By 1965, James Bond was on top of the world. After the huge success of the character’s first three movies, especially the phenomenal blockbuster Goldfinger, Bond-mania had gripped popular culture. Audiences simply couldn’t get enough of British Secret Service Agent 007. Wise to capitalize on this, the franchise producers settled into a rhythm of cranking out new entries as quickly as possible. Ready to launch just one year after the prior installment, Thunderball was designed to be Bond’s biggest and most spectacular adventure yet. Indeed, the film was another smash hit, the highest-grossing 007 picture during Sean Connery’s tenure in the role.
In my opinion, Thunderball is also the best of Connery’s Bond movies. By the fourth film, the series had refined all the critical components of its signature formula: the gadgets, the girls, the exotic locations, the megalomaniacal villain with a larger-than-life world domination scheme, Bond’s flippant puns when dispatching his enemies, and so forth – all delivered in their most effective manner. Thunderball is the peak of classic James Bond, not yet burdened by the overload of silliness and camp that would plague so many later sequels.
| Title: | Thunderball |
| Year of Release: | 1965 |
| Director: | Terence Young |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Nominally based on Ian Fleming’s ninth James Bond novel, Thunderball sends Agent 007 to the Bahamas in search of a pair of nuclear warheads stolen from a NATO training mission. The perpetrator, as Bond quickly ascertains, is millionaire criminal financier and SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), who’s holding the bombs to ransom the British government for a payout of £100 million GBP.
Sporting a sinister-looking eyepatch that hints at a dangerous background, Largo may not be the most famous or the most outrageous of Bond villains, but he’s an intimidating presence who keeps a swimming pool full of hungry sharks at his fancy villa and conducts his evil machinations out of a fabulous yacht that can transform into a high-speed hydrofoil. He also has the resources to keep a personal army of frogmen divers on call whenever the need for an underwater scuba battle may arise. In James Bond’s universe, that’s the sort of thing one should always be prepared to happen at a moment’s notice.
Working his way toward this operation, Bond naturally finds excuse to seduce Largo’s mistress, the lovely Domino (Claudine Auger). Unfortunately, Bond’s womanizing is particularly aggressive throughout this film, and that aspect has aged very poorly. It’s difficult to overlook the fact that our hero basically rapes a masseuse at the beginning of the movie. At the time, the scene was viewed as Bond using his charm and virile masculinity to overcome a woman’s silly objections so he can take what he wants. That doesn’t play nearly as well today.
On the other hand, in this viewing, the character I found most interesting was Largo’s henchwoman Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), whom even Bond’s considerable lovemaking skills fail to win over to the side of good. The character is obviously a sly rebuke against Bond’s turning of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. I wish she were developed further to act as more of a foil to the toxic masculinity, but sadly, the screenplay has little interest in that and cuts her screen time too short.
Few films can ever be described as “perfect,” and Thunderball has a few other issues that hold it back in that regard. Oscar win for Best Visual Effects or not, the sped-up undercranked footage during some of the fight and action scenes looks cheesy. The movie also runs a little too long at 2 hr. 10 min. Some viewers complain that the extended scuba battle climax drags the pacing to a crawl in the final act. I’ve personally always liked the scene and think it makes a fascinating action set-piece to cap off the picture, but I can understand where the criticism comes from.
Those parts acknowledged, the movie is a decidedly larger, more polished, and more exciting adventure for James Bond than his first three movies (even Goldfinger) had been. Most importantly, in my view, this is the last Bond film in which Sean Connery is still fully engaged with the material and invested in the character. During his next couple outings, the actor’s boredom with the role and burn-out from the schedule these productions put him through would become frustratingly evident.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Thunderball debuts on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray as part of the Sean Connery 6-Film Collection from MGM, available in either an expensive Limited Edition SteelBook box set or a basic keepcase. Both sets include the movies only on 4K physical disc or Digital Copy codes (which currently redeem with older video masters). No standard Blu-ray discs are provided.
When the Sean Connery 007 films were first released on Blu-ray back in 2009, Thunderball was one of the more disappointing efforts of the titles remastered by firm Lowry Digital. Picture quality on that disc looked soft and over-processed, and the film elements used for the transfer suffered a number of vertical scratches and streaks that had only been halfway digitally repaired. As such, this movie left a lot of room for improvement.
In most respects, I’m pleased to say that the 4K Ultra HD remaster rectifies the worst of those problems. The scratches and streaks are gone, and the image looks much less digitally scrubbed or manipulated.
Thunderball was the first Bond film to be photographed in Panavision anamorphic widescreen for an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. The 4K remaster also fixes one of Lowry Digital’s most infuriating decisions, which was to horizontally squeeze the opening titles sequence into a narrower ratio of 2.20:1 with black bars on all sides. The new transfer returns the titles to their original 2.35:1 with correct image geometry. (Unfortunately, I’m not yet equipped to take screenshots from a 4K Ultra HD disc.)
