---
title: "Twenty-five relics and a monorail"
post_id: 16768
url: "https://lui.vn/twenty-five-relics-and-a-monorail/"
language: "en"
type: "article"
published: "2026-10-27T09:35:45+00:00"
modified: "2026-10-27T09:35:45+00:00"
categories: ["Art & Media"]
kicker: "Bond, Binge-Watched"
intro: "Dr. No to No Time to Die in one marathon - James Bond as an accidental time capsule of furniture, villains, sexism and one very loud ricochet."
image: "https://lui.vn/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/twenty-five-relics-and-a-monorail-hero-1920x1080.jpg"
image_credits: "Image: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn"
---

# Twenty-five relics and a monorail

In 1969, [Ronan O’Rahilly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_O%27Rahilly) – the man who’d founded Radio Caroline, a pirate station broadcasting from a ship off the English coast – gave his client [George Lazenby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lazenby) a piece of career advice: quit James Bond after one movie, because [a secret agent would look archaic in the liberated 1970s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lazenby#James_Bond). Lazenby listened, walked away from a contract for several more films, and has been a trivia-night answer ever since. O’Rahilly was right, by the way; he was just early – by 26 years, give or take a Cold War.

Jayden and I just finished the whole run: 25 movies, Dr. No to No Time to Die, ≈59 years of tuxedos and martinis and men stroking white cats. We loved it – the secret-agent thriller vibes, the supervillains in their ridiculous underground, underwater, airborne and orbital bases, that very particular British humor that never once winks – but somewhere around the third mountain base I realized we weren’t watching a spy franchise anymore; we were watching an archive. Nobody in 1964 sat down to document what a living room looked like, how people talked over dinner, what an office smelled like (cigarettes, mostly), or how a man was allowed to treat a woman he wanted. The Bond movies did it anyway, 25 times in a row, completely by accident.

Jayden had never seen a single one of them before this. He still knew the number. In Vietnamese slang, he told me, 007 is what you call anybody who works in secret – a spy, or someone with a job nobody’s supposed to know about – and then he summed up the entire franchise better than six decades of marketing ever did: It’s luxury job :3.

## Kidney tables and volcano lairs

Let’s start with the obvious, and I mean that literally: the furniture. The 1960s films drop you into a high society that doesn’t exist anymore – members’ clubs and gaming salons and hotel suites stuffed with dark, heavy, ancient furniture, velvet curtains swallowing half the daylight, oil paintings so murky you can’t tell whether they show a duke or a horse, and flower arrangements the size of a Honda Wave, all of it lit like a funeral that serves brandy. That alone is worth the ticket. Then the decades start rolling in: kidney-shaped tables in the 60s, tiled coffee tables through the 60s and 70s, flower wallpaper in the 70s, an entire decade dipped in brown, mustard and olive in the 80s, and finally the glass-and-stainless-steel era of the 90s and early 2000s – doors, walls, desks, all of it – which looked like the future back then and now looks like the waiting room of a dentist who overcharges.

I spent an embarrassing number of hours in three generations of The Sims and in Minecraft furnishing rooms nobody would ever live in, so half the time I wasn’t watching Bond at all; I was taking notes for build mode.

And in stark contrast to all that old money: the villains, who always live in the future. An industrial shipyard with a reactor inside, a hollowed-out volcano, a karst island straight out of Hạ Long Bay (it’s actually Phang Nga Bay in Thailand, where the locals have been selling it as “James Bond Island” ever since), a jungle canyon, a zeppelin. Most of the classic ones came out of one head: [Ken Adam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Adam), [born Klaus Hugo Adam in Berlin in 1921, son of a Jewish family that fled the Nazis in 1934](https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20150315/283643938411013), who studied architecture in London and then became one of only three German-born pilots the RAF let into a cockpit during the war. After that, I guess, designing evil lairs is just the logical next career step. For You Only Live Twice he [had 250 workers build the volcano from scratch at Pinewood, complete with a full-sized rocket, a helipad and a monorail](https://www.dezeen.com/2016/03/14/james-bond-set-designer-ken-adam-dies-aged-95/), and he said afterward that if it hadn’t worked, he’d never have worked in movies again. His war room for Dr. Strangelove was so convincing that [Ronald Reagan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan) [reportedly asked to see it](https://itv.com/news/2016-03-11/james-bond-design-visionary-sir-ken-adam-dies-at-95) once he was president; it never existed.



