Where I Watched it: Amazon

English Audio Description?: Yes

Last year, the documentary film was taken by storm by a film celebrating music, and really showing what it meant to make a music documentary. This year, amazon realized they now own the Bond franchise, and decided to make one more thing for you to click on. The Sound Of 007 certainly isn’t comprehensive, and plays favorites, but for extreme Bond aficionados, it might be worth the watch.

I did enjoy many of the stories of how certain songs came to be. Shirley Bassey was having a hard time belting that high note on gold finger, so she came up with a clever way of giving herself a less restrictive way to sing that note.Sam Smith claims to have written his song in a really short period of time. And I didn’t know that Radiohead once wrote a Bond song they ended up not using (but you get to hear here anyway). Most of the comments come from the No Time To Die perspective, as the camera crews has ample time to follow that team around as they wrote the title song for our most recent film, but they do touch on some others.

But not all. If I was directing, I would have started at the beginning and moved chronologically, instead of jumping through the series hoping no one would notice that certain films are skipped over, and some are even mentioned directly as less memorable.

I think that’s what surprised me the most, is that when not limited by a conventional runtime due to theatrical release, this film could have really given us the beat for beat details. James Bond is a huge franchise, and had Amazon gone the same way Peter jackson did with his Beatles documentary last year for Disney plus, they might have made something truly special and almost a necessary appendage to the larger 007 franchise.

Instead, the film manages to just offer enough anecdotal stories to keep you interested, but it’s not comprehensive enough to feel necessary. The movie does have audio description, which will help you keep track of the talking heads as the movie plays out, and explains some of the random bond footage, but the highlight here is the music, and we don’t need audio description to enjoy a really good Bond theme song. i think my personal favorite is Skyfall, but I really can’t deny the brilliance of Diamonds Are Forever. What’s your favorite Bond song?

Final Grade: B