A View To A Kill

Okay, just let me say this. A View To A Kill is a lot better than you think it is. I know people can be quick to dismiss it: Moore is far too old, nearly sixty. By now we're bored with him. He shouldn't have made Octopussy, let alone this. Reviewers, like me, ploughing through the films in order, are impatient to move on, to get to the good stuff. But despite all that, we should not overlook AVTAK. There's much to admire here - including Roger Moore's last performance as 'James Bond as played by Roger Moore'.

To be fair, it's not his fault he carried on. Moore was sure Octopussy was his final Bond - but then he had thought the same thing after FYEO, and even Moonraker. Throughout the late Seventies and early Eighties a seemingly never-ending search was under way for a new James Bond. Some actors (like Michael Billington) were auditioned again and again. Future stars like James Brolin and Sam Neill were screen-tested. The implication is, apparently, that nobody could do it better and, like the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Moore was required to soldier on regardless. Broccoli did have his eye on a pair of comparatively young actors called Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton by now (Dalton had been first considered back in 1969 for OHMSS, then again during the late Seventies; Brosnan came to Broccoli's attention during the making of FYEO) but neither of them was quite ready yet. For whatever reason, Broccoli remained unsatisfied.

Unfortunately this is surely a Bond too far for Moore. Watching AVTAK, one can't help but scrutinise him, to wonder what construction work or emollient has been applied behind the scenes. I've even heard it said that Moore had had cosmetic surgery after Octopussy, which is neither here nor there, but just look at his eyes. Whatever de-wrinkling techniques have been employed, nothing could have been done about those; faded and washed out to a pale watery blue, they are the eyes of an old man.

There's always been a hint of play-acting with Moore's Bond, but here it is very much all play and little acting. This is especially the case in the scenes where he has to flirt with his (ahem, much) younger female co-stars. It's as if his age has become a joke in its own right, like in a Carry On film where Moore might be playing the doddery old man who doesn't know he's too old to be phwoaring at Barbara Windsor. Listen to the exaggerated "Ooooh!" he emits as he and Tanya Roberts finally get it on at the end - it's half Kenneth Connor, half Charles Hawtrey and it's the very last sound Moore's Bond makes. It doesn't help either that Moore has so many opportunities to try it on in AVTAK, as if the producers are trying to manufacture sexual charisma by draping him with women. It doesn't work, but it is not always sleazy either. There is actually something tender about some of these hook-ups: Bond even tucks Stacey up in bed after she falls asleep in her underwear. Connery's Bond, one feels, would at least have stuck his hand down her top whilst he was at it. In fact there's no hint whatsoever of the sadistic brute about this version of Bond. And (mercifully) without the awful jokes of Octopussy, Moore is left with nothing to do but play 007 with a straight bat. He's not showy, or mean, or troubled. He is, instead, just a charming old gent, a nice guy who rescues damsels and bakes them quiche; who plucks people from burning buildings; who, when confronted with a dastardly villain, shows his own goodness with a series of earnest and principled frowns. The end result is an uncomplicated, straight-backed and really rather sweet old duffer of a Bond. It might not be your cup of tea, but this is, if nothing else, an eminently likeable portrayal of 007.

(from l to r) Dull, Old, Mad, Psycho

I was pleasantly surprised by the women here, whom I had previously written off as, respectively, dull and mad. But that's not fair. Stacey may seem dull in comparison with May Day, and May Day may seem bonkers when compared to Stacey, but they both have many good qualities. Stacey is remarkable really in that she is one of those exceedingly rare 'ordinary' Bond women. She has a real job, a house, a back story, and even a legitimate reason to be involved in the plot. (The other Bond women from the Moore era, for the record: a clairvoyant voodoo priestess, an MI6 spy, a KGB spy, a CIA astronaut, a marine archaeologist and a circus-owning international jewel smuggler.) Stacey is a geologist working for the State of California. For the Bond films her character is like something out of a kitchen-sink drama. Even better, Stacey doesn't throw herself at Bond, or end up in a bikini for no reason; she's not patronised and she doesn't 'hilariously' make stupid girly mistakes like a stupid girly-girl. No, she's not particularly exciting. But she is nice, and competent, and she even gets to drive the fire truck.

Then there's May Day. Yes, Grace Jones does seem to be a prime piece of stunt casting and yes, what the hell is she wearing? But look past all that and she is actually pretty good. May Day's character may seem outrageous and absurd compared with Stacey, but don't forget that May Day is the film's henchman - stick her alongside Jaws, or Nik-Nak and suddenly she makes sense. At least she does have a character (unlike some) and it's a compelling one, too: a damaged woman in a weird relationship, brimming over with anger, frustration and pride, ultimately prepared to kill herself to get back at the lover who has betrayed her. As last minute conversions go, it's a damn sight more convincing than Pussy Galore's. And of course, Jones is amazing visually and physically - it's great for the series that May Day poses a real physical threat to Bond and she deserves to be considered as at least one of the most interesting and memorable Bond henchmen, if not one of the best.

And, hang on, who's that but Christopher bloody Walken! Even then he had a reputation for being able to play scary oddball characters and he is brilliant in this, making Max Zorin the best Bond villain since Scaramanga and easily one of the greatest of the franchise. Zorin, a left-over from Nazi breeding experiments and a genuine psychopath, is a more nuanced and compelling baddy than one might imagine from that description. Yes, he's unhinged and violent, but Walken gives him layers of self-control with which to cover up the madness, a reasonable jocularity that is all the more chilling for being a ruthlessly calculated façade.

It's just a shame then that his evil scheme is a bit, well, dull. For a start, Californian earthquakes are all very Superman I. And, yes, I know the world silicon chip market is important, but this is hardly holding the world to ransom. Who would mind if he just bought out Silicon Valley? Surely not the governments of Reagan or Thatcher (it's the Russians who seem happiest when the scheme is foiled after all - has MI6 been played?).

So, with that last comedy "Oooh!" still echoing in our ears, the Roger Moore era comes to an end. The Bond films in the Sixties were a phenomenon, but during Moore's tenure they become an institution - no mean feat considering how precarious the future of the franchise was in the early Seventies. For a long time it has been fashionable to sneer at Moore's movies and at his performances but I don't think that's fair. His films vary enormously, both in style and quality, and should be considered on their individual merits. The bad ones are awful, yes (Moonraker, most of Octopussy) but TSWLM and FYEO are absolutely brilliant. But good or bad, the series flourished during this time. The audiences were always happy to go back for Moore.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: It's another mission for Bond, this time in some ice-bound expanse, and it's another neat little PCS. It's nearly brilliant, featuring, as it does, some nifty skiing, some snowboarding (which was unheard of in 1985) and even an exploding helicopter. But why in the name of Penelope Smallbone did anyone stick the Beach Boys over the snowboarding stunt? It's not actually even the Beach Boys, but a cover by a band called Gidea Park. (Google them, go on, I dare you.) BOND PRODUCERS TAKE NOTE: if you want 007 to impress us, whack the Bond theme over the top of what he's doing. Ta very much.

Theme: Apparently John Barry was a bit sniffy about working with Duran Duran but, goodness me, the resulting track does give the whole franchise a whacking great kick up the backside and a much needed injection of energy. The song was (very unusually for a Bond theme) a massive world-wide hit and suddenly, from this point, this is what a Bond theme is supposed to sound like. It may be a coincidence, but after several rather lacklustre efforts, Barry's score for AVTAK is a return to his previous high form; it's exciting, full of energy, and even manages something approaching grandeur during the escape from City Hall in San Francisco. Maurice Binder has also had a shot in the arm of something. It may be the same 'slowly gyrating girls' stuff as always but the visuals do look strikingly different thanks to all the neon and day-glo colours. Finally the Eighties have arrived.

