CommanderBond.net

CBn Reviews 'A View To A Kill'
Forum members review the fourteenth James Bond film

I give it a 6

I give AVTAK a 6/10. I believe I have it ranked around 17th out of the 20 official films. To sum it up:

Three Good Things About AVTAK:
1) Villains- Zorin especially, May Day too.
2) Flow- It had the feeling of a Moore Bond film, which I like!
3) Title Song- Duran Duran deliver one of my all time Bond favs.

Three Bad Things About AVTAK:
1) Bad Action Scenes- I'm not too wild for the whole fire engine sequence in particular.
2) Moore's Age- This one is criticized too often, but it cannot go overlooked. In some instances, I don't think he is believable as Bond.
3) The Ending- This is strictly my opinion, but I think the ending sequence with Zorin is too short. I would've liked to have seen more of fight...I just think he goes down too easy.

I have to disagree with you on this. I think much of the French sequences flow fine, but once the setting shifts to San Francisco it grinds to a serious halt and becomes the slowest, most boring stretch of any Bond film IMO.

Investigating the pumping station, stalking Sutton, baking quiches and falling asleep in a rocking chair and having coffee sitting around a kitchen table and planning with Chuck Lee are like sequences out of some bad '80s television series. A lot of people think Moore is too old in this film. I don't necessarily agree with that, but some of these sequences give that arguement more weight.

Even the other sequences in the mine don't seem to have that much at stake. Sure the ticking bomb thing is there, but it just doesn't have much urgency behind it.

I had forgotten that I had written a review of this movie...I gave it a 10 because it's consistently in my Top 5.

This is in bottom place for me (out of the official Eon film series). I gave it a five on the poll.

I gave it an 8. I have a real soft spot for this one.

I've always had a huge soft spot for AVTAK. I dunno why, either; it's almost an unconditional love. But I think it's a good film, ranks in the middle with me. It won't share the company of TSWLM, LTK, and TND on my list, but it'll stay far above TMWTGG.

EDIT: Yeah, see that one '7' vote? That's all me.

This post has been edited by Flash1087: 8 January 2006 - 03:30

Me too. I'm sure that has a lot to do with nostalgia too and where I was in my life in 1985. I still remember going with friends and their parents to go see it as one large group one balmy (for the UK at least) evening in the summer of that year.
I already knew the plot having picked up the Starlog Movie Magazine while on summer vacation and just eating up the synoposis and interviews with the cast and crew.
Incidently I would recommend any fans of the movie pick up a copy of the Movie Magazine which is still my favorite coverage of the making of the movie, and the closest to a "Making of..." book for that particular entry in the series (though its technically speaking not a book).

Somewhat of an interesting point that this film was one that got alot of reviews in my Countdown series (there were some reviews I did not even include in this article, but they will be added in at a later date).

Fans are vocal about this one; whether they liked it or not.

Out of the 23 Bond movies there's only one movie that I don't like and even that movie had a great boat chase down the Thames as its precredits sequence. I'm aware of the shortcomings of A View To A Kill, but I love it anyway..
I felt it attempted to reign in some of the fantasy from the previous movie (by downplaying gadgets in having Bond use the air from a tire and dropping the original Halleys Comet idea).
It really is a product of nostalgia though, of long, warm summer evenings long ago.

What was that Halley's Comet idea all about? I've never heard of that mentioned in the same breath as AVTAK before.

The original plan was for Zorin to manipulate Halleys Comet (which was big news in 1985) so that it would come crashing down destroying Silicon Valley.

I am surprised that you were not aware of this Scottlee, it is often cited in interviews, especially in the interviews of Maibaum and Wilson in the aforementioned Starlog publication.

Eventually the writing team of Maibaum and Wilson decided on a more realistic plot that could as they said "almost happen."