A view to a kill video game8/7/2023 Glen rose through the ranks of editor and second-unit director on the franchise and was very well-acquainted with its operations before leading the series back to basics. Under the stewardship of director John Glen, Eon kept costs relatively low, despite inflation and other financial woes that were going on in the background. Broccoli was being pressured to lower Bond’s budgets. Throughout the 1980s, United Artists had undergone various upheavals, starting when the failure of Michael Cimino opus Heaven’s Gate tanked the studio and prompted a merger with MGM, and then continuing with a revolving door of moguls in charge of the new part-stakeholders in the Bond franchise. By this point in the series, the question is not whether A View To A Kill is a good film but whether or not it’s a good James Bond film. On Moore’s advancing years, I can’t think of a way to say it better than they say it in 2015’s Premium Bond With Mark Gatiss And Matthew Sweet, a delightfully geeky BBC Four programme in which the two writers don formal wear to sip cocktails and recap every era of Bond, from Connery to Craig.ĭuring the Moore section, Gatiss observes that “if you watch, not as a James Bond film, but a film about an elderly man who thinks he’s a secret agent, it’s absolutely charming.”Īnd yet, the stuff it gets away with in bringing back a 57-year-old leading man for one last jolly is bedded entirely in Bond as a known quantity. 007 tangles with Zorin’s girlfriend May Day (Grace Jones) and stubborn oil heiress Stacey Sutton, (Tanya Roberts) but also stumbles upon Operation Main Strike, a scheme to destroy Silicon Valley. And for some of us, (me – I mean, me) it may just be that marathoning Roger Moore’s Bond films in order does A View To A Kill absolutely no favours in either category.Īs expected at this stage, the film has very little in common with Ian Fleming’s 1960 short story, From A View To A Kill, which sees Bond go undercover to break up a cabal of motorcycling assassins who have stolen top-secret government documents, instead playing out a techno-thriller story that’s more reminiscent of familiar beats from Goldfinger and other previous outings.Īfter recovering a Russian duplicate of a microchip pioneered in the West, Bond is assigned to investigate French-American tech mogul Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and his potential ties to the KGB. For many, the highly subjective distinction between “good film” and “good Bond film” might go in either direction towards the modern Daniel Craig films or the earliest Sean Connery adventures. In a series as long and variable in quality as the James Bond franchise, we all have our biases as fans. ![]() A couple more keystrokes and the screen changes to a map of the San Francisco Bay area, with a sort-of bulls-eye animation zeroing in on its source (spoiler: it’s near Zorin’s oil fields…).Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £1: right here! She types a few keystrokes and a series of waveforms appear on the screen, along with some text indicating the strength of the tremor. ![]() ![]() Bond and Stacey feel a minor tremor and so she uses her //c to connect to The Earthquake Center and find out about the quake. While, on reflection it is a pretty cheesy movie, it did have it all: action adventure settings across the globe an evil mastermind (Christopher Walken, no less!) a villainous, destructive plot involving Silicon Valley Grace Jones a struggle atop the Golden Gate Bridge, and the memorable cameo appearance of an Apple //c computer carrying out a seismic analysis.Īt one point in the film, Bond (Roger Moore) and leading lady State Geologist Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) are in Stacy’s home, and beside her bed is an Apple //c (what a weirdo she must be). It’s also one of the movies that we had at home on tape that I remember watching the most on our new-fangled (Betamax) VCR. I saw it in the theater as a 13-year old over the summer of 1985. Among those, one that I recall enjoying best is the James Bond film, A View to a Kill. When I think back to the ’80s (as I do quite often), part of that lovely feeling I am conjuring is formed from various stand-out movies of the time.
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