released well over 20 years ago this one remains, in my mind, the best effort made with a Bond film. it had a wonderful performance by Roger Moore, in respect of the fact that he was still an interesting character, an amazing support line-up in the form of Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, and was still a James Bond that imagined the future. no it didn't? oh yes it did?
computers, or rather control over who created the microprocessors for the world, was at the heart of this film. at the time microprocessors and computers were little more than toys, used mostly for fun and the most basic of tasks. as a consequence, on release A View To A Kill didn't really seem to have all that much of a demanding bad guy - who cared who controlled the creation of the bits that made Donkey Kong work properly?
now, of course, the idea of one person being in that situation is a good deal more of a daunting prospect - we have one Bill Gates controlling how we all get them to work, would we really want another one controlling the creation of what it is that makes it work??
Another awesome aspect of A View To A Kill is the fantastic theme song by Duran Duran. forget the nostalgia over Goldfinger or the "it's a Beatle doing it" praise for Live And Let Die, A View To a Kill has the greatest ever James Bond theme. some, and i can't believe it is this old, 22 years later, it is still a fresh, exciting and quality song to have blasting through your stereo.
The glamour, the techonology, the music, the locations, the performances, the plot - add them all up and you get for me the best James Bond film, and even if you disagree with that, then you at least get the last great one. it all seems to have gone wrong not long after.
Where did it go wrong? Well, Timothy Dalton was a great choice, but he was not helped at all by the makers. i am not sure if A View To a Kill in the end exhausted all good ideas left, as The Living Daylights was pointless - to this day i still have no idea what it was supposed to be about, except that it had a decent theme song. Dalton's final performance, Licence To Kill, was a deeply dark and violent Bond film, a good idea but sadly released at a time when the world was trying to avoid onscreen violence - Stallone was in Oscar and Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot whereas Schwarzenegger was messing around with Kindergarden Cop or whatever it was called at the time.
considering just how inept and woefully miscast Pierce Brosnan was in the part of James Bond, it is a miracle that GoldenEye is an almost watchable film. The rest of Brosnan's work as Bond, particularly the lame, dull and quite frankly waste of time that is Die Another Day, made it very hard to understand why anyone would want to make or watch another James Bond film.
granted, there is light at the end of the tunnel - not a lot of light, but Daniel Craig in the "restart Bond" film Casino Royale wasn't bad - a masterpiece compared to the Brosnan era but, it has to be said, still the magic has long since gone, last seen in 1985.
be excellent to each other!!!!!
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