Awesome / Dr. No

The Film

"That's a Smith & Wesson, and you've had your six."

• "You've had your six" is a defining moment for the entire character, despite (or maybe because of) how brutal it is and how undeniably cool he looks at it.
• Sylvia Trench is often completely forgotten, but we can't overlook that she actually fed James Bond's legendary Catchphrase to him.
  Bond: I admire your courage, Miss...?
  Trench: Trench. Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mister...?
  Bond: Bond. James Bond.
  • Look closely when Bond gets up to leave the baccarat table; he tips both the dealer and the doorman while casually asking Sylvia to dinner the next night. Both are Freeze-Frame Bonus but it cements how suave Bond is meant to be.
  • Another one comes up in her second scene. Nowadays, Bond's The Casanova who can seduce any woman. But the very first Bond girl? She seduces him.
• Quarrel is probably Bond's greatest sidekick. An enemy agent manages to get the drop on him with a shard of glass to the face. He wipes the spot blithely, to confirm he's been cut, then comments to Bond that he probably won't get any information out of her.
  • This is after Quarrel ambushed Bond.
• While aside from her iconic entrance she's best known as an airhead who apparently believes dragons exist, Honey gets one when she describes how she killed the man who kidnapped and raped her: that is, she slipped a very poisonous spider into his bed. "Took him a week to die." We don't actually see this, of course, but it's still pretty badass.
• The first half of the movie involves Bond thwarting No's minions at every turn, successfully Obfuscating Stupidity when they thought he was suspecting them specifically. He sees through the chauffeur, Mr. Jones, and his attempt to convince him that Government House sent him and turns the ambush on him. The photographer, Annabel Chung, is discovered and her camera film is destroyed. The spider that No gave to Professor Dent gets squashed with his shoe in the middle of the night. He outruns the Three Blind Mice through a construction zone, causing their hearse to fall off the road and explode. He gets Miss Taro arrested when he he called a cab to her house after spending the night there and made her believe he didn't suspect her, and he killed Dent when he showed up to kill him shortly afterwards. The only attempt on his life from No's minions that fails due to mere chance is the Three Blind Mice's first attempt on his life when he returned to his hotel.
  • No is impressed enough by Bond's constant outwitting of his agents that he tries to get Bond to defect.
• Bond's classic Shut Up, Hannibal! to Dr. No:
  Dr. No: "The Americans are fools. I offered my services, they refused. So did the East. Now they can both pay for their mistake."
  Bond: "World domination, the same old dream. Our asylums are full of people who think they're Napoleon. Or God."
• Ken Adam's set design was groundbreaking. Despite the film's low budget, the producers gave him an additional £6000 out of their own pocket to build Dr No's secret base, rightly recognising his art direction made the whole film look three times more expensive than it actually was.

The Novel

• Bond proving that he is Britain's greatest badass by beating the crap out of a giant squid. After he's been burned, electrocuted and nearly bitten to death by poisonous spiders, only armed with an improvised spear and a steak knife.
  • Then, despite being heavily injured, he climbs out of the sea and gets right back up to complete his mission, pain be damned. He rescues Honey and it culminates in him killing Dr. No by dumping a craneload of guano on him, then both of them hijacking the Dragon tank and killing the guard's hunting hounds. And best of all, he keeps himself up and fighting by sheer determination alone. Bonus points to Honey for proving that she's actually a very good spotter as they're driving the Dragon tank to safety.
• Dr. No gets one himself for building one of the first underground super villain lairs in fiction. It cost him over 1 million dollars and it's implied that it might not be entirely stable, but it's just damn impressive to read about. Oh, and he was somehow able to get a giant squid under his control, which is no small feat.
• After escaping and killing Dr. No, Bond runs into Honey (who mistakes him for a Mook and hits him in the balls.) It turns out she recognized that Dr. No had no idea what he was talking about with his death-by-crabs execution for her and she easily escaped while Bond was running the gauntlet.

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