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A View to a Kill
Starring Roger Moore
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
A View to a Kill is notably different from earlier Bond movies. It was produced in 1984, when Gorbachev was just barely beginning his reforms and Ronald Reagan was still talking about the Evil Empire. Yet in retrospect it's an oddly prophetic movie.
In A View to a Kill the villian, Zorin, is a former KGB agent who has gone wild and now serves himself alone. The KGB is sending its own agents to stop him even as James Bond is trying to do the same for different reasons. There is a scene in which a KGB agent who is killed by Zorin is portrayed sympathetically, so that the viewer actually feels sorry for him. At the end, when Bond kills Zorin off and saves Silicon Valley, the KGB awards Bond the Order of Lenin and the KGB general who delivers it says that the Soviet Union couldn't get along without American computer technology to steal from.
In some ways Zorin could be regarded as symbolic of the various out-of-control forces spawned by the former Soviet Union (ecological disaster, rampaging nationalism, loose nukes, etc) that have become the real threat to international security, while the Soviet government had learned that it had to co-exist with the rest of the world. We can only hope that somehow all these little tyrants and little terrors can be gotten rid of.
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Review posted December 16, 1998
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