[![The inside of a hollowed-out volcano turned into a villain base, with a silver rocket on a launch pad, a monorail train curving along the crater wall, a sliding roof disguised as a lake, a helicopter on a helipad and rows of tiny figures in orange jumpsuits running across the crater floor](https://lui.vn/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/twenty-five-relics-and-a-monorail-volcano-lair-1920x1080.webp)](https://lui.vn/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/twenty-five-relics-and-a-monorail-volcano-lair-scaled.webp)

Ken Adam’s volcano, more or less – rocket, monorail and jumpsuits all present and accounted forImage: AI-generated with google/nano-banana-pro by lui.vn

Then there’s the technology, and nothing tracks it better than Moneypenny’s desk. In the 60s and 70s she runs MI6’s front office on pen and paper; somewhere in the 70s and 80s a typewriter moves in; by the end of the 80s and through the 90s she’s got a beige desktop PC; from the 2000s on it’s flatscreens and laptops. Same desk, same job, same man leaning on the doorframe flirting with her, while the office equipment quietly time-travels around the two of them like a background NPC nobody bothered to update.

## The monorail has arrived

The villains got more ridiculous with every decade, and I love them for it. A reactor in an old shipyard, run from walls of levers, valves, cranks, gauges and blinking lights? Fair enough. A big rocket that launches from a volcano behind a fake lake surface and swallows other spacecraft whole? Well … A supertanker that swallows submarines? Well … And a space station that looks bigger than the ISS, built in orbit without a single person on Earth noticing? There’s a radar jammer, apparently, so that’s fine – essentially one plot told three times, each time a little bigger, until it literally left the planet.

Every one of these bases also employs an army of extras in sleek, colorful full-body jumpsuits, jogging from A to B, then from B to C, then from C back to A, while the loudspeakers bark every order twice, because apparently nobody in a villain’s employ can move a single muscle without official instructions. Monorail arriving at platform two. Monorail arriving at platform two. And every serious underground base needs a monorail, obviously, plus a pool of sharks or piranhas, for staff morale. It all looks like it’s straight out of an Austin Powers movie – which is a recursive joke in itself, since Austin Powers only exists because of this.

And of course, it’s always the Russians. At least in the old movies. Every couple of nights, the moment the bad guys showed up on the TV, Jayden would go huh, Russian again?, and I could only imagine how omnipresent and suffocating the Cold War must have felt to a Western audience at the time. The funny part is that the franchise actively tried to dodge it: Ian Fleming’s novels used SMERSH, the actual Soviet counterintelligence outfit, and [the producers swapped it for SPECTRE, a stateless crime syndicate, to stay clear of real politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Russia_with_Love_(film)). The Soviet heavies only really pile up in the 80s, and in between there are friendly-ish Russians – General Gogol, Agent Triple X. It didn’t matter: the Cold War leaked through every crack anyway, and Jayden’s line became the running commentary of our entire marathon.

Plenty of scenarios got recycled, too. A chase on skis, a fistfight in a train compartment, a car chase in front of an obviously shaky, blurry greenscreen: every few movies, like clockwork, and still somehow enjoyable, with their own peculiar irony and charm. Just as repetitive as the Bond girls – but we’ll get to those.

## Slow drinks, fast punches

The old movies are slow. Long scenes, long conversations, slow movements, long stretches where nothing at all happens: people sitting together, talking, drinking, smoking cigars and cigarettes (oh man, the smoking – every room in the 60s has its own weather system), eating fancy dinners and simply enjoying each other’s company. No phones, no laptops, no TV, no loud music. People living their lives, right here, right now. And everyone speaks with this gentlemanly courtesy, all respect and good manners, light-years away from the direct, straight-to-the-point tone of the new films.

