Octopussy

The Brits deign to discover their former empire. Bond spends a lot of time in this one hanging out in India, with only a reasonable amount of condescension. That doesn’t make this a sterling outing, just a little different from the rest of the line. Clearly, the producers were searching here, trying to find something to freshen up what had become a stale franchise by this point; they didn’t entirely succeed. One interesting point: this, as well as several of the preceding and subsequent Bond films, displayed a level of detente between the Cold War adversaries that was actually ahead of its time, certainly for the early ‘80s. It’s a long way from From Russia With Love, to be sure, in several ways, but perhaps these filmic thaws were contemporary evidence that the world was not really on the edge of destruction, as most of us back then believed it was. Still, something as good as the first few films would have been more welcome, even if it had relied more on the old, cutthroat east-west rivalry.