Deaths: 66. It's not particularly high compared with some Moore films, but as is traditional the tally sky-rockets in the final act. Although here, instead of a climactic battle, we have a massacre as Zorin kills all the civil engineers and labourers that have been working for him in the mine. I counted 55 deaths on-screen during this sequence alone but surely there would have been more. It's the most gratuitous act of violence we've seen carried out in the series so far.

Memorable Deaths: Aubergine is stung by a poisoned butterfly up the Eiffel Tower. Grace Jones rides a massive bomb down a railway. Christopher Walken giggles and gasps as he tries and fails to hold on to the Golden Gate bridge. Reminiscent of Mr Solo from Goldfinger, an investor reluctantly 'drops out' of Zorin's air-ship board room meeting.

Licence to Kill: 5 - very low for Moore but then he is loaded with rock salt during the only gun battle.

Exploding Helicopters: 1! And a zeppelin! Get in!

Shags: 4! The record's gone thanks to a perfect storm cooked up by a) the need to have a conquest in the PCS; b) May Day being a bit crazy/desperate/into old men; c) a saucy hot-tub cameo from Fiona Fullerton; and d) Stacey Sutton taking pity on Bond in the very last few seconds. Four. That's more than Dalton managed in total isn't it?

Crimes Against Women: Not much. There's a poor 'women's lib' reference that sounds hopelessly out of date even for 1985. Bond is rather sleazy at Zorin's party but otherwise Moore is now all sweet and avuncular and not the callous sexual predator of LALD or TMWTGG. In the scene where Zorin and May Day spar there is an uncomfortable moment where it looks like Zorin is attempting a sexual assault. But then they are both fairly unusual, even by the standards of Bond villains, so it's not entirely impossible that this isn't 'normal' within the parameters of their (dysfunctional and damaged) relationship. If so, they really need a Safe Word.

Casual Racism: I can't remember the last time we saw a Frenchman (not counting Michel Lonsdale or Louis Jordan who aren't playing French, of course) but the character of Achille Aubergine is strangely unpleasant, almost repellent, which, given that he's only on-screen for about a minute, seems oddly deliberate. Dr Carl Mortner is your common-or-garden Nazi eugenicist. All the (good) American men are dull but worthy, as usual (and all appear to have moustaches - was that a thing in 1985?). For the first time we get some British stereotypes as Bond and Tibbett play Upstairs, Downstairs.

Out of Time: What's a Walkman?

Fashion Disasters: It's tempting to say 'everything Grace Jones wears' but it's a little obvious. Her thong/leotard thing is eye-watering though and her asymmetric sunglasses are merely pretty bad. Bond has sunglasses too, trick ones from Q, but sadly they just look like part of some odd prescription and make Moore appear, astonishingly, even older.

Eh?: Does May Day have superhuman strength? It's sort of implied that she is at least incredibly strong, but unlike (say) Jaws she doesn't have the physique to match (yes, she is obviously in top shape, but she's still very slight). >> Why does Zorin go in person to collect his assassin (May Day) from the scene of the crime? Is that not just a little bit of an unnecessary risk? >> Why does Zorin use his private residence, his 16th century French château, as a packaging and distribution factory for silicon chips? They're not manufactured there, it makes no sense! >> Gogol, 'doing a Zorin', is there in person to pick up one of his operatives. The man is the head of the KGB and he is driving through California with known Soviet spy (and internationally famous ballet dancer), Pola Ivanova. How? Either (as is hinted elsewhere during this period) East/West relations are dramatically better in the Bond universe than they were in real life, or US counter-espionage operations are non-existent (which would explain, perhaps, why James Bond has to keep saving them). >> Bond tricks Pola by switching cassettes, but how does he know she even has a cassette? >> I may be wrong but the film appears to muddle up state and city government: Stacey works for the Californian Department of Conservation but the office is based at San Francisco City Hall? (The real DOC is, sensibly, with the rest of the state bureaucracy in Sacramento). >> Bond uses a credit card to break open a sash window. Fair enough, except that this is achieved electronically and with a beep, rather in the manner of a sonic screwdriver. Why not just slip the catch with it? And who the hell is auditing Q Branch? >> Why does Bond break in? Why not just ring the bell? >> Why would Bond go back for the shot gun now that he knows it is not loaded? >> Bond cooks a quiche. Stacey says, "I had no idea you could cook!" Well, you've just met him, why would you think he couldn't? Bond replies: "I've been known to dabble." No you haven't! We've been watching for twenty years! The closest you've come to cooking is when you flambéed Mr Kidd in DAF! >> The baddies creep up to the house and kill nice CIA man Yip and then drive away. Why? Why not kill Bond and Stacey too? >> Bond steals a fire engine, gets chased through San Francisco, escapes and drives it to Zorin's mine. Except when he gets there it is a very different fire engine. Maybe, overnight, he ditched the first one and stole a second so as to evade his pursuers? >> Once again, Gogol turns up in M's office at the end of the film for a cosy chat. This time, he offers Bond the Order of Lenin to boot. Why? Was the USSR threatened by Zorin's plan particularly? Does the Governor of California not want to say thank you? >> Q, searching for Bond, is exploring Stacey's house with his Mars Rover. 1) How did it get up the stairs? 2) Why not just knock on the door himself?

Worst Line: May Day and Zorin gaze at nothern California as their airship approaches Silicon Valley. "What a view!" breathes May Day appreciatively. "To a kill!" hisses Zorin. Because that's a phrase isn't it, 'a view to a kill'. Whilst we're on the subject of dialogue, I have to record the first "shit" of the franchise, muttered by Stacey during the fire chase. It's immediately followed by the second "shit" of the series, which comes from the SFPD officer. I haven't gone back and checked, but I think these are the first profanities we've had so far. Back to the Future's full of them too.

Best Line: Again, not much in the way of a killer line, but the banter between Bond and Tibbett at least sounds like it was fun for the actors.

Worst Bond Moment: For sheer audience discomfort it has to be Bond in bed with May Day, but I'm not sure 007 would be complaining.

Best Bond Moment: Well it would be the snowboarding if it wasn't for the ersatz Beach Boys song. So I think instead it should be Bond carrying Stacey out of the burning City Hall - one doesn't often see a crowd cheering for Bond and the scenes here are reminiscent of other '80s films like Ghostbusters or Superman II.

Overall: This is a bit more like FYEO and bit less like Octopussy, but it's all very gentle (apart from when Zorin machine guns everyone to death). Moore's amiable old Bond is fun and familiar but all the edges have been knocked off of 007 and Fleming's original character has almost completely disappeared. Next time, (if there is a next time, see below) it'll be back to basics...

James Bond Will Return: ... Well, he'll just return, okay? Have some faith.

A Tiny Slice of Canada with a New York Chaser

I did something unnatural the other day. I crossed a land border into a new country. To some of you that won't sound like too much of a big deal, but to the English this is an alien concept. We prefer our international perimeters to be described by large bodies of water, and this partly explains why cries for Scottish, Welsh or even Northumbrian independence might confuse us. Why bother having a separate country if one can just walk there? Well, that's what you get for growing up in a cul-de-sac, I suppose.

