’t be coincidental. True, in that previous movie it was spaceships being hijacked rather than submarines, but the goal of starting nuclear war is the same, and the method of capture feels undeniably familiar, as does the final act shootout between masses of faceless goons and masses of faceless heroes in a secret base (albeit a tanker rather than a volcano lair). It’s true that Bond movies tend to have a certain formulaic nature to their plot, but this is pushing it.

Of course, Stromberg’s presence as a villain isn’t helped by Richard Kiel’s Jaws being a factor. Impressively tall and unique in appearance, Kiel dominates the screen every time we see him, and see him we do, a whole lot more often than Stromberg. Add in that his lack of spoken lines and those teeth only add to his aura of mystery, and it’s not hard to see why the character would be brought back, even though he was ‘only’ a henchman.

But as impressive as the first two acts of the movie are in many ways, it does all rather start to fall apart a little in the final act. The generic nature of the final battle aside, there’s also the way in which Amasova suddenly finds herself captured and at the mercy of Stromberg, relying on Bond to come to her rescue so they can get smoochy as the credits roll. There’s no real plot-relevant reason why Bond has this sudden change of heart about a woman who has sworn to kill him once their mission is complete, nor any real reason why she wouldn’t when she has the opportunity. Certainly each has saved the other’s life more than once, and there’s been a suggestion of growing mutual professional as well as personal respect between them, but the decision to situate the ‘reveal’ of Bond having killed Amasova’s lover halfway through the movie feels odd – earlier and there would have been room for that respect to gradually – grudgingly even – turn into genuine affection. Later, and maybe that respect and affection would be strong enough that it wouldn’t matter. Situated where it is, it just interferes with the underlying logic that the movie is otherwise fairly strong on.

It also gets a bit silly with the gadgets towards the end. The Sea Doo is a Q-Branch special but it certainly doesn’t seem to have any gadgets or weapons fitted. There are also some fairly cliched bits of plotting as it rattles towards its close, as if it just can’t quite figure out how to end but knows that it needs to, and fairly quickly at that.

It also – fascinatingly – references previous movies, in particular On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, albeit in a fairly oblique, fleeting fashion, and it does so making absolutely clear that as far as the movie is concerned, that Bond was this Bond, and that’s an end of it.

As far as Moore goes, it is certainly a massively improved outing from The Man with the Golden Gun, mostly because the script and the direction allow him to do what he does best, all smooth quips, easy going charm and that constant feeling that he’s winking at the camera even if he isn’t actually winking at the camera. Moore is once again firmly in on the joke with the audience, and having a riot with it. There’s no attempt at including those ‘harder edged’ moments like there was in the previous movie, not even the merest hint of violence towards a woman. That said, there’s still that steel to the character that many tend to forget. His easy killing of Sandor on a rooftop once he has the information he wants from the henchman, his casual dropping of Jaws into a shark tank – these are the little flourishes that prove for all his wit and charm, there’s a good reason why Bond has his licence to kill.

It is interesting though, to see the subtle but pivotal shift in the formula here – the arch villain is suddenly much less important as an actual character, as the script choses to focus much more strongly on Bond and his companion. Add in that Amasova is such a strong character, in stark contrast to most of the Bond girls to that point, and it’s easy to see why the movie is so well-loved and has had such enduring appeal, even if it doesn’t quite manage to pull off its final act.

It’s also a gorgeous film, with the locations being a particularly strong part of that recipe. Egypt in particular looks magnificent, and it’s hard to argue that the production doesn’t get its money’s worth out of the usual globe-trotting which is as much a part of the franchise as the girls, guns and gadgets.

Not a perfect movie then, but also not a bad one at all. Much improved from its predecessor, fully getting out of its star’s way, and showing promising signs of change for the franchise as a whole. No wonder Moore was quoted as saying it was his favourite in his tenure as Bond.