Dr No has gone to extraordinary lengths, including building an enormous undersea lair—losing supervillain points for not using a hollowed-out volcano, obviously—complete with nuclear power plant, to carry out his dastardly plan of, erm, knocking down rockets with radio waves. He has also stolen a Goya from the National Gallery, presumably while disguised as an overweight bus driver. Oh, and he has robotic hands, or something. 

I grew up with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, although I was slightly too young to see GoldenEye at the cinema. Needless to say I never felt much need to dip into the back catalogue to see how on Earth we ended up with The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, but it is strangely comforting to know that the silliness was there from the beginning.

Absurd plot aside, Dr No is a surprisingly modest affair. There are none of the signature stunts and gadgets for which the Bond films are rightly famous, but many of the other classic story elements are already present, and happily free of the winking self-consciousness they would later develop—the Bond girls, the globetrotting, the casinos and cocktails, the score and the megalomaniacal villain in his honkingly over-elaborate lair. And above all there is Sean Connery, who carries the film with his reassuringly macho yet engaging presence, equally adept at delivering a punch and a cynical one-liner.

Dr No did not quite crack the Bond formula, with the big set pieces being a notable absence, but it is a pleasingly lo-fi and unself-conscious first instalment.