Such rules can not be applied to the vastness of North America and, to be fair, the Niagara river that divides the USA from Canada is large enough perhaps to give even the most insular Englishman pause for thought. But after a plethora of road tolls on the way there, the border checks to get into Canada didn't really seem that much of a big deal. If anything, it was an unexpectedly convivial process. Not that this should in any way be taken as a sign that Canada isn't a 'proper' country: Americans take note, one doesn't judge a nation's greatness by how difficult or unpleasant it is to get into it.

On another occasion we might have fooled about with the idea of driving to the border from Texas, but it's not really feasible during Spring Break. Another time, perhaps. No, we flew to New York to stay with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere) and drove from there. A trifle of a drive, really, just four hundred miles or so. We took our time.

The road winds up through perfectly rounded hills, its path endlessly criss-crossed by shallow river-beds. The water is dark, winter-cold and dashed with pale rocks and stones. The hills are covered with countless bare trees so that their outlines are softened to a faint grey blur. When the land does flatten it is thick with fur-brown grass, like the countryside has its own winter pelt.

It was nice to be up in the North of the world again. A mixture of oddness and familiarity. I realised I miss even the subtlest of things: the low angle of winter sunlight; the way shadows pool up in the sharp valleys, in the lee of hills; it's an intricate landscape, chiselled and sculpted. There isn't much in the way of topography in my part of Texas and none at all in the city, of course. Even if you do get out west, the land is smashed flat, hammered into an expanse of grassy plains or beautifully desolate desert.

The road in to Ithaca, NY was vertiginous in comparison, rising up over the brim of yet another hill before plunging down into the city. We only stopped for dinner but I liked it. I didn't realise that it was the home of Cornell University, but I should have guessed it was something like that: there were too many cool-looking young people around for it to be an ordinary out-of-the-way small town. From there it was another hour or so, driving through the pitch dark between invisible finger lakes to Geneva, and then in the morning we headed for the border.

It is weird that America is so big. It is unhelpfully large, so much so that I can see, just a little bit, why there are crazy people here who are scared of the federal government or think that their state should be able to ban contraception or what have you. Even I had come to the point, I realised, where I was starting to think of the states as individual proto-countries. Texas is so different from New Mexico, let alone New York, that I had begun to think of them as distinct areas, mis-matched patches in an ungainly American quilt. And then I crossed a real frontier into a real foreign country and I was forced to squeeze the 50 states back into the small box in my head labelled "America", mixed and muddied together like poorly-managed playdough. And, having, done that, I had to try and come to terms with Canada, a country which looks just like America, but which has the Queen on their money.

So, yes, we did Niagara Falls. The horseshoe falls are the big ones and, to be fair, it is impressive. The falls are nagging, insistent, unrelenting. If you ever had to do anything like woodwork at school then I expect you've forced a rod of dowling against the wheel of an electric sander, pressing it forwards so that it is inexorably shwizzed into wood dust. Well Niagara is like that. Relentless and inescapable. No photo can do it justice because it is always thundering and always in motion, continuously dragging the eyes over and down, over and down, over and down until one gives up the fight and lets them rest against the white-out of the gently coiling mist.

The worst bit (or the best bit, depending on your inclination), is the part of the path that somehow goes around the top of the falls so that one is just a couple of metres from the very lip itself. I stood there, caught in a single rolling instant of time, watching the same water rush over and disappear into the event-horizon itself. The sunlight stabbed down, slicing through the water so that I could see just how deep it was at the edge. It also made the water shine, translucent like thick glass, so that I could almost see through the apex. But never for very long. Always the thunderous flow would drag me on with it and I'd be back again to the comparative calm of the lower river: the smoke-blue water giddily spinning and foaming; the mist falling as rain; the permanent rainbow; the hundreds of gulls, wheeling and diving, black against the whiteness.

In my imagination I had always seen it as being set in a wilderness, rather like the Grand Canyon. But no, it has two towns wrapped about either side of it: Niagara Falls, NY, which is rather rugged and a little decrepit in a post-industrial way, with a rather ugly shiny nub of downtown, and Niagara Falls, ON, which is a little tacky. It's got some nice buildings, some lovely houses but it also has a stretch of crap amusement arcades, wax work displays and over-priced pizzerias. For the deeper pockets, there's the casino - the upmarket end as it were. The boys went on a ferris wheel and then we went up the Skylon Tower. Both offered excellent views of the wider landscape and therefore options for escape.

We carried on to Hamilton, ON to stay the night with cousins (my wife has cousins everywhere, did I say?). It was another of the most fleeting stops, but we had a lovely time. We got to shop in a real Canadian store and we got to walk along the hill and stare out over another Great Lake, Ontario. In the very dimmest distance we could see the faint skyline of Toronto.

Annoyingly this first trip was only a series of first impressions, but I like what I saw of Canada. It was suddenly exotic and exciting to see something other than the Stars & Stripes flying, and it was rather wonderful to see kilometers and French words on the road signs. But is this a kind of knee-jerk homesickness? After all, even New York feels like Britain after a winter in Texas. I don't know. It is nice to see that the USA, which can sometimes believe itself to bestride the whole world, doesn't even fill North America. And Canada is such a fascinating idea, a parallel-universe Bizarro America, tinged by another century or so of British rule. Having seen it for myself, I think I understand the country a little now, I have a better sense of how it plugs into the world. It's worth exploring properly and I hope that I will get a chance to do that one day.

We spent the whole day driving back to New York. Surprisingly, getting back across the border was a rather fraught affair, with lots of queuing and waiting and, at the end, a surly American border guard who rolled his eyes at us for trying to navigate the frontier at all. But after that we had a good day's drive. We had possibly the best hot dogs ever at a place called Ted's in Buffalo, NY  (America, for good or ill, excels at inexpensive, unpretentious and very tasty food) and then we ploughed on back down the road, through the hills and across the rivers, all looking much the same as they had on the way up, until the sunlight ebbed from the world and the galaxy of lights that is New York city rose up before us.

It is my ambition that one day I will be able to be blasé about New York City. I want it to be familiar and known, scoured of secrets and mystery.

It's unlikely to happen but we did get to spend a day chipping away at the mystique and I fixed down some of the things I half-remembered from previous visits. This felt good but of course there was no defence against stumbling into new unforeseen wonders or, worse still, foreseen ones.

For example, I knew Grand Central Station was impressive, but seriously? For the first time, I arrived in New York by train and it took a long while to get out of that building. I had expected it to be grand. I hadn't expected it to be exquisite and banded by its own blue vaulted heaven of sky and stars.

Once outside, we ambled. Battery Park to stare across at the Stature of Liberty, then back uptown. On a whim we poked our noses inside the Schwarzman building - the branch of the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street - only to find another palace. Like a Tuscan church its white stone and marble gives away to a beautiful interior of carved dark wood and luscious frescos. The Reading Rooms were full of people, studying and researching, their gaze split between page and screen - libraries aren't just for storing books, they are for helping knowledge and information to spread freely, regardless of the medium.

With the time we had left we took a walk along the High Line, an old elevated railway line that has been reclaimed as a public park. Initially I was underwhelmed: I hadn't come to New York city to encounter calm or quiet. But as we strolled along above the streets and the traffic I took to it. It's fun to share the space with other pedestrians, to see the backs of buildings and to enjoy the odd vantage points: a secret version of the city hidden away amongst the air rights, which is after all exactly the sort of thing I had been hankering after. Best of all, being an old train line, the High Line actually took us somewhere. Rather than walking around a park to end up where we had started, our stroll had taken us to our destination. Or rather the next in a series of destinations, a series that ended, finally, late that night with us rolling up to the door of our home, way down south.

Octopussy

It's not as bad as Moonraker, but it is almost nothing like FYEO. Octopussy returns the Bond franchise to familiar surroundings with a poor script, an ageing male lead and some unjustified nonsense where a taut adventure story should be. Presumably the criticism of FYEO had been that there weren't enough jokes, but goodness knows there are far too many here.

Like the Curate's Fabergé egg, Octopussy is good in parts. Despite everything, the sequence in East Germany works very well: it maintains tension and shows that Bond can still be relevant within the Cold War setting of the Eighties. This film is mostly rubbish though. And the problems start on the first line of the script.

At this point there are almost no more Fleming stories left to adapt: the producers have worked over all the novels (except Casino Royale, the rights for which are tied up elsewhere) and are now having to pick through the bones of the short stories. This worked with FYEO, when they had all the short stories to choose from - but now they are getting down to the dregs and, although they are having to produce a lot of original plotting, they still feel obliged to smear something of these lesser works on to the screen.

The producers settle on a vignette about an old soldier who stole some gold during the war. Many years later his crime is discovered and a man from London comes to tell him he's going to be court-martialed. The old soldier is devastated and the man, who's name is James Bond, decides to allow him to kill himself instead of facing disgrace. It's called Octopussy, because the old soldier has a pet octopus and commits suicide by provoking the animal to attack him. Whatever its merits as a short story, one does not spend a lot of time wondering whether the title is particularly good or pertinent - but as soon as the production team chose it as the title for Bond 13, 'Octopussy' had to mean something within the context of the film.

The problem of justifying a silly title is not unique to Octopussy. In Thunderball, the title is excused by being a blink-and-you'll-miss-it codename. Those of YOLT and OHMSS enjoy the fig leaf of being thrown into random lines of dialogue. And we mustn't forget QOS, the title of which perplexed almost everybody, gets no reference within the film itself, and only really makes sense if one is prepared to thoroughly digest the short story from which it is taken. But all these clumsy efforts are nothing when compared to Octopussy.

It is a terrible, silly title and EON's solution, to give it as a name to the female lead, is even more terrible and silly. We are faced with the prospect of Roger Moore and Louis Jordan having to call Maud Adams 'Octopussy' and keep a straight face, pretending that this a reasonable state of affairs. It isn't of course and the Bond series ends up pushed as close to resembling a Carry On film as it ever does. Lumbered with this baggage, the film now has to justify it. Who is this Octopussy woman? What is she like? Well with a name like that she'd obviously have to be an exotic Eastern madame, living on an island with her spandex-clad harem of lesbian jewel-smuggling circus acrobats or whatever that's supposed to be. I hope I'm not being unfair on Maud Adams if I suggest that her sincere efforts to sell this are about as convincing as Roger Moore's legs in the picture at the top.

I'd hate to single Adams out though - none of this is her fault and she even manages to imbue her ridiculous character with a quantum of dignity. And the unwarranted silliness infects the whole Indian portion of the film in which the story is daft, the characters are limp, the action is weak and the jokes are wearisome. I won't spend too long sticking the boot in, but I can't pass up mentioning a few of the larger problems with this section.

Quickly then - India is just the latest developing country to be treated as an exotic backdrop for some Bond japes. With its palaces, tiger-infested jungles, crocodile-infested lakes and streets crowded with beggars, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and fakirs, this is an India only of the British imagination. A Raj-themed playground in which posh Brits can muck about without having to engage in any uncomfortable post-colonial soul-searching. George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman books) was hired to write the Indian bits but there's no way of knowing if what appears on screen is his fault or if it was mangled by the producers into something less interesting.

Louis Jourdan strikes me as an odd choice to play exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan. I can see that he has the easy sophistication that so often graces Bond villains, but his chilled urbanity is almost soporific. He's very much a mirror image of Moore's Bond in fact: suave and unflappable to the point of utter blandness. That's not to say that Jourdan isn't trying here, because he turns in a performance that is subtle and clever in places (there are some lovely nervous bomb-related glances, for example), but this is hardly the point of a Bond villain, where understatement is nearly always pointless. And Khan is such a boring villain! He has no grand scheme, no megalomania - he's just a posh petty criminal. It all seems rather a waste.

No the real villain of the piece is General Orlov, the deranged and off-message member of the Soviet Praesidium played by Steven Berkoff. He is an unusual baddy for a Bond movie: they are (as you know) nearly all private citizens of wealth and taste with impeccable manners. Orlov is a soldier and his villainous scheme is born of a frothing raging frustration. How he is supposed to know, let alone fall in with, Khan is unclear (nothing is made of the USSR invasion of Afghanistan for example) but it is an unlikely pairing to say the least. But never mind that because he is a great baddy here and a wonderful change from all the Draxes and Strombergs.

Orlov's plan is a great piece of Bond villainy too and provides Octopussy with its real saving grace: a brilliant twenty minute sequence through East and West Germany as 007 races after a nuclear bomb. Orlov wants to force unilateral nuclear disarmament in the West by faking an accident at a US airbase, leaving NATO without its deterrent. It's a wonderful example of how an evil scheme's very plausibility can raise the stakes and make it more frightening. Dropping orchids from space to sterilise the Earth? Who's going to worry about that? But Orlov's plan, with his bomb hidden inside a circus tent, brings the threat of nuclear death right into the reality of family outings.

The mechanics of the sequence, a long convoluted chase involving trains and cars and many fights, are excellent and the drama is well above average for a Bond film, with 007 cast as the secret agent who alone knows the truth of the conspiracy. It's a proper (albeit mini) Cold War thriller and it works so well, in fact, that it doesn't really matter, as the last few beeps of the countdown sound, that James Bond is a middle aged man in a clown costume.

It's impossible to ignore Moore's age in Octopussy. I'm not actually sure that the film, or his portrayal suffer very much because if it, but it can distract the attention if, like me, you are waiting for signs of decrepitude, knowing that his time is nearly up. Always a visibly relaxed actor, it's hard to tell if he's merely going through the motions here or not, but I doubt it. There is perhaps a slight loss of intensity compared with FYEO but that could be as much down to the excessive amount of jokes as anything else. Moore's still in good shape here for a man of 56 and, thanks to some hard-working stunt men, Bond is able to save the world once again. But this would have been a good time to call it a day.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: For the first time in ages, Bond is on a mission rather than just getting randomly set upon or tangled-up in something. This is the one with the mini-jet hidden in a horse's backside. The aerial work is not unimpressive but, as spy-gadgets go it's rather ostentatious isn't it? Interestingly, the target here is South American military hardware - I'd always assumed it was supposed to be Cuba, but now (what with the polo references), as I write this I wonder if it wasn't supposed to be Argentina. That's a bit much isn't it? Let bygones be bygones and all that, I say. [Moore's biography claims it's Cuba, just so you know, but the credits refer explicitly to 'South American' troops.]

Theme: Raise your glasses, this is the last hurrah of that mighty lumbering dinosaur, the Bond Ballad. All Time High is yet another innocuous three minutes of blandness but from now on it's going to be MOR rock-pop numbers all the way. Meanwhile, Binder can't leave the gymnastics alone, even if somebody has bought him a laser pointer to play with.

Deaths: 44. Slightly below par but then everyone seems to be taking it easy this time.

Memorable Deaths: 009, dressed as a clown, crashes through the British Ambassador's french doors with a Fabergé egg in his hand. I'd say that was memorable.