The Craig era couldn’t be further away. Short, fast cuts, action, music, chaos, something is always moving – shaking, running, burning, screaming, exploding – and while that’s not every scene, the shift in pacing is impossible to miss.

The fights went through the same evolution. The first ones in the early movies feel a lot like Kirk vs. the Gorn: two grown men slowly hugging each other near some furniture until one of them falls over. Speed and intensity pick up noticeably in the 80s, and by the 2000s it’s full realism – punches land, bodies get damaged, people move fast and take it seriously instead of staging a slow-motion schoolyard scuffle. Guns go the same way: in the old movies they’re handled like cowboy props, while in the new ones every shot sounds full, loud and dangerous.

And then there’s THE sound. That high-pitched, whistling, singing ricochet that follows every bullet in the old movies, repeated so often that some shootouts feel like a joke instead of a fight. Turns out it isn’t even a Bond invention; it’s stock library audio that [turns up in Winchester ’73 from 1950, in Zulu and Goldfinger from 1964, and still in GoldenEye in 1995](https://whatculture.com/film/10-ridiculously-overused-movie-sound-effects?page=5) – I knew it by heart from the N64 game long before I’d seen the films. Real ricochets don’t even sound like that: [Ben Burtt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Burtt), the sound designer behind Star Wars, [went out as a teenager with a recorder and a .22 rifle, shot at rocks, and got barely a zing](https://designingsound.org/2017/12/08/a-conversation-with-ben-burtt-on-perserverance/). The movies had been lying to us the whole time, and honestly? I’d like the lie back.

## Wikipedia after every movie

After every single film, I opened Wikipedia and read up on development, production, release, reception and, of course, the trivia. It’s a collection of rabbit holes so deep that YouTube is full of entire documentaries on every last aspect of the series, and while most of it counts as useless knowledge, some of it stuck harder than the movies did.

The gyrocopter sequence in You Only Live Twice, for one. Little Nellie, the tiny yellow autogyro, was real, and so were the helicopters chasing it over the mountains of Kyushu – until [one of them came too close and its rotor sliced into the foot of aerial cameraman Johnny Jordan, which was dangling over the side of his helicopter](https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20151204/283192967293797). Jordan photographed his own nearly severed foot on the way down, because it was the only thing he could think of doing, and [a former kamikaze pilot crash-landed the helicopter safely](https://whatculture.com/film/20-things-you-didn-t-know-about-you-only-live-twice-1967?page=17). Jordan later chose amputation, went back to aerial work with a prosthetic foot – and [two years later fell 4,000 feet (≈1,219 meters) from a bomber while shooting aerial footage for Catch-22](https://www.pressreader.com/china/china-daily-hong-kong/20170708/282282435330927), an accident that got blamed on that very prosthesis. You don’t watch Little Nellie the same way after that.

Then Jaws, the giant with steel teeth, played by [Richard Kiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kiel). [The original script had the shark kill him at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_(James_Bond)); a test audience liked him too much, so he survived, came back in Moonraker, fell in love with tiny, pigtailed Dolly and got his own little happy ending in an escape pod while the space station exploded behind them. The teeth were designed cog-shaped by [Katharina Kubrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_Kubrick) – yes, Stanley’s daughter – because pointed ones could have injured him, and Kiel could barely keep them in for a minute without gagging. That slow, menacing, legendary stare? [The rather stoic look was me trying to keep from throwing up](https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-richard-kiel-actor-1526574), he said. Oh, and he was scared of the dentist.

Jayden got his own culture shock out of the marathon. He knew 007 before he’d seen a frame, he knew a handful of the gadgets from somewhere, and then Q walked into the room and Jayden immediately thought of Q from Star Trek, of which we’d already watched every single series: same fanciness, same exasperation, completely different universe (okay, same universe, different lore). The Q scenes are absurd in the best way, by the way – overcomplicated, wildly impractical weapons and defense mechanisms that made both of us laugh and facepalm in equal measure. That’s British humor doing exactly what it was designed to do, and [Desmond Llewelyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Llewelyn) played the gadget master like a headmaster watching his worst pupil break the expensive toys again.

