For Your Eyes Only (film)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Nice crossbow!
"The Chinese have a saying: 'Before setting off on Revenge, you first dig two graves.'"
James Bond to Melina Havelock

A British spy ship accidentally fishes out a mine and goes to the bottom. Unfortunately it contains a secret device that sends orders to British nuclear missile submarines.

007, after visiting Tracy's grave and dropping someone who strongly resembles Blofeld down a chimney (at what is now the location of the Millennium Dome, which would feature in The World Is Not Enough), is sent to find the ship and who was responsible for the murders of two people looking for it. While shadowing his target, he is captured and then saved via a crossbow bolt, after which he meets Melina Havelock, the Girl of the Movie and a Hot Amazon Archer who wants to get Revenge for her murdered parents.

One of the very few Bond films in which the Soviets are explicitly bad guys (the others tend to involve them as allies against a common evil). Even here, they are more respectful competitors; after all, if you hear of a chance to get a key item that could give you a strategic advantage over your official enemies, you'd have to be a utter idiot not to make a play for it. As it is, General Gogol not only survives uninjured in the attempt, but stops Bond from being shot when he destroys the device at the end of the film and concedes the loss without a fuss.

This film is somewhat of a mish-mash of two Fleming short stories (For Your Eyes Only and Risico), with a scene from Live and Let Die thrown in and some more plot added. It has also been compared to From Russia with Love, as the aforementioned secret device is similar to a MacGuffin featured in the earlier film.

Perhaps as a reaction to the perceived excesses of goofy humour and credibility-stretching adventure in the previous movie, Moonraker, this movie is far closer to a classic spy yarn, with almost no gadgets deployed, no "larger than life henchman with a gimmick" and the bad guys simply being shot (in one case) and going away empty-handed in the other.

The dark tone to the film (by far the darkest for Moore) oddly comes from Timothy Dalton. When he was first courted by Cubby Broccoli he was asked what kind of Bond he would play. He briefed Cubby on a much darker, edgier Bond grounded in reality, and this script was born, making a note of killing off the main series villain before the opening credits to make way for the new direction. By the time the new script was ready, Moore had decided to do another one, and Dalton that he was too young to play Bond. so with the script ready & waiting, Moore slipped into this moody and morally ambiguous Bond, something we didn't see again until Timothy Dalton took the role.

Memorable moments in the movie:

  • The pre-titles sequence, in which a helicopter is flown indoors and then Bond gets his revenge on Ernst Stavro Blofeld once and for all for Tracy.
  • The famous (and still tense on re-watch) scene in which Bond is hanging from a cliff.
  • The Colombo/Kristatos switcheroo, in which the latter turns out to be the villain after it's initially made out that he's the goodie.
  • A Margaret Thatcher impersonator (complete with her own Denis).
  • Bond kicking a car off a cliff.
  • Car chase in a yellow Citroën 2CV through olive groves.
  • Underwater fight between Bond, Melina and a villain in a JIM suit.
  • A Bond Girl with a crossbow.
  • The Bill Conti-composed disco-like score.
Tropes used in For Your Eyes Only (film) include:

Kristatos: Thank you, Mr. Bond. You have saved us the trouble of disarming it.

Lisl: "Oh, me nighties slipping!"
Bond: "So's your accent, Countess."

  • Paid Harem: Gonzales has a number of bikini-clad women lounging around his pool.
  • Parasol Parachute
  • Please Put Some Clothes On: Bond to Bibi Dahl as she tries to seduce him.
  • Powered Armor: The mook in the deep-sea JIM suit (played by the movie's stunt coordinator) Bond and Melina must fight off underwater.
  • Pre-Mortem One-Liner: "You left this with Ferrara, I believe."
  • Pretty in Mink: A few worn during the scenes in the Alps, including a coat Melina wears.
  • Psycho for Hire: Locque.
  • Put on a Bus: M is absent from the film (in the movie, he's said to be on leave) because Bernard Lee, the original M, died before production began. He would return played by Robert Brown in Octopussy.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Melina, hunting down Gonzalez and whoever hired him.
  • Sea Mine: One is used to sink the British spy trawler, turns out, that wasn't the only one The Dragon had.
  • Sequel Escalation: Inverted. Moonraker featured a space station and a plot to wipe out humanity, For Your Eyes Only is about a stolen MacGuffin.
  • Show Some Leg: The villains provide one for Bond as he's infiltrating Gonzales hangout, and a member of his Paid Harem starts smooching with one of the guards, enabling Bond to sneak past.
  • Steal the Surroundings: When a spy ship goes missing, it turns out that to steal machinery onboard worth millions on the black market, the bad guys sunk the ship, killing everyone on board, so they could retrieve the equipment later by submarine.
  • Take That: Blofeld's appearance was a swipe at Kevin McClory.
    • The destruction of Bond's Cool Car while fleeing Gonzalez's compound was a swipe at the overuse of gadget-laden vehicles during the Seventies. Bond and Melina are forced to flee in a beat-up clunker instead.
  • Theme Tune Cameo: The code to the room containing the identigraph is part of "Nobody Does It Better".
  • Title Drop: A very subtle and rather unique variation. During his assignment briefing, Bond is handed a document marked "Classified" and secured with a seal marked "For Your Eyes Only".
  • Two-Person Pool Party: Although it takes place in the sea.
  • Underwater Ruins
  • The Voiceless: Locque again. We know he can speak, because we see him do it in one scene, but we never hear it. Fittingly, the only time he makes a sound is screaming as Bond shoves him to his doom.
  • Wafer-Thin Mint: Although, as described above, the pin thrown in a pending car doesn't bring it down: Bond's kick does.
    • Roger Moore argued against leaving the kick in, as he thought that might be too cold even for Bond. It was left in, though.
      • And it was pretty damn awesome. For such a simple kill, it's probably one of the best in the entire Bond series.
  • You Killed My Parents: Melina's motivation to join Bond's quest.