A View to a Kill

Notable for Duran Duran, A View to a Kill is also the second instalment in Bond villains doing absolutely nothing wrong, as nominal baddy Christopher Walken's plan is to destroy Silicon Valley, thus ensuring no Zuckerberg, no Jack and no McInternet as we know and loathe it today.

Because no actual person is as based.

His defeat is therefore the second most unwittingly tragic ending to a Bond film after Moonraker, in which Drax planned to wipe out the dysgenic hordes and replace them with models, saving the environment and bringing up the average human from a 5 to like a 7. I mean honestly his perfect specimens weren't actually that great, but whatever, it's the thought that counts.

The man's aesthetic sensibilities were unimpeachable regarding set design, but he had yet to discover thicc girls.

Walken should also have survived for the simple reason he has a blimp. Blimps are cool and all villains should have blimps, and I should have a blimp.

The movie ends in a climactic hand-to-hand fight on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a cool location and fun setpiece, but throughout the movie you're more worried Bond is going to die of old age because based Moore was like 200 years old at this point.

MY SPIIINE

The Moore era in general is overly maligned for its campiness. In reality the camp tone set in with George Lay-Z-Boy's cringe Carry On-esque antics in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and went into overdrive in Diamonds are Forever, so Moore really just inherited a well-established tone and rolled with it. Nevertheless he sold tense and dramatic moments such as the nuke-disarming in The Spy Who Loved Me excellently, and his Bond is a great character unto himself even if his actual films were all over the place in terms of quality. And this is what Bond should be: a consistent character who can find himself fighting Voodoo gangsters one week and metal-toothed giants the next, and retain much the same attitude of bemused detachment. Only one man has imbued a Bond with edge, grit, vulnerability and realism and not sucked utter balls, and his name is Timothy Dalton (up next).