BEFORE: The last of the Roger Moore films, just three more Bonds and 7 more films to go.
THE PLOT: An investigation of a horse-racing scam leads 007 to a mad industrialist who plans to create a worldwide microchip monopoly by destroying California's Silicon Valley.
AFTER: For the third night in a row, I get the feeling that Bond got sidetracked from his original mission. This could just be a way to cram two plots into one movie for maximum entertainment purposes, but that's a rather cynical view. Maybe there's a feeling that two plots will be more appealing, if someone doesn't like one, maybe they'll enjoy the other. I'm not sure why a British secret agent would be investigating irregularities in the horse-racing industry, so thank goodness it leads him into one of those "blow up part of the world for fun and/or profit" type deals.
This plot involves pumping sea water into the California fault lines for some reason, which apparently is something that can cause earthquakes. Can I see some paperwork on this? Is this some early form of "fracking", or was the current fracking process inspired by the events in this film? They also explain what setting off explosives along the fault lines will do, but I could have played this sequence a dozen times and not understood it, once they started talking about geological locks and moving fault lines, my brain just started to tune everything out.
This also represents the attempt to get bigger "name" actors to play Bond villains - which I think worked better than drawing from the talent pool of obscure German and Italian films. The process isn't perfect - they say the villain here can speak five languages with no discernible accent, but don't all languages require you to adopt some form of accent? Besides, the actor has one of the most recognizable and copied accents, or at least speech patterns, of all. Why not just say he can speak five languages fluently, and leave it at that? All American movie-goers would still be impressed.
Then we've got the title of the film - they say it at one point, but in an awkward way, so I still have no idea what it means. "What a great view!" "...to a kill!" Huh? I've gone back to the Ian Fleming short story "From a View to a Kill", and I still have no clue.
It's odd that most of the cast of "The Avengers" (not the Captain America/Iron Man group, the other one) has appeared in the Bond films at one point or another. Honor Blackman was in "Goldfinger", Diana Rigg was in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", and so was Joanna Lumley, and tonight's film had Patrick MacNee.
A disclaimer at the start of the film informs me that "Neither the name Zorin nor any other name or character in this film is meant to portray a real company or actual person" which is strange because here I was, thinking that all of the Bond films portray real-life events. Silly me. I'm guessing there was some kind of lawsuit at some point - yep, a fashion design firm with "Zoran" in the name apparently thought there would be some confusion, even though they don't work in the mining or microchip industries.
LOCATIONS: Siberia, Berkshire UK, Paris, San Francisco
VILLAINS: Max Zorin, Scarpine, Dr. Carl Mortner, May Day
BABES: Stacy Sutton, Jenny Flex, Pola Ivanova (hard to keep all these blondes straight), May Day
ALLIES: M, Q, Moneypenny, Sir Godfrey Tibbett, Chuck Lee
PASTIMES: Snowboarding, horse racing, spelunking, base jumping
CARS: nothing driven by Bond here, unless you count the fire engine... There's a cool 1962 silver Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II, but a chauffeur drives it.
GADGETS: some cool check-analysis device, similar to a credit card machine, but that's it.
THEME: "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran. Another chart hit, one that really captured the spirit of the late 1980's.
Also starring Robert Brown, Desmond Llewellyn, Lois Maxwell, Walter Gotell (all four carrying over from "Octopussy"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "Biloxi Blues"), Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones, Patrick Macnee, Alison Doody, with a cameo from Dolph Lungren (last seen in "Rocky IV").
RATING: 4 out of 10 sticks of dynamite
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