And the openings – the songs, the silhouettes, the guns – are legendary, and they’ve also been talked to death, so I’ll keep it short: You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, GoldenEye and Die Another Day were genuine bangers for both of us (GoldenEye, hello again, N64). Mainstream, sure, but there’s a reason they went mainstream; those melodies are timeless and elegant in a way most of the older songs simply aren’t. And I love that the franchise kept the multi-minute opening sequence at the start of a major movie alive, since nobody else does that anymore.

## Jaaaames

Then there are the Bond girls – ugh.

I get the concept: Bond is a womanizer, the center of gravity for every woman in the room, that’s how Fleming wrote him. But watching the first generation – I’ll call Connery and Moore that, because that’s how it felt – treat women is genuinely hard: women are decoration, something to put Bond in context, to make him look and feel attractive and desired. Sure, there were strong characters among the early Bond girls, but in the end almost all of them depend on James’s decisions, James’s strength, James’s goodwill. They keep falling into trouble, and only James, the mighty, strong, sexy, unquestionable white man, can rescue them; he’s their protector and savior, so he deserves to be loved, even against their will. If a woman resists, it’s only because she hasn’t understood his love and devotion yet – she doesn’t know any better until James shows her. It’s his right to conquer every woman, and her duty to satisfy his wishes and needs, always to the soundtrack of a sighed Jaaaames, half longing, half desperate cry for help.

A slap in the face because she wouldn’t listen to a man’s voice. A woman’s arms pinned to the ground while she fights back, just so he can kiss her – and then she stops resisting and melts for the gentleman. That second one is the barn scene in [Goldfinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)), with [Honor Blackman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_Blackman) as a woman the script named Pussy Galore, and no, it doesn’t get better with context. Jayden and I sat there on the couch with our mouths open, shocked that anyone had ever filmed this in earnest. Jayden called it from another world, and he was right: it WAS one. Women as toys, as sex dolls, as subordinate, submissive props – such sexism, such chauvinism, such fucking textbook patriarchy and toxic masculinity that the only way to sit through it is to watch it as a document of its time, and even then: heavy stuff, yuck.

The “exotic” foreigners get the same treatment from a different angle. People of color, Latin Americans, Asians are staged as strange, curious creatures with strange traditions and cultural peculiarities, there mostly to make the white Western world and its omnipresent superiority look even more natural. The low point is again You Only Live Twice, where Bond goes undercover as a Japanese man [by having his eyelids taped back, his chest waxed and a wig dropped on his head](https://www.pressreader.com/china/china-daily-hong-kong/20170708/282282435330927). Apparently that was the plan, and everyone signed off on it. The same film also has the top-secret ninja school that the bad guys already know about, where they promptly poison Bond’s girl in her sleep – after which everyone carries on as if the school were still top secret.

What I genuinely didn’t know was whether any of this was considered normal back then, or whether it already crossed a line. The answer: it crossed one, people just said so more quietly. In 1958, four years before the first film, journalist [Paul Johnson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Johnson_(writer)) reviewed the Dr. No novel in the New Statesman under the headline Sex, Snobbery and Sadism and [called it the nastiest book he’d ever read](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/08/14/bondage/). In 1965, [Sean Connery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Connery) told Playboy that [an open-handed slap was justified if all other alternatives failed](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sean-connery-slap-women/) – and when [Barbara Walters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Walters) confronted him about it in 1987, he told her he hadn’t changed his opinion. So no, it wasn’t another world where everyone shrugged. It was a world where the complaints existed and simply hadn’t won yet. They did win eventually: [Cary Joji Fukunaga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Joji_Fukunaga), who directed No Time to Die – the very last film of our marathon – said of the barn scene (he couldn’t remember whether it was Goldfinger or Thunderball, which says something too) that [basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman](https://au.news.yahoo.com/no-time-to-die-director-sean-connery-bond-behavior-towards-women-173632729.html), and that it wouldn’t fly today – the franchise’s last director, calling out its third film.

