Who is the longest tenured performer in the James Bond franchise?  That would be Desmond Llewlyn, who played Q, the military intelligence, section six (MI6) gadget wiz.  He appeared in seventeen of these films.  A close second is the original Miss Moneypenny, first played by Lois Maxwell from the Dr. No (1962), through to number fourteen in the series.  That number is significant because it is today’s review, A View to a Kill (1985).  It was also the last one for Roger Moore as James Bond, the iconic British secret agent.  Whether you are like me and find most of what Moore did as the character to be silly, or you believe things were becoming stale in general, it was time for a change.  If you happen to watch this one, you will see why in greater detail than I could describe.

The first thing I said to myself as A View to a Kill began was, man, these Moore flicks love their helicopters.  They also like skiing, and that is what James is doing.  He is attempting to find the corpse of 003 under an avalanche in Siberia, doing so while the Soviet army is also searching in the same area.  He is successful, though only barely, getting away in a submarine disguised as an ice berg and piloted by an attractive woman, of course.  Once he gets his package to MI6 headquarters, and it is analyzed by Q, it is found to contain a nearly indestructible microchip.  It is the kind of miniaturized electronic that can withstand the magnetic discharge of a nuclear blast.  So as to not prematurely get your hopes up, I will tell you right now that the plot has nothing to do with that variety of weapon of mass destruction.  Remember, this is Roger Moore as James Bond, so nothing sensible.  What they do know about the tiny component is that it is produced by the billionaire genius Max Zorin (Christopher Walken).  It is thus time to do some reconnaissance, and this takes place at the horse track, where Max races his own unbeatable thoroughbreds.  This gives James the cover he needs, posing as a wealthy businessman looking to get into horse breeding in order to visit Max’s chateau.  To further the charade, he travels with Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee), who acts as James’ valet.  Together, they infiltrate the secret laboratories under the sprawling estate, and find how Max is getting his horses to be so successful.  Thus far, this does not sound too nefarious, other than cheating at a lucrative sport.  Yet, a new piece of information emerges, and that is his plans to take over the production of microchips in Silicon Valley near San Francisco, California.  It is there that James next travels, having escaped an attempt on his life that unfortunately resulted in Sir Godfrey’s death.  Once in the United States, James tracks Max to his oil refinery, and learns that Max is using sea water to flood his pipelines that lead inland.  Curious as to where they go, he then heads to city hall.  While observing, he makes another discovery: the presence of Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts).  She is somebody James had met at Max’s French mansion, though she had miraculously rebuffed his advances.  Curious as to why she would show up in the same place as Max but on the other side of the world, he follows her to her own well-appointed spread, at least on the outside.  The inside is bare, and after calming her nerves upon taking him as an intruder, and dealing with some actual home invaders, she explains her backstory.  It has something to do with being the daughter of an oil tycoon that Max had ruined with his own enterprises.  James then goes on to tell her what he has found out.  Luckily, she is also a geologist, and thus she is able to grasp the significance of Max’s activities on the California coast.  His use of water from the Pacific Ocean can trigger massive earthquakes, which is an even bigger threat when you consider their proximity to the San Andreas fault line.  To gain more information, they decide to go back to city hall, but Max is waiting for him.  In classic Bond-villain fashion, he decides to do away with James and Stacey by putting them in the elevator and setting it on fire.  Of course, they are able to escape, but not before grasping the significance of what Max is trying to accomplish.  By bringing about a massive shifting of the ground in the area, he can flood Silicon Valley.  In doing so, he will become the world’s leading producer of microchips.  Because they were able to come away with a map of Max’s underground network, James and Stacey are able to find the location of Max’s excavations.  In a mine complex, with a lake above and the San Andreas below, Max is planning to set off a massive explosion that will wipe out the electronics capital of the world . . . at least in 1985.  With a little help from May Day (Grace Jones), one of Max’s female henchwomen, who he leaves to die when he releases the seawater into the tunnels, they thwart the blast.  Still, flooding does occur, and whoever does not drown is mercilessly gunned down by Max before he gets away in a portable blimp.  James extricates himself from the labyrinth in time to see Max swoop down in his blimp and snatch Stacey.  James takes a hold of one of the guy lines, going for a death-defying swing over downtown San Francisco before Max manages to get the airship stuck on the Golden Gate Bridge.  A baffling sequence of events ensues, the long and short of which is that James ends up saving Stacey, and they end the film in the shower.

While I am relieved that the Moore era as Bond is over with A View to a Kill, there is one serious matter to discuss. Namely, it is a character not discussed above, Dr. Carl Mortner (Willoughby Gray).  He is a former Nazi scientist who, it is suggested, is responsible for creating the mad genius that is Max.  I have always found the term “mad genius” to be a strange one, but I digress.  The film discusses how during World War II, Dr. Mortner experimented on pregnant women in order to create people with enhanced cognitive abilities.  Anyone determined to be of no value was killed in the womb.  Yes, this means abortion, and why this Catholic reviewer is focusing on this aspect of the film.  More specifically, the Nazi party were major proponents of the idea of eugenics.  Eugenics was a so-called science that held that genetics determined a person’s worth to society, and that certain racial features made one group superior to another.  It was a theory that German right-wing nationalists adopted from the United States, and one of its main proponents in this country was Margaret Sanger, one of the developers of the birth control pill and a founder of Planned Parenthood.  The idea was that through these abhorrent tactics, certain undesirable characteristics or entire people(s) could be selectively bred out of the human population.  This kind of thinking guided Nazi views on groups like the Jews, believing that their ethnic cleansing would be for the benefit of mankind.  Echoes of these themes are found in a character like Dr. Mortner, which raised my Catholic attention to an otherwise standard Bond film.  It should come as no surprise that the Church is against these practices.

One thing that I discovered in doing some cursory digging on A View to a Kill is that in the German release, probably only in what was then West Germany, Dr. Mortner’s character is described as a Polish communist.  It is little wonder that the new German state would want to distance it from such a past, or why the Catholic Church was, and is, against ideas like Eugenics.  Now that you know all this, you can skip the movie entirely.