On the other hand, the picture is still pretty soft and has nowhere near 4K worth of resolvable detail. However, the second half of the movie tends to look better than the first. In general, the image has little grain, aside from optical composites and other process shots, which can be swamped in thick, heavy swarms of it. One of the worst examples of this is the famous jet-pack stunt in the opening, which jumps radically in quality from shot-to-shot within the scene. In instances like that (and this movie has quite a few of them), I’m left thinking that Lowry Digital’s invasive grain removal wasn’t always a bad thing.
The HDR grade for Thunderball is mostly subtle. Colors are often rich, though scenes on the ocean or underwater have more of a green bias than the vibrant blues from the Blu-ray. I can’t say which is supposedly more accurate to the original photography, but I don’t feel that the 4K’s greens necessarily look wrong. In my experience, waters in that part of the Atlantic Ocean do have plenty of green in real life. Regular readers will know that I’m very sensitive to video transfers that inflict revisionist teal color grading onto old movies. I don’t feel that’s the case here.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray includes no less than four options for English audio: two versions of the original theatrical mono (encoded in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 format) and two Dolby Atmos remixes. Back in 1965, Thunderball was released with a couple slightly different soundtracks depending on release territory. The tracks labeled “Alt” have a few changes to music cues and overdubbed dialogue. Most notably, the end credits play to the franchise’s iconic James Bond Theme by Monty Norman on the main tracks (with no label), whereas the “Alt” tracks play John Barry’s main theme composed for Thunderball specifically. Either version works in the context of the movie, but in my comparisons, the “Alt” tracks have slightly weaker audio quality, especially for the Tom Jones theme song, and I favored the regular (non-“Alt”) options.
In my recent viewings of the first three Bond movies, I came away disliking the Atmos remixes for Dr. No through Goldfinger. I have more conflicted feelings on Thunderball. Although it was released theatrically in mono, Thunderball was first remixed into stereo-surround for the THX Deluxe Collector’s Edition Laserdisc box set in 1996. If I’m not mistaken, the theme song and John Barry score were remastered from original stereo recordings. With that in mind, the movie sounds much broader and richer with the music in stereo, and it’s difficult to go back to the more limited mono.
While the Atmos mix has some high-end roll-off, it’s less pronounced on Thunderball than the first three movies. Overall, the Atmos sounds pretty good to my ears, and I was on the verge of calling it a winner, until I skipped to the big scuba battle climax scene at the end, which just doesn’t sound right to me. I suspect that a lot (possibly even all) of the original sound effects for that scene were replaced with newer substitutes. Specifically, the sounds of the harpoon guns shooting are duller and weaker in Atmos; they’re crisper and have a little bit of bass kick in the mono soundtrack. The water bubbling background ambience also hit me as sounding like something off a library CD.
At the moment, I can’t say whether that’s a new issue with Atmos or if it was also the case in prior stereo and 5.1 remixes. I also can’t definitively confirm whether the sound effects have been replaced, or if they’ve just been overly-processed and filtered. Either way, the scene sounds rather dead in Atmos, and more engaging in mono.
Bonus features on the 4K disc are once again all recycled from previous home video releases. Of the two audio commentaries, the second (featuring editor Peter Hunt and screenwriter John Hopkins) is worth checking out to hear the unused Dionne Warwick theme song Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang played in sync with the opening titles. One of the video featurettes (called “The Secret History of Thunderball”) explains the story behind the alternate audio tracks. Other featurettes, interviews, trailers, and so forth may also hold some interest, assuming you haven’t already watched them on prior DVDs or Blu-rays.
Related
- Thunderball
- Other James Bond Movies
- James Bond Books
- James Bond Parody
Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
The Video File Blog 
Spot-on review. I’ve always loved Fiona Volpe in this film and it’s a shame that she exits so soon.
I tried all four English audio tracks and was really disappointed that I had to ride the volume control throughout the entire film. The very first scene is the worst, with the dialogue way too low.
The misogyny in this one is really bad, but we just finished YOLT and it blows Thunderball out of the water.
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I should have mentioned the volume swings in the technical portion of the review. In my experience, that’s always been a problem in Thunderball, back to every home video edition I’ve ever watched (I’m not old enough to have seen this in the theater). I think that’s just a fault of the original sound design.
The beginning is definitely the worst. I think it evens out as the movie goes.
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it certainly is a problem on the BD also – the audio in the beginning – have just finished watched the BD – strange they did not fix it – However Lowry is not a good restauration company – they tend to oversaturate the colors and use DNR a lot
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