Dr. No [Blu-Ray]

Introducing the simultaneously brutish and charming, fearless and pragmatic, bed-hopping James Bond, Dr. No is far more amusing than tense by modern standards but paints a much more grounded and human framework for a mere man to work within than more recent entries. A lack of explosions, super-human strength and over-the-top chicanery and gadgetry make the man-slaughtering spy more tangible and identifiable, which is perhaps why so many fans claim the Connery entries to be their favourites. While more grounded, a perilous scene involving a spider, as well as some bad day-for-night shooting, Gilligan’s Island-style underwater antics and Caucasian actors trying their darnedest to be convincingly Asian make for many unintentional laughs. The film follows Bond (Sean Connery) on a routine mission to Jamaica to investigate the deaths of a British confidential agent and his secretary. His plucky determination eventually leads him to the sinister Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman), a German-Chinese Scientist working for a criminal organization called "SPECTRE” that, of course, is out for world domination. Along the way, he diddles a Chinese spy (Zena Marshall) and finds an orphaned island girl (Ursula Andress) to protect from radiation and other perils. Audio commentary on the Blu-Ray is the bland narrated sort with occasional sound bytes from director Terence Young and other members of the cast and crew. Other features include the "License to Restore” featurette, which is a lengthy examination of everything that goes into a print restoration (snore), as well as "The Guns of James Bond” featurette that comes in its original grainy black and white print, similar to the "Dr. No 1963” featurette, which is truthfully just a long commercial. The "Inside Dr. No” and "Terence Young” shorts examine how this original film came to be, from handshake deals to casting and so on, along with the director Terence Young, who directed three of the original four Bond movies. A "Premiere Bond” featurette reveals how fanatical people were, and are, about the franchise and how star-studded the premieres were.