"I need a urine sample. If you could fill this beaker for me?"
"From here?"

Back in the early 1980s someone made a bold move. Was there was a loophole in the movie rights for Bond films? It turned out that there was in fact a series of events that would allow a company other than Eon to create a film based on James Bond, but that's the thing: Just because you can, should you? Dare you? In 1983 Kevin McClory's Never Say Never Again remake of the Eon Bond film Thunderball went head to head against Eon's latest Bond film: Octopussy. In the end, Roger Moore's Bond won out in ticket sales and rentals, but it proved that there was indeed room for both to be blockbusters.

As a remake of Thunderball, Never Say Never Again again stars Sean Connery (Time Bandits, The Hunt for Red October, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as James Bond 007, but this time nearly 20 years later it's an older, more experienced bond who is clearly approaching retirement. Of course the general plot is the same: Bed beautiful women and somehow still find time to fight assassins and sharks in slow-motion underwater and maybe recover some pesky nuclear weapons that may have somehow gotten into the hands of the scariest terrorists in all of film: Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, aka SPECTRE.

While there are certainly some similarities between the two films, Thunderball lacks the pivotal geek scene where in a black tie video arcade, Bond plays an odd PvP video game called "Domination" with SPECTRE #2 man Maximilian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer – Out of Africa, Becoming Colette). While the game itself doesn't seem to be that intuitive, Bond picks it right up. "Domination" is amazingly advanced for a 1983 game, with multiple game settings, allowing users to change the rules in the middle of the game and featuring a convincing simulated AI voice. The game board is projected on a glass display between them, and each of them aim and fire at various sections of a plot of land, claiming the sections that they hit for themselves by coloring it with their own color much like "Trick Attack" in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games. Unlike arcade games marketed in the US, "Domination" has the added conceits that each country on the map that they play for has a corresponding monetary bet value, and that instead of "dualshock" controllers, the players actually get shocked when they take damage or start losing.

In the end, James Bond wins, 'cause he's James Bond, and instead of taking an obscene amount of cash that he's earned by winning, he offers to instead take one dance with the lady, Domino (Kim Basinger – The Ghost of Flight 401, 9 1/2 Weeks, Batman), also because he's James Bond, and he's all about getting the girl.

Extras:
I thought initially that this disc didn't have any extras beyond the commentary, but it turned out that the onscreen menu was just almost too clever for me. The extras are rather brief for a Blu-ray release, but they are altogether satisfactory and include: