Headscratchers / A View to a Kill

• Why didn't May Day just jump off of the minecart before the bomb exploded? Yes she would have gotten hurt but that's better than dying. And she may have even been given a pardon on account of her, you know, saving millions of lives.
  • It was somewhat implied that Zorin's massacre of his mine staff really brought home what a monster she'd been working for/in a relationship with and she intentionally killed herself out of guilt and remorse.
  • May Day also dead lifts one of Gogol's bodyguards over her head with little effort, and has anger management issues. She's clearly steroidal.
• What the heck does "California Girls" by The Beach Boys have to do with James Bond snowboarding down a mountain?
  • It's surf music. And snowboarding looks kind of like surfing. And...I got nothin'.
  • It's not nearly as bad a sound choice as the idiotic slide whistle, and it was essentially a relic of the 80s where snowboarding was only really popular in California and a lot of other places thought it was ridiculous.
• I watched again the scene, where Bond is under water and sucks air from tires, thus tricking the bad guys into thinking he's dead. The problem is they are watching the surface. And the air he's inhaling... he must exhale somewhere, creating continuous bursts of bubbles on the water surface. Yet it didn't tipped them off that he's still alive? Even if they didn't think he used a tire air, he might have had some sort of breathing device hidden in the car, perhaps?
  • They were waiting to see if Bond would resurface. Zorin has already been established to be arrogant and probably didn't think Bond had any kind of air source. Plus, Mayday had knocked Bond unconscious.
  • It didn't make much sense since he wouldn't have been able to open the door in the water pressure?
  • He could have as long as the inside of the car was filled with water. Mythbusters tested a similar thing and found they could get out.
• In the opening scene, where did Bond get the forward momentum to jump out of the crevasse and pull a fast one over those other snowboarders?
• Why would a submarine go on autopilot right when it was leaving iceberg-infested waters?
  • Because Bond wants to spend time with his partner. Presumably the sub is advanced enough to avoid icebergs or Bond knew a course which for sure would avoid icebergs
    • The layout of icebergs in the Arctic isn't like a street map.
• Bond has a license to kill but does he have a license to kill trade secrets from foreign companies as he did with the microchip at the beginning?
  • The double-O section is not an assassination squad. They do investigations and only kill if necessary. It's revealed that the chip is a copy of an EMP-proof one that was developed by a UK government contractor that had been penetrated by the Soviets thanks to Zorin buying them out. Apparently, it was part of an investigation into how top-secret chip designs were ending up in an enemy's hands. That the design was stolen after Zorin bought the company is what puts MI6 onto Zorin. Zorin calls out Gogol on the incident later.
• Why would May Day not recognize Bond? He's the one she saw in Paris a couple days ago.
  • She saw him at a relative distance in a darkened room, and when they were outside she wasn't exactly stopping to take a good look at him; it would be easy enough for her not to see him clearly and take her time to recognise him when she had no reason to believe she'd see her pursuer from Paris again.
• Why would May Day kill Chuck Lee, but not wait in the car for Bond to pull the same trick? If the reason not to kill Bond was because they couldn't have made it look like a murder wound with a gun, they had their opportunity right there
• Why does it take a whole night for Bond and Stacey to visit San Francisco City Hall, search City Hall for Zorin's plans, escape the burning City Hall, escape the cops in the fire truck and reach the mine at dawn even though Stacey's mansion, City Hall and the "Mainstrike Mine" are all in the San Francisco Bay Area and Bond and Stacey Sutton leave the latter's mansion at dusk? Was there some deleted scenes during this period to account for the jump in time?
• Why did Bond believe he would uncover any major evidence from the last check transaction on Zorin's checkbook?
  • He didn't need major evidence. Presumably he was mainly chasing after the girl but with most films she ends up being important regardless
    • But how did he know that the check book would reveal anything?
    • It revealed her name had she been unimportant he uses his resources for a date later down the track.
  • Looking at the film, I'm inclined to think that he was curious because Stacey was unfamiliar to Tibbett as a horse-breeder and yet was clearly important enough to Zorin for him to meet in person.
• Did security cameras not exist in this era? Particularly at Zorin's estate in Paris.
  • As with most Bond villains, the simplest explanation is that Zorin was arrogant enough to either think nobody would dare to do anything like that or assume that anyone who could find anything out in that manner wouldn't be able to get out afterwards.
  • In point of fact, security cameras were not super common in the 1980s.
• Zorin tries to destroy the microchip production in Silicon Valley by flooding it, so that he would have the monopoly on the microchip market. Isn't the Valley more about utilizing the microchips rather than producing them? Is Zorin actually destroying a potential market for his products?
  • The implication seems to be that making money is of secondary or even tertiary concern, and he really just wants to kill a lot of people.
• At the end of the film, Q is maneuvering his little spy rover around Stacey's house to find Bond, and eventually rolls it into her bedroom… which is, as established earlier in the film, upstairs.

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