A View to a Kill

A View to a Kill arrives from that peculiar era when James Bond films still believed themselves to be the apex of entertainment without any particular concern for contemporary progressive sensibilities. Roger Moore glides through the proceedings with the kind of distinguished nonchalance that suggests he has read none of the script and cares even less about its contents. The film presents women as either ornamental or villainous, with Tanya Roberts serving as the nominal love interest who exists primarily to be rescued, while Grace Jones, the film's most visually interesting presence, is deployed as a henchwoman whose queerness reads as menace rather than representation. Christopher Walken's performance as Max Zorin transcends the material through sheer force of his unhinged brilliance, suggesting he understood something about 1980s excess that the film itself does not quite grasp.

The plot, concerning a Silicon Valley earthquake scheme of staggering implausibility, betrays no awareness whatsoever of environmental consciousness or corporate critique beyond the most superficial villainy. Max Zorin is evil simply because he is evil, not because the film harbors any actual analysis of late capitalism or technological monopoly. The racial composition of the cast reflects the default Hollywood casting of 1985, which is to say it reflects nothing intentional at all. A pair of minor characters of color appear without comment or context, which was the standard operating procedure of the era. The film's relationship to gender politics remains entirely pre-ironic, a period piece that does not know it is a period piece.

This is Bond cinema operating at full cruise control, confident in its own irrelevance to any conversation about representation or social consciousness. The film's woke score reflects not moral failure but simple chronological innocence. We are not measuring a 1985 action film against contemporary standards so much as noting its complete indifference to them, which is precisely what we should expect from a work that predates the entire conceptual apparatus by several decades.