Licence to Kill: 39 - it's high, but then Bond did blow up a large aircraft hangar full of South/Central American troops. Many of them were seen to escape but there were certainly some left inside - I've estimated 25. More unusually, Bond's kill tally is a very high proportion of the overall death toll: 89% in fact, fact-fans!

Exploding Helicopters: 0. Again. Next time though, eh? Must be one next time?

Shags: 2. (Magda, the 'bad' Bond woman here, must have the highest ratio of hair-to-body mass of anyone in the series.)

Crimes Against Women: Bond complains that having an island just for women is "sexual discrimination" and then stages a sort of Fathers4Justice style protest, going there in a crocodile-shaped submarine and shagging the boss woman. That'll learn them pesky women's libbers. He also uses government equipment to ogle a co-worker's breasts. Otherwise he's quite well-behaved. The production team make the most of Octopussy's all-woman outfit by ensuring that the costume designer makes their outfits out of very little.

Casual Racism: Bond is helped by a very stereotypical-looking couple of sausage-munching Germans. As for India, well, perhaps this is an apt point at which to mention the great work Sir Roger has done for UNICEF for many years.

Out of Time: Can't really imagine Bond being given a fountain pen these days. The Barbara Woodhouse reference is classic 1983. There were plans (apparently) for a Charles and Diana cameo à la FYEO but this never happened, luckily.

Fashion Disasters: The clown costume is surely an all time low for 007. Everything the women of the Octopus cult wear is highly suspect. There's an honest-to-goodness Nehru jacket for Jourdan and one last safari-suit for Moore.

Eh?: The Egg plot just disappears, but that might be because it didn't make any sense in the first place. Let's get this as straight as we can. Khan and Orlov are stealing art from the USSR and smuggling it out of the country. To cover their tracks they are getting fakes made and leaving them in Russia. 009 somehow gets involved with this and steals a fake Fabergé egg which then ends up in London with 007. But if this fake was made by Orlov then why is the original up for auction in London? If it is missing from the USSR, won't they notice it reaching £500,000 at Sotheby's? And why do Khan and Orlov need the original back? It's the fake that they end up buying and it's the fake that was stolen from them by 009, so... they're sorted then aren't they? When they do get the original back from Bond, Orlov smashes it thinking it's the fake - so where is the fake? Khan seems to know that it is the original that's been smashed but doesn't say anything and the fake is never seen again, not even in the pile of treasures that gets smuggled on the train. And finally, was the whole jewel smuggling operation thought up just to create a way to get the bomb into West Germany? >> If not, their smuggling operation is a LOT more complicated than it needs to be given that Orlov can just take the jewels to India in his helicopter. >> If Octopussy's circus is based in Europe, why do so many of its staff live in India? >> Famously, each clown's make up is unique, so how come there's another clown that looks just like Bond? And even if 007 has just nabbed a spare costume and miraculously accidentally copied another clown's face, then surely having two identical clowns would be blindingly obvious to the circus people? All of which misses the obvious point which is how come Bond - who is racing to defuse an atomic bomb, remember - thinks he has time to apply clown make up? >> This weeks top-ranking British intelligence officers off on a wander: M saunters around Checkpoint Charlie and Q is sent to India where he sits by himself on a river bank all night, keeping watch. >> There are obviously staffing issues in MI6 though as Q's right-hand man, Smithers, (from FYEO, keep track) is doubling up as a taxi driver to follow suspicious foreigners. >> Bond has about 8 seconds to climb out of that gorilla suit. >> But then he manages to get in and out of that ludicrous crocodile submarine too? >> If the lake is full of crocodiles, how did the assassins swim across? >> When Bond is trying to listen in on Khan, the bug picks up interference from Magda's hair-dryer - but why is she using it? Her hair's  not wet! She also spots Bond creeping about the house and doesn't raise the alarm. >> Is it really practical for the circus to put on two shows in one day in different cities? How long does it take them to take down/put up the marquee? And Karlmarxstadt (now Chemnitz) is a good way from the border with West Germany... >> When Bond is 'driving' the car along the rails he keeps wiggling the steering wheel for some reason. >> Why does Khan take Octopussy on the plane? What's he going to do with her? >> Why does the plane crash once Bond jumps out? Khan just seems to forget how to pilot it. >> Proving that the KGB are just as reckless with their top officers (or that Anglo-Soviet relations in the Bond universe are massively better than in ours), General Gogol visits M in his office for a chat. Which is nice.

Worst Line: Argh! Bond channels Barbara Woodhouse (and somehow quietens a tiger) by shouting "Si-it!". Reporting Bond's break-in, a USAF guard adds "And he's wearing a red shirt!" as if this was yet another crime 007 had committed. Worst of all though is Bond's quip, having just thrown a load of money at some impoverished Indians, as he pushes a wadge of cash into his Indian co-worker's hand: "That'll keep you in curry for a few weeks!" Stay classy, James.

Best Line: I didn't spot one. Let me know if you do.

Worst Bond Moment: Hmm.. The Tarzan yodel? The clown costume? The tuk-tuk chase? Probably that last one.

Best Bond Moment: There's a neat trick in the PCS where Bond escapes from a pair of guards by pulling the rip-cord on their parachutes. But the best bit - and you can tell it's the best bit because the Bond theme drops in - is where 007 swerves the Mercedes-Benz onto the railway and the wheel rims fit on the tracks just so.

Overall: With the clever use of the Cold War, the Germany bomb chase and Gogol's Internal Affairs subplot there's quite a bit to like here really. Imagine this with Dalton and with the Indian scenes completely rewritten and it would quickly begin to smarten up. Unfortunately, as it is, it's all a little too easy going and a little too pleased with itself. Remember: dishipline, 007, dishiplin!

James Bond Will Return: ... in From A View to a Kill (although they contrived to drop the 'From' at a later date - that's why the marketing department get paid the big bucks).

Paranoid Collage

The Internet, eh? Just chock full of STUFF. So much stuff in fact that you will never ever see it all. You won't even be able to wade through all the bits you want to see. Luckily there are people out there who are devoting themselves to organising, marshalling and curating content, sometimes even re-working it into something new, and directing it to your eyeballs.

Here's something you want to see, something that exemplifies this process. It's a collage of cover versions of Paranoid Android by Radiohead.

I know grumpy people (people anyway who are differently grumpy to me) who might say "Oh yeah, look! If you knit together all these mediocre homespun covers you end up with a version that is almost as good as that which was skilfully produced by the original artist!"

But that misses the point. Firstly, this is the point of the Internet: how wonderful that anyone can share their passion, their musicality, their personality in this way? How brilliant that their efforts could be combined so cleverly into a new and different and, arguably, wonderful version that includes contributions from so many people? How touching that people who will never know each other can collaborate on a larger project?

Secondly (and I can't stress enough how much you should click on this link), everything is a remix.

For Your Eyes Only

So the Bond pendulum (Bondulum?) swings once more, away from the thoughtless insanity of Moonraker and back towards the earnest and hard-working For Your Eyes Only. The new director is former Bond editor and Second Unit Director, John Glen and (like Peter Hunt with OHMSS) he sets about trying to fix the problems he sees in the series by pushing 007 back to his early Sixties roots. Out go the gadgets, the preposterous plots, and the sledgehammer jokes; in come many of the hallmarks of a classic thriller, and we end up with an old-school adventure, replete with sunken treasure, pirates and a literal cliffhanger finale. 

