As we meet Bond (Roger Moore) for the first time, he receives a teletype via wristwatch. Clearly, he must quickly abandon his latest female conquest and enter into a mission of grave danger. While the mountain-set ski scene that follows is a testament to green screens and lousy CGi of the later 70’s, the rest of the film transcends it beginning’s hokum.
Of course, there’s a reason for Bond to ski down this mountain: one of the men chasing him will plummet to his death while Bond floats away under the safety of a parachute. And of course, this man was formerly engaged to the lovely, dangerous, aptly named Agent XXX (Barbara Bach), a KGB agent who is assigned to help Bond uncover the location of two kidnapped submarines and their crew.
The Spy who Loved Me is the Bond equivalent to a second wave of feminism in the 1970’s. What I mean to suggest is that this is the first film in which the Bond girl (Agent XXX) is less a body to keep around – though she ultimately falls for Bond’s wiles, of course – and much more of a protagonist, and more-than-worthy foil for our hero. Each innuendo that crosses Bond’s lips is met with another from XXX, and as romance is kindled, XXX extinguishes any possible spark with a wise retort or a cold shoulder. In other words, Bond has met his match – and we’re not talking about the ravenous sharks, though they are equally formidable.
The villain of this film is Carl Stromberg, a man who has created a veritable Atlantis, surrounding himself with the ocean and the predatory creatures therein. We get two first-hand glimpses of Stromberg’s nefariousness when he plunges his secretary into a pool with a rather hungry tiger shark as well as when he obtains a submarine-tracking device from two scientists that he kills shortly thereafter.
Alone in the ocean and happy with his chosen isolation, Stromberg simply takes care of any problems by sending out his henchman Jaws, aptly named because of his metal teeth that, evidently, can sever metal chains with a simply bite. The villain is cartoonish and nearly indestructible, if it weren’t for those pesky magnets.
But the most interesting moments of the film are between Bond and XXX. While seductively named, she is no push over. In truth, she’s the first Bond woman to hold her own. She’s not an archetype or stereotype. She’s a main character, and there’s something to be said for the franchise’s evolution here. The choice to legitimately empower this character is doubly interesting in that much of the film is set in with the backdrop of an Arab world, particularly Egypt, where Bond must reconnect with a confident in order to recover a reel of microfilm, which ultimately leads to a competition of recognition and intelligence when M, Bond, XXX, and her Russian scientist view the content in the same room, but I digress.
The ending, as the majority of Bond films do, ends with a victory and a conquest. And this is unfortunate. Granted, the alternative to Bond and XXX shagging is her killing him in a cathartic redemption for her former lover’s life, but an ending that saw them agreeing never to see each other again would fit the tone a bit better.
The one consolation I have about the ending is that perhaps XXX never wants to see Bond again, which would make her more and more like him.
