Extra Extra: The Incomplete Guide to A View to a Kill and Joy
In which Vanessa finishes off the Roger Moore films in the James Bond canon and Elliot watches Netflix film in a cinema and regrets it?
A View to a Kill in 2024
How does Max Zorin measure up to previous Bond masterminds, Vanessa wonders.
Well, this is unexpected. As I’ve woefully fallen behind on sharing my (possibly inane) thoughts from my Bond rewatch before the end of the year, I am asking your forgiveness for the intrusion over the weekend, but I’ve set myself a goal, and by jove, I will see it through, with the last of Roger Moore to kick off our first extra Bond edition of the Guide!
Notably, the film opens with a unique disclaimer about Zorin's similarity to Zoran Corporation (a former semiconductor manufacturer). It also includes a rare musical misstep, playing The Beach Boys’ “California Girls” in a snowboarding sequence to create tonal whiplash. Duran Duran right the wrong, and deliver a certified bop of a theme song, while Maurice Binder's UV-drenched opening credits embrace 80s excess.
Valley of the Dolls
The film’s gender politics are a study in contradictions. May Day is portrayed with superhuman strength, and with an assertiveness in her sexuality. She redeems herself after realising Zorin does not love her, and has sacrificed her colleagues, like Jenny Flex, for his psychotic goals. So once more, like in the bad old days, an enemy lady sleeps with Bond and has to die.
Stacey Sutton also represents a regressive return, this time to damsel-in-distress territory. Despite her geology credentials, she's played for laughs - can't cook, can't drive, and sports impractical high heels that prompt dated "women's lib" jokes - especially because she seems to manage outfit changes despite incredible danger. From a filmic perspective, at least her dangling from the Golden Gate Bridge scene looks inspired by Spider-Man's 1973 “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” visuals.
The film continues the troubling trend of disposing of local allies - both Tibbetts and Chuck Lee meet grim ends, marking our third and fourth sacrificial contacts in three films. (1/5)
Chips Ahoy!
The film's understanding of technology varies. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) remain a genuine threat today, but yes, EMP-hardened chips exist. The remote-controlled injection system for Zorin’s racehorses seems prescient - nowadays diabetes patients use 'closed-loop' systems where glucose monitors automatically trigger insulin pumps to deliver precisely calculated doses.
Zorin's plot to flood Silicon Valley via geological faults shows limited understanding of plate tectonics. While water injection can trigger earthquakes (a process called induced seismicity), the potential scale portrayed is absurd. Other technical details also strain credibility - the blimp that takes 2 minutes to inflate in the film actually required 24 hours in reality. Still, the Order of Lenin, bestowed by General Gogol, was occasionally awarded to non-Soviets, but Bond was not the first by a long shot. (2/5)
Bridge Over Troubled Waters
The film flaunts wealth at every turn. Bond sports three Louis Vuitton cases, a duffel bag, and a doctor's bag - a fortune in luggage alone, with the cheapest ringing up at £6,400. At the Eiffel Tower’s Madame Brasserie you can’t order a la carte any longer, but a central table costs €186.30 per person. MI6 might still foot that tab today, if the safety of the nation depended on it.
Modern travellers can visit Royal Ascot races on the cheap, but Tarantino’s, where CIA man Chuck Lee picks up Bond, was turfed out last year. The "San Andreas" mine scenes were actually filmed at West Sussex's Amberley Chalk Pits Museum (£17 entry for an adult). Blimps or zeppelins are hard to come by - and riding on the Goodyear blimp, for example, requires an invitation. At least you’re unlikely to plummet to your death as the Golden Gate Bridge has nets to avoid falls, accidental or otherwise. (2/5)
Killswitch engage
As Moore's swan song (making way for Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights), A View to a Kill epitomises 80s excess while exhausting its formula. The plot rehashes Goldfinger's monopoly scheme with microchips, possibly hoping a new generation won't notice. Christopher Walken's Zorin proves unnervingly captivating, though Moore's visible ageing (and unnaturally wide eyes) suggests it's time to reboot. While we got a killer theme song and some memorable set pieces, this View is ultimately better off in our rear-view mirror. (2/5)
All James Bond movies are currently available on Amazon Prime in the UK.
Joy
Elliot reviews a film on the development of a novel medical procedure.
Believe it or not, I couldn’t convince anyone to join me for a Saturday night screening of a dramatisation of the first successful in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) during London Film Festival this year. Thankfully, Joy arrived on Netflix after what they’re repeatedly calling ‘Select Cinema Releases’; where Netflix releases the films in a small range of independent cinemas to no fanfare and minimal marketing but don’t reveal box office data (such as with Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.)
In their defence, Joy works better at home. It’s a wonderful, life-affirming, and heartwrenching story of discovery and philosophy, full of a sense of British homegrown adventure. Still, there’s no denying that it is small in scale, and director Ben Taylor struggles to make Jack Thorne’s script cinematic. There are a lot of aspects to Joy that make it feel like a TV movie.
Joy tells the true story of Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), Dr Robert Edwards (James Norton) and Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) as they experiment to develop IVF and find themselves not just on a scientific crusade, but a moral one, as the establishment and church portray them as morally outrageous - going against god and nature. Jean finds herself ousted from her church and her home by her religious mother, Gladys (Joanna Scanlan on fine form as the cold matriarch).
I love Thomasin McKenzie as Jean Purdy; the more I see McKenzie, the more convinced I am that she is capable of anything. She can show the weight of the world in her expressions, yet has a face full of youth. It’s an awards-worthy performance.
IVF on TV
It better be a good performance, because the TV movie-like choice of director Ben Taylor keeps the majority of the film on close-up. It certainly works in moments of emotional importance, but it speaks to a lack of confidence in your visual storytelling if you keep us stuck on the character's faces the whole time. It undercuts the moments of proper intensity. Being utterly in focus on its main characters’ faces, this film loses focus of the bigger picture.
Dr Edwards frequently partakes in TV debates about the morality of using science to adjust the parameters of conception and these sequences are all too short. This is the less colourful side of the 60s and 70s, where the ragtag group are trying to create babies in the most dingy conditions, and under constant attack. The thriller side of Joy is quite effective, if, again, not fully explored.
The film succeeds in telling you the human story of an incredible moment in scientific and social history. They make human mistakes, they overcome difficult odds, they win and lose love along the way. It did the job, as I was weeping by the end. Thomasin McKenzie in particular could be up for some best actor nods for work in this, conveying a life beyond her years.
Right through his career, since Skins through to His Dark Materials, Jack Thorne’s writing has been full of engaging and heartwarming characters, and he achieves that again here. I just think it's a shame to see it put in the hands of a director whose experience does not give such an exciting and important story the cinematic output it deserves.
Joy is on Netflix now.