‘Goldfinger’s Nerve Gas Plot Hole Hurts ‘James Bond’s Best Movie

While the debate about which James Bond movie is objectively the best is probably something that will never be fully settled, there’s one installment in the 007 franchise that routinely appears near the top of the list. Released in 1964, Goldfinger was Sean Connery’s third time out as the iconic superspy. Although it’s loved by countless Bond fans, the movie has a glaring plot hole that didn’t make sense at the time, and has become no more logical since.

Making well over $100 million at the box office on a budget of just $3 million, Goldfinger was an unprecedented success that remains held in high esteem. Today, at 99%, it’s still the highest-rated of all the James Bond movies on Rotten Tomatoes. The fan score is just slightly lower than that, but still comes in at a still-impressive 89%. No matter which way it’s analyzed, Goldfinger was a massive success, and it remains in the mix as one of the finest James Bond feature-length projects. Still, it’s not quite perfect.

Auric Goldfinger’s Plan to Gas Fort Knox Makes No Sense

United Artists

Gert Fröbe’s gold-obsessed supervillain has an unconventional plan in the 1964 classic. Rather than infiltrating Fort Knox to steal all the precious metal within, he only wants to break in to irradiate it all so that the value of his own private stockpile increases. It’s a relatively illogical scheme in general, but it’s easily forgiven as cheesy mustache-twirling bad guy antics. However, one element of Goldfinger’s plan is just plain dumb.

Goldfinger’s elaborate heist relied heavily upon Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore and her Flying Circus dispersing a fictitious nerve agent called Delta-9 above Fort Knox with the intent of killing everyone with whom it came into contact. The intent was to remove any resistance from the military forces stationed there. The use of nerve gas for this stage of the plan makes sense, in the abstract at least. Unfortunately, the Delta-9 is dispersed from such a height that it would never have reached the ground in any meaningful quantity.

‘Goldfinger’s Fake Nerve Gas Reveal Doesn’t Fix the Plot Hole (It Makes Things Worse)

Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger kissing Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore

As it turns out, Bond had convinced Pussy Galore to turn on Goldfinger, and she switches out the Delta-9 for a harmless decoy gas instead. So, even though it appeared to be effective as the planes flew overhead, everyone at Fort Knox had been instructed to play dead so that Goldfinger could be lulled into a false sense of security. That would have been enough to clear things up from a logical storytelling standpoint if the idea hadn’t been so ridiculous in the first place. Sadly, the plan was still treated as if it would have been successful if not for Pussy’s betrayal of Goldfinger.

There were so many moving parts involved in Goldfinger’s nefarious scheme that several people would be looped in on its various steps. Despite the villain’s preposterous assumption that the nerve gas would reach the ground at all, let alone as quickly and voluminously as it did, no one following his plan felt the need to point out that it was nothing short of nonsense that needed rethinking. According to the movie’s logic, Goldfinger and his forces believed everything was strategically sound. Furthermore, the film implies that if Pussy hadn’t turned on her former allies, everyone at Fort Knox would have died via the high-altitude Delta-9 delivery. Considering how well-regarded Goldfinger is as a James Bond movie, it’s surprising this was overlooked in the script.