For Your Eyes Only is my first Bond movie in 2023. It’s also my 12th Bond movie. Have I turned into a James Bond fan? Not yet, but it’s fun watching to see if Bond will ever transform from a one dimensional, lust filled guy to someone who has emotional depth and respects women.
It’s so funny that this whole James Bond journey started from me watching a show that’s the complete opposite of a James Bond movie. I watched Victoria, a series about the young life of Queen Victoria set in the 1800s. I liked her husband, Prince Albert, played by Tom Hughes and he led me to Bond. You can read about it here: Who Is The Next James Bond Actor? A Non-Bond Fan Makes Her Prediction.
Okay, so this is my reaction to For Your Eyes Only. Of course there will be spoilers.
The Opening Scene
The opening scene is in a cemetery. Is someone going to jump out of a grave and shoot James Bond? Or will Bond pop up out of the grave and shoot someone? Or will one of the graves be a cover for an underwater submarine? You never know what might happen at the beginning of a Bond movie.
I love that it’s simply James Bond putting flowers on his wife’s grave. The scene is brief because he’s called away to a work emergency. Even though he speaks no words at her grave, it shows that Bond is human and still thinking about and possibly still grieving the loss of his wife and what would have been. Any time Bond shows a hint of emotion, I see it as him evolving because it rarely happens.
If the producers want to take Bond to a deeper level, they can do that without comprising his action-hero status. But maybe they’re afraid to cross that line. They don’t want to risk losing the audience. Or maybe they think showing emotion compromises Bond’s toughness.
I heard that Daniel Craig shows a deeper side to Bond, but I’m not there yet. I saw Daniel Craig’s last Bond movie, No Time To Die though, and I saw that he was in a relationship with someone and had a child that he just found out about. It’ll be interesting to see how all that transpires, but for now, I still have two more films with Roger Moore, then Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.
Here’s How Bond Could Have Evolved In This Movie
There was a missed opportunity to show Bond’s human side in his interaction with Melina, the female lead. When Bond learns that Melina is the daughter of a murdered couple connected to his investigation, he says, “Your parents were the Havelocks?”
Bond and Melina were in the middle of an action scene, so his response made sense. But, in another scene, he could have said a few words like, I’m sorry you lost your parents. My wife was murdered too.
Bond still feels the loss of his wife, and he meets someone who’s just lost her parents. What an opportunity for him to show a little more depth. It would have been a great way to tie in his emotion at the cemetery to him empathizing with Melina’s loss.
James Bond & Women in For Your Eyes Only
In Moonraker Bond slept with three women by the halfway point of the movie. In this movie, he doesn’t have his standard one-night stand until after halfway through the movie. His second tryst is with Melina at the end of the movie.
I wonder if there will ever be a Bond movie where he doesn’t have sex with anyone.
Although the movie had me yawning at times (action scenes that were too long), I’m giving it a round of applause for not having offensive sexual names for female characters.
There was a weird interaction between Bond and an underage girl named Bibi in this movie. The actress who played her was 21, but she plays a sixteen-year-old skater who comes on to not only Bond but to another older man in the movie. Without James Bond’s knowledge, Bibi gets into his hotel room and takes a shower. When he arrives she hops into bed inviting him to join her, and thankfully he rejects the girl’s advances.
The interaction between them is odd being that a sixteen-year-old is coming on to a fifty-three-year-old man. In another scene, she kisses Bond on the lips and says, “I could eat you up alive!” Why was it necessary to sexualize a teen girl in this movie?
My Overall Thoughts on For Your Eyes Only
I know a lot goes into the action scenes, but there was one action scene that went on and on and on. So much that it became boring. Bond was being chased on skis. He went down a hill, on top of a rooftop, broke through a fence, and ended up skiing on a bobsledding track, and I can’t remember what happened next because I tuned out.
I don’t think I ever watched an action movie I liked until I saw the Bourne series (I watched the first three). All the action in those films had me on the edge of my seat and my heart racing. I never lost interest because the action seemed to have a purpose. Some of Bond’s action scenes are more like stunts without a purpose.
My favorite scene in this movie was Bond at his wife’s grave because it showed his humanity. My second favorite was a thrilling action scene when Bond climbed a rocky vertical mountain to get to the enemy’s location. It was an edge-of-the-seat scene because the enemy’s henchman was doing what he could to make Bond fall. And of course, I liked that there was no disrespect towards women in this movie (not including the sex-craved sixteen-year-old).
Production & Filming Info
This movie was filmed in 1980 and released into theaters in the U.S. in June 1981.
If you’d like to know why I, a non-Bond fan, am watching all 25 James Bond movies you can read about it in detail here: Who Is The Next James Bond? A Non-Bond Fan Makes Her Prediction.