A View To A Kill: The LS Cut

Another excellent LS entry in the 007 franchise. A modest edit which trims / replaces the most egregious bits. It was an interesting experience to watch this while I'm finishing my own (more aggressive) edit of AVTAK, making me very familiar with the material and alert to any changes.

The Eiffel Tower diving board is perfectly removed. Thank you. The Beach Boys are gone. Thank you. The Blues Brothers style cop chase is reduced. Plenty of improvements to make this edit preferable over the theatrical release.

My critical notes for this edit are minimal. On directorial decisions, one change that jumped out for me was to cut the entire Paris chase. The transition is done seamlessly, including slowing down the shot before the cut to better match the parachute's speed in the next shot. But it is a memorable Bond chase (when the film came out in '85, the car jump onto and over the bus made a big impression), and it has a good Zorin / Mayday moment on the speedboat (yes, they ARE both insane).

On video editing, one transition felt sudden: the end of the firetruck chase to driving up to the mine. It feels like the cop is cut off from doing or saying something. Adding one close-up shot of the cop as transition might solve that (he has 2 in the cut part at that bridge).

For audio editing the only one thing that was noticeable, was the Beach Boys replacement. I listened to the inserted Barry score on headphones, PC, and main stereo. The lining up of the inserted score is perfect: the beat continues perfectly at the end. But the acoustics are different. The inserted score has less bass and sounds less immersive. It's only an issue at the transitions so I realize this may seem a bit nitpicking, but it's a very prominent change and therefore gets everyone's attention.

Oh, and LS includes another insightful audio commentary. One of the enjoyable parts concerns the question whether or not to cut a shot, a storyline, or nothing at all.

LS makes this a better Bond film. Not the best Bond film ever, but that's due to the source material.

This Fanedit was just fantastic!!!! A really enjoyable film! For those who love the James Bond movies i'm sure you'll love this edit!!!!

Credit should be given to LastSurvivor for their conservative edit of A View To A KILL.

From a purely technical standpoint the visual and audio edits are seamless and the picture quality is top notch. The main aim of this edit was to produce a tighter, less cartoonish farewell to Roger Moore's 007 and I feel LastSurvivor succeeded in that aim. There are several questionable scenes still present in the film but removing said scenes would have negatively impacted the narrative so I feel the editor was right to leave them in. It's fair to say the original was never a favourite of mine but this edit definitely improved my opinion of it. It's really rather impressive how much better the film is after removing only 007 minutes. I guess it's true what they say...

Less is Moore.