Because the source book was a short-story collection, FYEO is a clever hodgepodge of scenes from various Fleming stories, all welded together within an original framework. It turns out this is a pretty good way of constructing a Bond movie as the constituent Fleming elements are faithfully reproduced without compromising the overall cinematic plot. It also means that the film is very down to Earth, and is perhaps the least fantastical of all the Bond movies. Melina's mission for revenge comes from the eponymous short story For Your Eyes Only, where Bond, sent on a personal mission by M to kill the assassin of some friends, bumps into a woman trying to do the same thing and avenge her parents' death. The Mediterranean feud between smugglers Colombo and Kristatos, complete with Anglo/Soviet proxies and plot twist, is lifted from Risico, from the same collection, whilst the keel-hauling scene (and to some extent the sunken treasure plot) are left over from the novel of Live and Let Die. It's a bit of a mixture but they are fused very effectively and together they set the tone for the film, blending a manageable amount of melodrama with some mildly grubby Cold War espionage. Apart from the PCS and some small quibbles about the A.T.A.C. MacGuffin (see Eh? below) everything that happens is completely credible - in fact when compared to the rest of the series, FYEO is practically cinéma vérité.

Hang on, but aren't Bond films really dull when all the fantasy is stripped out? Isn't that the problem with the first half of DRNO? Well, no, not if what's left is full of tension and action and cleverness, which is what we have here (and in FRWL too). Don't forget it's Bond's style, resourcefulness and wit that makes him such a great action hero - if he has to employ a gadget then it's the way he uses it that matters. The fantasy is great if it is cool and clever (the Lotus Sub/the DB5) and annoying as all hell if it is crass and stupid (the gondola), but it's always best when he brilliantly extemporises.

Here the decision is taken to do away with all gadgets whatsoever and leave Bond to cope instead with whatever is to hand. This is very clear in the first major action sequence, the escape from Gonzales' villa. There's a reason that Bond's Lotus has such a ridiculously over-sensitive burglar alarm (it explodes when an inquisitive guard breaks a window) and that is to force 007 instead to get away in a roughed up Citroen 2CV. The audience gets an immediate double-whammy: whilst our anticipation of the Lotus's (and Bond's) superiority are blown up we get a sight gag as Bond does a double-take at Melina's car. And then we get an excellent car chase - bereft of technological gimmicks and totally reliant on some high-precision stunt driving. 

The rest of the film continues in this vein, serving up the usual series of fights and chases, but never allowing Bond's presumed invincibility to diminish the tension. Instead he's repeatedly shown at vulnerable moments: pinned down behind a tree by a rifle marksman; deep underwater, unaware of the armoured assailant bearing down upon him; hanging from a rope whilst far above his pitons are being knocked from the cliff-face, one by one. Most tellingly, we even see him at his wife's graveside - a very rare reminder indeed that there is supposed to be a man inside the suit. This isn't normal Bond fare and, in another shocking departure, the action sequences are interspersed by scenes where characters properly interact thus advancing the story! When Bond warns Melina about the personal cost of her desire for revenge or Colombo persuades Bond to trust him we are light years away from the standard one-dimensional conversations elsewhere in the series. It's good stuff.

Moore is very good here too. In fact he comes much closer to playing James Bond (rather than the character he normally plays, 'Roger Moore playing James Bond') than at any other point in his tenure. Although he looked both podgy and creaky in Moonraker, he is completely credible here, even at 54. He's an older Bond to be sure, but he looks grizzled and weathered rather than merely decrepit. Being thrown into a romantic clinch with twenty-two year old Lynn Holly-Johnson (playing ice skater Bibi Dahl) should make Moore look impossibly old, but somehow it doesn't and the thirty-two year age gap merely makes Dahl look stupidly young and naive in contrast to Bond. The familiar Moore smugness is almost non-existent and, slim and seemingly in better physical shape than ever, he is more convincing in the fights than he has been previously.

Two things help him here. Firstly, Moore benefits enormously by having a female co-star who can convincingly sell her interest in him (especially as he gets older) and Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock excels at that. Straight away, in the 2CV chase, he fires off a weak joke and she really laughs, as if helplessly exhilarated by the adventure into which she has fallen (I've a suspicion that it's a natural laugh from Bouquet that they kept in, but all the same). In fact throughout the film there's a coherence to her characterisation and, even better, she doesn't end up in a bikini, needing to be rescued! Secondly, there's much less humour in FYEO and as a result Moore's natural twinkle becomes charismatic rather than smug. It's the corollary of DAF where Connery, having played Bond straight for five films, becomes suddenly funny. 

Because it's all so straight Julian Glover's villainous Kristatos doesn't have a lot to do which is rather a shame as he's one of the better actors in the series. [BONUS FACT: Julian Glover also played baddies in The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and classic Tom Baker Doctor Who story, City of Death. Don't think anyone else has achieved that. What I'm saying is, he's kind of a big deal.] It does however make him one of the more believable Bond villains and there is something satisfying about that. Chaim Topol does good work as Bond's comrade in arms, Colombo, and tradition demands that I describe this as 'evoking the spirit of Pedro Armendáriz' from FRWL. There's a whole thesis to be done on the supporting male characters in the Bond stories, but suffice to say the one thing they all have in common is a 'warm, dry handshake' - knowing this perhaps helps make more sense of the scene where Colombo persuades Bond to trust him: it looks as if Bond changes his mind rather easily if you miss the significance of that handclasp.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: Well isn't this strange? Blofeld pops up out of nowhere and tries to kill Bond with a remote control helicopter. I say Blofeld but, for legal reasons, the bald, white cat-fondling villain is never formally identified. Around this time Kevin Mclory was trying to get a rival Bond film made based upon rights he claimed from Thunderball - which included Ernst Stavro and SPECTRE. Broccoli's response was to drop Blofeld down a chimney. Interestingly, this sequence was scripted as an introduction to the new Bond, should Moore not return. Interesting because it's so unlike other Bond introductions - but maybe it would have been shot differently if a new actor had actually ended up involved? By the way, Mclory's film project eventually popped out as Never Say Never Again starring everyone's third favourite 007, Sean Whatshisface. 

Theme: It's another sedate theme song gently lulling us to sleep whilst Binder does his stuff. His stuff's a little better this time - gentle swimming silhouettes - and there's some real novelty in having Sheena Easton sing at us on-screen.    

Deaths: 53, holding pretty steady. Three of those deaths go unseen but are reported. One guy is shot in the chest with a cross bow bolt but, somewhat miraculously, doesn't seem to be terribly injured. However he is stuck atop a Greek mountain and his criminal comrades are all dead. It's a fifty/fifty call but I like to think that Bond handed him over to the proper authorities promptly enough that he was able to get medical attention he needed.     

Memorable Deaths: Gonzales gets a cross-bow bolt in the back as he dives into his pool. Bond kicks Locque's car off of a cliff and throws a piton into a guard so that he falls off a cliff. A chap in a hi-tech diving suit gets blown up underwater. And, of course, someone who may or may not have been Ernst Stavro Blofeld is dropped down an industrial chimney.   

Licence to Kill: 14. Again holding steady.

Exploding Helicopters: 0. For the eighth time in twelve films!

Shags: 2. But it might have been three had he not disappointed young Bibi Dahl.  