## Bond, third generation

The first real patch came in 1995. GoldenEye arrived after [six years without a Bond film](https://lwlies.com/in-praise-of/goldeneye-reinvigorated-james-bond-franchise), into a world without a Berlin Wall, and its new M – [Judi Dench](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judi_Dench), one of my favorite characters in the entire series – looks [Pierce Brosnan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce_Brosnan) in the eye and calls him a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War. That one hit different: from GoldenEye on, everything felt more grown up – more violent, dirtier, more serious, the franchise basically writing its own patch notes on screen.

Fairness requires a footnote for [Timothy Dalton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dalton), the awkward middle child of my generation model. In The Living Daylights, with AIDS all over the news, his Bond sleeps with one woman, maybe two, and [Roger Ebert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert) landed the perfect joke about it in his review: [surely it is the woman, not Bond, who is at risk](https://www.rogerebert.com/?p=38400). Dalton had this scampish charm that made him unique, and he was quietly grounding the character two decades before Craig got the credit for it.

The second reset was Casino Royale, and from there on, Bond felt like a completely new interpretation of the original story, look and vibes – Bond, third generation. And I came into it biased: I’d never seen the [Daniel Craig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Craig) films and had it in my head that they were bad, a betrayal of the Bond tradition. Ha, little did I know: they’re outstanding, refreshing through and through – finally, Bond movies got serious and emotional; finally, Bond became a little more human and a little less hero; finally, women got a voice and, sorry, a brain; finally, Bond got a background, depth, lore, a third dimension.

They’re also just made differently: huge, long camera pans, long panoramic shots, music that’s intense in one scene and barely there in the next, pacing that swings between loaded action and long silent, peaceful stretches, and that color grading – everything a little desaturated, less colorful, lower contrast, deeper blacks and brighter whites, the tint following vibes and temperatures (of course Mexico is yellow – of course it is; that’s another meme entirely). Much of that look traces back to [Roger Deakins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Deakins), who shot Skyfall as [the first Bond film shot digitally, on ARRI Alexa cameras](https://ymcinema.com/2021/10/08/skyfall-is-the-first-007-movie-shot-digitally-on-the-alexa-cameras/); Spectre went straight back to celluloid, which makes my favorite Bond technically a one-off. It’s a style that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but to me the new generation looks and feels the way Bond was always meant to.

My personal top three, for the record: Skyfall, Casino Royale – and Die Another Day. Yes, the one with the invisible car, the CGI surfing and Madonna, sitting right next to the two most serious Bond films ever made, and I’d defend that ranking in court; I love the grown-up Bond and the cheesy one, and the series spent ≈59 years being both. Favorite actor sits somewhere between Craig and Brosnan, with Dalton close behind. [Roger Moore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Moore) and Connery belong to another time and should stay there. And Lazenby had potential, and showed up exactly once – in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the one where Bond actually marries Tracy and loses her in the final minutes, one of the most tragic and, surprisingly, one of the deepest moments for the character in the entire early run, tragic for Bond and for Lazenby alike. Jayden prefers the Craig films too, though he enjoyed every single one of them, even the old ones, awkwardness, imperfection, cringe and all.

## Relics

It was a wild ride, and entertaining, and also enough Bond for the next few years. Watching the old movies was fascinating from a historical point of view, but honestly: good thing they’re relics, and good thing they stay where they belong – in the past. I can definitely see us coming back to the Craig era. The old ones? I doubt it, at least for now. Too much cringe, too much Kirk vs. the Gorn, too much vicarious embarrassment.

The next generation is already in the oven: Amazon MGM has [Denis Villeneuve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Villeneuve) directing and [auditions underway for a full reboot](https://www.examiner.com.au/story/9247781/bond-james-bond-actor-auditions-officially-begin/), and I’m curious what it’ll make of the look, the feel, the lore and all those traditions – and where Moneypenny’s desk is going to be by then. Probably a hologram, in a glass-and-steel office that’ll look dated in about 20 minutes.

Lazenby’s agent called Bond archaic in 1969, M called him a relic of the Cold War in 1995, and in 2026 two guys on a couch in Sài Gòn filed the whole first generation under relics, too. And if the new guy’s first villain turns out to be Russian, Jayden already has his line ready.

Shaken, not stirred, and finally retired 🍸

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