14th film, last Moore-film, and the last movie with the original Miss Moneypenny. Starts up in Iceland (it was filmed on Iceland, but I assume they are somewhere in Russia) where 007 finds the corpse of 003 with a locket containing a microchip. He escapes Russian soldiers on skis, scoters and helicopter and we have the music back. A step up really. He blows the helicopter up and escapes on a mini-submarine. And then the title theme. One of the best one yet, A View to a Kill with Duran Duran. Great start.
So the actual story is that the microchip is a copy of one of a microchip the British government contracted a defence contractor to create to be able to withstand an electric impulse from a nuke or something like that. The contractor was bought by Zorin Industries and therefore Bond is sent in to investigate the businessman Max Zorin. Suspicion arise as he constantly wins horse races so Bond meets a french investigator that gets killed in the Eiffel Tower so 007 goes undercover with another agent (which I learnt in the documentary was the voice for all the documentaries on the movies). Turns out that the horses are operated with microchips that with a remote control can add natural steroids to the horses so that they can win the race... and the audience learns that Zorin is a KGB-agent that supplies microchips to the Soviets, but he intends to break off since he intends to stand on his own by taking control of the microchip market.
Apparently he intends to cause an explosion on the San Andres fault and flood the whole Sillicon Valley which stands for 80 % of the worlds production of microchips. And apparently he is genetically engineered human from East Germany that seems to have made him into a psychopath... and now it's just Bond catching up to the plot. He spots a woman that was given a check and after looking into one of Zorins oil platforms that pumps salt water into the pipelines he visits San Francisco City Hall where he meets the woman again that was at Zorins home in France. She works as a geologist there while processing against Zorin for stealing her father's oil company. They team up and follow him to the fault and stops the explosion after Zorin kills all the workers. He tries to escape on a zeppelin and kidnapp the girl, Bond follows and they have a fight on the Golden Gate Bridge where Zorin falls off and the Zeppelin explodes after a stick of dynamite gets lost in a shuffle.
I've had memories of this being the worst Bond-movie, might have been since it was the one I've seen least. Probably due to all the deaths. Sir Godfrey and the CIA-agent got strangled while a Soviet KGB-agent gets dropped into an underwater propeller. I can stomach it now, but as a kid it was probably the right decision by my parents not show it for a long time. The biggest crime the movie has is that it feels a bit disjointed. First the introduction, then horse races followed by oil rigs that ends up in mining facilities and talks about a psychopathic villain (what differs Zorin from anyone else? He's practically reenacting Goldfinger but with Microchips). And maybe that Moore isn't that nimble anymore. The music though is great, every action scene has a sound. Compare that to Octopussy and the tiger hunt. I can't recall a sound beyond the people and elephants.
And the plot at its core isn't that interesting. Microchips that doesn't contain any information isn't that interesting, but at least it was something that would be important for the computer industries. Also, this one was titled Living Target.