NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN
1983, Warner Bros.

In Never Say Never Again (1983) Sean Connery makes his triumphant return to the role he made famous (or was it the role that made him famous?) in a self-parody about coming out of retirement to save the day.  What is the target for the bad guys? Oil. In particular, a nuclear warhead is stolen and used to threaten “The Tears of Allah,” which are oilfields in Northern Africa.  So, it combines two fears into one movie as a double whammy scare tactic: 1) anxiety about loose nukes during the height of cold-war détente tensions of the early 1980s, and 2) the sense of vulnerability to oil supply cutoffs from the energy crises of the 1970s.

Separately, the idea of terrorists threatening global oil supplies in Northern Africa to wreak havoc on the world’s economies seems just as timely today as when the movie was made 30 years ago.  Some things never change, I guess.