Crimes Against Women: Hardly any! All right, a bit. Dahl gets slapped about by the baddies, but then they're baddies (and she is the closest thing to Scrappy Doo that we'll ever see in a Bond film - apart from possibly Rowan Atkinson in Never Say Never Again. Ah, you'd forgotten about that hadn't you!). No FYEO is very unsexist. Considering. The two women Bond beds, Melina and Lisl, have distinct characters without being either damaged damsels or twisted sexpot stereotypes. And Bond doesn't patronise them - hell, he and Lisl even exchange small-talk, as if she was a real person that he was a bit interested in. Melina's desire for revenge is hackeneyed as a characterisation possibly, but it's one we haven't seen so far in a Bond film (no, I'm not counting Tilly Masterson or Amasova) and it means she has valid emotional reactions throughout. Yes, Bond does take over the driving duties from her during the 2CV chase, but there's no snide comments about women drivers this time - the distinction being drawn is not man versus woman, but spy versus amateur. And when Colombo expresses regret that they are attacking St. Cyril's with 'only six men', Melina immediately responds, brandishing her cross bow, 'and one woman'. Yes, it's clichéd dialogue but the implicit sexism, that Colombo doesn't count her as a combatant, is immediately corrected. This new spirit has even reached MI6 where Q Branch is very obviously an equal opportunities employer, even if Sharon does end up making the tea. It is just a little sad though that Moneypenny's gadget is a make-up kit hidden in her filing cabinet.

Casual Racism: Very little. Kriegler the KGB agent is rather obviously a stereotypical (East) German: a giant blond strongman who excels at winter sports. But I'm clutching at straws really. In fact the film does try and subvert some prejudices - there's a real moment of understanding between Bond and (the Russian) Gogol at the end that suggests they can share a joke even as their governments point nuclear missiles at each other. 

Out of Time: Q Branch's Indentigraph uses data discs the size of pizza boxes. Meryl who? Janet Brown, the definitive Margaret Thatcher, pops up alongside John Wells as Dennis.

Fashion Disasters: For the third film in a row Moore gets dressed up in bright yellow and this time it's rubber pyjamas. Bleurgh. Bibi skis in a cowboy hat and ear muffs, which is frankly unforgivable. . .

Eh?: I'm given to understand (thanks Wikipedia) that Greek Orthodox churches do not have confessionals. I suppose there are plenty of Catholic churches in Greece but surely it's just as likely that Q knocked up a confession box for the sole purpose of briefing Bond? And whilst we're here I note that the habit of recklessly sending high-ranking intelligence officers out into the field has not yet been rethought. Can't they use the bloody phone? >> According to Melina, the ruins on the sea bed are 5,000 years old, which is just about feasible although it would put it right on the fringe of the Early Helladic I or (more likely) Early Cycladic I eras. This claim is however undermined by the Roman-looking mosaics and statuary, and the Doric columns. I'll leave that one with you then. >> Bond, playing Baccarat and having drawn five, is told by Kristatos that "the odds favour standing", to which Bond replies "if you play the odds." This is all nonsense as any Bond fan worth their salt will tell you. In fact as no less an authority than James Bond himself explains in Casino Royale, (1953): "Five is the turning point of the game. According to the odds, the chances of bettering or worsening your hand if you hold a five are exactly even." >> Right then, this A.T.A.C. device. It's some sort of code control thing for giving orders to nuclear submarines yes? Fair enough, I can see why the UK would feel the need to retrieve such a device before the USSR can get their hands on it, but at the end, having dashed it on some rocks, Bond claims to Gogol "That's detente comrade. I don't have it. You don't have it." That's rubbish surely? The Royal Navy didn't just make one A.T.A.C. did it? Are there not blueprints? Schematics? >> Nobody seems to mind that Kriegler has bunked off from his biathlon to chase Bond across a ski resort, but presumably he's facing a DNF after all that. >> Why does Melina leave that oxygen cylinder on the sea bed? And why does Bond drop it back into the sea when they're done with it? I call that littering. >> Bond is spotted by a guard as he climbs up the cliff. Why doesn't the guard just shoot him? Why doesn't he raise the alarm? No, much more sensible to climb down and knock the pitons out. Some people don't half make things difficult for themselves.    

Worst Line: The ersatz Blofeld cackles "I hope you had a pleasant... fright?" and then, pleading for his life, makes this utterly bizarre offer to Bond: "I'll buy you a delicatessen! In stainless steel!" Really? 

Best Line: There aren't many zingers here so the best line comes from my nine year old son. He watched the 2CV chase which ends with 007 introducing himself. "Wait," he says, "he did all that before he even told her his name? Wow, that James Bond really does have a way with the ladies." 

Worst Bond Moment: Getting propositioned by Bibi. Although, to be fair Bond looks as uncomfortable about it as we are.

Best Bond Moment:The 2CV chase is a classic, but there's one moment in the middle of it that is just brilliant: a swerving braking manoeuvre from Bond that sends the little yellow car shooting backwards and causes the two pursuing vehicles to smash together. Executed at high speed, it's a breath-taking balletic piece of stunt driving and, though it only lasts two seconds, deserves a lot of attention.

Overall: It's hardly John Le Carré, but this is the first Bond film since FRWL that has any chance of being considered a straight espionage thriller. It works very well, with some excellent chases and action set-pieces almost making up for the missing flash of the spectacular that, say, TSWLM or Goldfinger can provide. It's the best of the Moore Bonds, or at least joint best with TSWLM, depending on what you want: each is an excellent example of, respectively, the fantastic and the more realistic versions of Bond.

James Bond Will Return: ... in Octopussy.

Proof that Doctor Who has a Mary Poppins bag.

From 'The Land of Happy Endings' by Scott Gray, art by Martin Geraghty.

Moonraker

I suppose there's a widely held notion that Bond films are either grim and gritty or high camp but that's not true. The best Bonds blend the two, the fantastic and the real world, and if we each have our own idea about where they meet, all we're doing is marking the point on the scale where we think the balance should be. But surely to goodness there can't be too many people who think that Moonraker is anything other than batshit crazy. It's so preposterous, it makes YOLT look like Cathy Come Home. It's odd because this is the same writing/directing team that nailed TSWLM two years before. Perhaps they were over-confident? Or maybe, after Star Wars and Superman, they felt they had to push Bond further to compete. Well, whatever the reason, this just doesn't work.

It follows the model from TSWLM fairly carefully, but somewhere along the way things fall through the Looking Glass into an insane version of the Bond universe. Take an example. In TSWLM, Bond has a streamlined sports car that converts into a submarine during a helicopter attack. It's very silly and it stretches our credulity but we knew it was going to do something as soon as Q pushed the keys into 007's hand. In the equivalent sequence from Moonraker Bond hails a seemingly random gondola and, having been attacked by a man hiding in a coffin on a Venetian canal, converts it first into a motor boat and then into a hovercraft in order to escape. For an encore, he drives the craft around a tourist-packed Piazza San Marco, and even the pigeons give him double-takes. It's beyond silly, it's ludicrous, a carelessly thrown away joke for which we are given no explanation, no context, no reasoning. In short, the credulity gap is unbridgable.

It's the same with the villains. Stromberg's plan had been to kill a few hundred million with stolen conventional nuclear weapons whilst hiding in his underwater sea base: silly but merely very unlikely. Here Hugo Drax's completely bananas scheme is to retire to an orbital space station before killing EVERYONE on the planet below with a nerve toxin derived from a rare Amazonian orchid that will leave all other forms of life untouched. Villainous schemes should teeter on the very edge of plausibility. Drax's is just stupid, and so far removed from feasibility as to render it dramatically worthless.

