Project Bond: For Your Eyes Only

The tone was set early on with an opening scene that definitely does not feature Ernst Stavro Blofeld. It does, however, feature a bald villain in a wheelchair with a white cat, and he doesn’t relate to the plot of the rest of the film at all. (For copyright reasons, Blofeld and SPECTRE could no longer appear in Eon Bond films.) He tries to kill Bond, but this backfires when Bond drops him down a chimney, possibly to his death, possibly who cares?

A toe-curlingly embarrassing opening now behind us, we can move on to the main “plot.” There’s a submarine that’s gone missing, and so the government tells MI6 to tell Bond to see what’s going on. You know the sort of thing.

Once again, Bond is captured, once again he is rescued, once again it is by a woman, and once again he is astonished at this ‘twist.’ A woman, doing things? This is unheard of! Apart from the last time a woman saved me, and the time before that. And the time before that.

This time, the woman is Melina Havelock, who uses her car to run the escape mission after Bond’s is blown up for some reason. At one point, Melina tips the car over driving on a preposterously uneven road, so Bond takes over and drives her car safely and competently through a forest. I never knew how dreadful women were at driving before I started Project Bond, so it has taught me that, if nothing else.

Then after a skiing scene that lasts about 40 minutes for some reason, Bond gets into a fight on the ice with some hockey players. (I assume it’s in Moore’s contract that he has to ski in every film, because it doesn’t come up organically this often.) At this point, I stopped, wrote down exactly what I thought would happen in the second half of the film, and then watched it happen. That’s entertainment.

I really hoped that I would like Roger Moore by this point, but I just can’t. It doesn’t help that this script is extremely derivative of virtually all previous films in the series, but Moore remains extremely wooden, and his smile is still excruciating. His only saving grace is that he has a voice that is quite fun to imitate, but even on this front, Sean Connery triumphs hands down.