For Your Eyes Only (1981)

I suppose that after Moonraker, James Bond had nowhere to go but up.  Once he hit rock bottom by going to outer space, I kinda figured that his adventures had reached their limit.  I’m happy to say that the producers of this series have come to their senses.  They realize how silly the outer space plot was and with For Your Eyes Only, they decided to bring Bond back to Earth.

The great relief of For Your Eyes Only is that this is the first film of Roger Moore’s tenure that gives me the kind of feeling that I had during the Connery years, that this was a British secret agent who gets in messes that might get him killed.  Some have accused this entry of being a little too standard, but I think that given the previous three adventures, this is just exactly what this series needed.

The plot has Bond chasing a missing missile command module that has been stolen and is in danger of falling into the wrong hands.  His cohort in this adventure is the beautiful Melina Havelock (Carol Bouquet) who wants revenge on the people that took the module because they murdered her parents who were also looking for it.

The plot, as in all of Bond’s films, is beside the point.  It’s all just the starting gun to get things moving.  When they do get moving, it’s pretty exciting.  For Your Eyes Only employs some of the most effective chase scenes that I’ve seen in this era of Bond, one involving a chase on skies and the other an attempt by Bond to get free when he is tied to the back of the villain’s boat and dragged through a razor sharp coral reef.

The attempt, obviously, is to get Bond back on his feet again, and to get back some of the reputation that was lost after Connery stepped aside.  This movie really does get there.  Finally, I felt that I was watching Bond and not just another also-ran chapter in the series.