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Lizards in Movies
 
Spectre (2015)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
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At the end of a great opening action sequence (the kind that we find in every Bond film) 007 pulls a ring off a man he kills that has an emblem of an octopus, the symbol of the criminal organization "SPECTRE." The camera then takes us into the ring through the octopus emblem where we see the opening credits with lots of scenes with octopuses, including an octopus with a gun. I hoped that this meant we were going to see a giant killer octopus in the movie, maybe something similar to the killer animals in previous Bond films - the giant python in "Moonraker," the tank full of sharks in "The Spy Who Loved Me," or the Komodo Dragon pit in "Skyfall." I would have settled for just that octopus with a gun... but I was disappointed. The octopuses are only in the main titles. I should have known. There weren't even any octopuses in "Octopussy." We do see a few harmless animals - crows feasting on a corpse, a helpful mouse in a hotel room, a white cat, and a trivial shot of a lizard.

Bond and Madeleine travel from Tangiers to a giant meteor crater in the middle of the North African desert, which, in a classic Bond touch, doubles as the villain Blofeld's hideout. (In "You Only Live Twice" his hideout was inside an extinct volcano on an island.)

Bond gets whacked on the head and passes out. We see him wake up in a bright room. His vision is blurry as looks over to see an out-of-focus lizard on the wall. When the lizard comes into focus and walks up the wall we can see that it's a gecko, the sort of lizard one would expect to see on a wall in a lot of desert locations. Next Bond sees a white Persian cat on the floor and then he realizes that he's shackled into a chair. When we see the cat we realize for the first time that the villain, whose real name we have not been told yet, is that guy with the cat on his lap from the earlier movies - Ernst Stavro Blofeld. We haven't seen Blofeld since way back in 1971, when he was in several of the Bond movies. (Maybe we'll see Odd Job in the next movie, or maybe Jaws...)

That's a wrap for the lizard. It's just an uncredited cameo performance, but it's in a Bond movie so I'm contractually obligated to report it. Why is there a gecko in a nice big bright sterile room and why are they showing us Bond looking at it? Who knows. I think they just wanted something odd to show us as Bond regains consciousness. Too bad it wasn't an octopus.

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