'We Meet Again, Mr Bond': a Guide to the Spectre Trailer's 007 Movie References

Spectre may be a doubly appropriate title for the new James Bond film: as well as reintroducing the global crime syndicate of the same name that first appeared on screen in Dr. No more than 50 years ago, it seems haunted by the ghosts of 007 movies past.

The new trailer, which was released online this morning, is packed with references to earlier Bond films, so if director Sam Mendes really is departing the franchise after this one, he’s not going without covering all the bases first. Here are five key references we spotted.

1. The Día De Los Muertos Parade (Thunderball) 

Spectre’s pre-credits sequence takes place in Mexico, where Bond (Daniel Craig) seems to be pursuing a personal vendetta – perhaps tracking the mafioso husband of Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci). Either way, he’s there while the cheerfully macabre Day of the Dead festivities are at their height, and the film’s opening set-piece unfolds during a rainbow procession through Mexico City.

The colourful bustle of the scene recalls the chase sequence in Thunderball (1965), in which Sean Connery’s Bond is chased through the Junkanoo Mardi-Gras celebrations in Nassau by the Spectre agent Fiona Volpe and her henchmen. Thunderball’s Junkanoo sequence was considered so iconic that, when Guy Hamilton came to direct Live and Let Die (1973), he deliberately avoided including a Mardi-Gras sequence in the film’s New Orleans-set passages for fear of looking second-best. But that clearly didn’t bother Mendes.

2. Bond goes rogue (Licence to Kill) 

Whatever Bond gets up to in Mexico City, it’s clear that MI6 does not approve, and a taut scene with M (Ralph Fiennes) suggests that 007 is temporarily suspended from duty as a result. Later, he’s seen conspiring with Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) in order to secure classified information and field kit, which suggests the events that set Spectre’s broader plot swinging will be strictly off the books.

That premise has cropped up in Bond before: in Licence to Kill (1989), where Timothy Dalton’s incarnation of the character was suspended from duty by Robert Brown’s M after pursuing a personal vendetta against the drugs baron responsible for the death of Felix Leiter’s wife. Then, as seemingly now, Bond is helped out on the quiet by Q (played by Desmond Llewellyn).

3. The mysterious Alpine clinic (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) 

The double reference to Proust in Madeleine Swann’s name surely makes her the most highbrow Bond girl to date, although it’s still not exactly clear what memories of Bond’s past she’ll stir up. What we do know is that she’s a doctor, played by Léa Seydoux, whom Bond finds at the Hoffler Klinik in the Austrian Alps – a shadow ice-cube of a building whose darkly gleaming facets suggest secrets are hidden within.

Bond is no stranger to mountaintop treatment centres: in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), George Lazenby’s 007 visits a similarly sleek ‘allergy research institute’ in the Swiss Alps, which turns out to be a front for a Spectre brainwashing scheme. Could the Hoffler Klinik also be a Spectre outpost, or will that be a hollow volcano we’ve yet to glimpse?

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