Throughout the script is littered with inconsistencies, improbable coincidences and stupid nonsense. It creates the impression that nobody really cared how everything was fitting together or whether it was making any sense. As I mentioned last time, Jaws was an effective villain in TSWLM because Bond was required to use his brain. Here nobody is using their brain and so Jaws is defeated in Rio by having some Mardi Gras revellers brush against him, sweeping him away into the carnival. Just a small example but typical of the carelessness with which this film has been plotted. It's depressing, but see the Eh? section anyway for a summary of as much of the madness as I could bear to remark upon.

Is there anything grounded about this film? Anything worth shouting about? It's Ken Adam's last Bond film and he leaves us with a magnificent control room for the Moonraker launch headquarters. It's angled and pointy and full of screens so it looks a little like a modernist chapel full of abstract stained-glass. (It's Bernard Lee's last film too, having played M since DRNO. He died just as filming began on FYEO.) Michel Lonsdale is rather good as Drax, displaying all the frosty and languid hauteur of a Himalayan glacier. And the centrifuge sequence is effective even if it is a rip-off of the traction machine from Thunderball. Houstonian Lois Chiles is nicely brusque and professional as NASA/CIA operative Goodhead, but weirdly turns to simpering jelly once Bond has got her into zero G. It's a shame because the corresponding character from the novel, policewoman Gala Brand, wonderfully does the opposite: appearing to be falling for 007 before telling him she's not interested and walking away on the last page. And if there was ever a Bond film where he deserved to be left standing dejected and chastened at the end, it was this one.

* * *

Pre-Credits Sequence: It's a good stunt for the time, especially as it was done for real (if you want to see it done with CGI then watch third-rate Schwarzenegger flick Eraser which totally rips this off). But all too soon it all turns into a big unfunny joke when Jaws turns up and flails about in mid air like Wile E. Coyote.

Theme: A soporific combination of music and visuals. Drear and dull from Dame Shirley and John Barry; Maurice Binder feels compelled to dig out the trampoline again so it's all unnecessarily reminiscent of TSWLM.    

Deaths: 55 - way down on TSWLM but still quite hefty and comparable to the death tolls of the mid-Sixties.   

Memorable Deaths: Corinne is chased down and savaged by Drax's evil big dogs.   

Licence to Kill: 15. Again it's small beer after TSWLM but it's really rather high even so. As of Moonraker, Moore's average kills per film is 31.25 and the average for Bond across all 11 films so far is only 17.

Exploding Helicopters: 0. But a jumbo does get exploderised by a shuttle's exhaust.

Shags: 3. This is now seemingly an unbreakable limit, a natural law of the Bond universe: no more than three sexual partners per film! 

Crimes Against Women: The soul-crushingly awful sexism and male insecurity of the Moore era is exemplified by Bond's smug, patronising and faintly bemused response to meeting NASA scientist and CIA operative Doctor (Holly) Goodhead: "A woman!" The man is a twunt. Dr Goodhead becomes the fourth woman in as many films to shag Bond within seconds of rejecting his advances. Remember boys, no means no.

Casual Racism: Hardly any. But then South America and Venice (and Space) aren't presented as real places full of indigenous cultures but as sandpits for Brits and Americans to play in. 

Out of Time: The US Space Marines all wear silver-foil spacesuits as if it were the Sixties. 

Fashion Disasters: Bond's back in a safari shirt. The yellow space suit with skullcap does him no favours either. And why does he dress up like a gaucho?

Eh?: I am going to get shouty here, sorry. Deep breath then and off we go! >> Drax, a government contractor responsible for building the space shuttle (and therefore, you know, probably vetted at least, if not kept under constant surveillance) has built his own launch complex in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. It is capable of launching multiple shuttles simultaneously (with all that implies for staff numbers and resources). To do this he has presumably procured himself the technical expertise of many individuals from astronautical engineering, one of the smallest and closely monitored industries on the planet. He has also built a space station in Earth orbit capable of docking all these shuttles - in other words it is vast - without anyone noticing. Hell, you can see the ISS with the naked eye but nobody in the world has noticed this space station? It's the most stupid thing in the series and makes SPECTRE's volcano lair look like a loft conversion. >> The nerve toxin kills only human life. Wow! Sounds impossible to me. And it's derived from a plant that made people infertile? Yes, of course! Because infertility and death are the same thing! Even more stupid is the fact that Bond is now a genius biochemist who can recognise a chemical formula instantly and knows the botanical history of the rainforest. FFS. >> Okay, let's say Britain really really needs one of these Moonraker shuttles (WHAT FOR?); why would you transport it fully fuelled? Or even a little bit fuelled? >> There's NOBODY aboard the space station until the Moonrakers dock. All the people who secretly built it in space just left it there? Why leave it unmanned? The first chap aboard has to go and switch on the gravity, like coming home from holiday and putting the heating on the instant you get back. >> And of course, there's the corridor labelled 'NORMAL GRAVITY ZONE', because gravity can be fenced in by airlocks. >> If the Moonrakers steer themselves, why have pilots at all? >> The gondola. >> Why have a top secret nerve toxin laboratory in the middle of a densely populated city? Sorry I mean why have a top secret nerve toxin laboratory in the middle of an ornate 18th century ballroom in the middle of a densely populated city? Because the glass is handy? >> Bond puts a glass phial of the DEADLY TOXIN in his shirt pocket and then has a massive and protracted fist fight in which a load of glass gets smashed. Reckless at all? >> And having discovered the top secret nerve toxin laboratory in the middle of an ornate 18th century ballroom in the middle of a densely populated city, Bond... waits overnight for M and the Minister of Defence to arrive from London before securing the building or having the lab investigated! What? And then send them in to the DEADLY LAB first? Is there no one more expendable than the MINISTER OF DEFENCE? Argh! >> If it's Summer in Venice (and it is) how come it is February in Rio? Are the laws of Time in abeyance now as well? >> Well, yes they are: within half an hour of spotting Drax's space station, the US have launched a militarised shuttle full of space-trained Marines from Vandenberg, CA. That's nifty. But even more amazing is the fact that M, Q and the goddam Minister of Defence are able to hot-foot it from London to the control room in California in the time it takes for that shuttle to reach the space station. I say from London, but it's just possible that the UK government keeps its top-ranking intelligence officers permanently travelling around the world, just to be on the safe side. >> In Rio, Bond desires to check out the airport... so he goes up a nearby mountain and looks at it through a tourist's telescope. Why not just go to the airport and look through the fence? During the (Californian) pheasant shoot, how does Bond know there's a sniper in the tree? >> Bond and Goodhead just happen to bump into the pilots of the remaining shuttle exactly when they need to. >> The tiny Venini glass shop - right on the Piazza San Marco, no less - Tardisly contains a showroom, a museum, a vast factory and warehouse, a palazzo interior (with deadly nerve toxin lab) and St Mark's Clocktower. >> Oh there's more too... but you get the general idea.      

Worst Line: See Crimes Against Women above. There are others too, but I'm losing the will to live just thinking about them. 

Best Line: Quite a few, surprisingly. The pick of them are from Drax: "Take care of Mr Bond. Make sure some harm comes to him." And my favourite: "Mr Bond, you appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season."  

Worst Bond Moment: The gondola? The Magnificent Seven rip-off? The rubber snake fight? Plenty to choose from.

Best Bond Moment:I'm afraid it can only be the three second shot during the PCS where he streamlines his body into a free-fall dive and the Bond theme starts up. That's it.     

Overall: Careless, thoughtless, bombastic and ridiculous. Just as with YOLT, the series has become bloated and stupid and badly needs to return to Earth.

James Bond Will Return: ... in, for the second time in a row, For Your Eyes Only.