For Your Eyes Only basically started the tradition of the franchise course-correcting from a bloated, ridiculous installment by making something much more down-to-earth. This time, Bond must race to recover a computer system from a sunken British submarine before the Soviets can get to it. Think for a second about how weird that is: one movie Bond is practically in Star Wars, the next he’s handling a totally normal mission that an actual spy might do. That’s like if the Avengers spent one movie fighting Thanos for the Infinity Gauntlet, and the next they’re busting insurance scammers.
This also has one of the craziest pre-credits sequences, in which Bond nonchalantly kills Blofeld by dropping him into a smokestack from a helicopter. This moment should be the climax of the whole series, yet it’s reduced to a throwaway gag because the producers didn’t actually have the rights to Blofed and were making a joke about it—so instead, the supervillain Bond kills is just a generic bald guy stroking a cat whose name is never uttered out loud. Bizarre.
