The film stars Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond, and co-stars Carole Bouquet, Chaim Topol, Lynn-Holly Johnson and Julian Glover.

The twelfth film in the James Bond franchise produced by Eon Productions, For Your Eyes Only was written by Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson.

Although the script is principally based on two Ian Fleming short stories, "For Your Eyes Only" and "Risico", some elements of the plot were also inspired by the novels Live and Let Die, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The film follows Bond as he attempts to locate a missile command system while becoming tangled in a web of deception spun by rival Greek businessmen along with Melina Havelock, a woman seeking to avenge the murder of her parents.

The British information-gathering vessel St Georges, which holds the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC), the system used by the Ministry of Defence to co-ordinate the Royal Navy's fleet of Polaris submarines, is sunk after accidentally trawling an old naval mine in the Ionian Sea.

[19] Moonraker was successful yet was very expensive to produce, and shortly afterwards United Artists suffered a major financial flop with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.

[8] The transition in directors and lower budget resulted in a harder-edged directorial style, with less emphasis on gadgetry and large action sequences in huge arenas as was favoured by Gilbert in the previous two films.

[20] To that end, the story that emerged was simpler, not one in which the world was at risk, but returning the series to that of a Cold War thriller;[20] Bond would also rely more on his wits than gadgets to survive.

"[33] Roger Moore had originally signed a three-film contract with Eon Productions, which covered his first three appearances (Live and Let Die in 1973, The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974 and The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977).

[27] Uncertainty surrounding his involvement in For Your Eyes Only, considering his age, led to other actors being considered to take over, including Lewis Collins, known in the UK for his portrayal of Bodie in The Professionals;[34] Ian Ogilvy, known for his role as Simon Templar in Return of the Saint (played by Moore in the original series);[35] Michael Billington, who previously appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me as Agent XXX's ill-fated lover Sergei Barzov (Billington's screen test for For Your Eyes Only was one of the five occasions he auditioned for the role of Bond),[36] and Michael Jayston, who had appeared as the eponymous spy in the British TV series of Quiller[27] (Jayston eventually played Bond in a BBC Radio production of You Only Live Twice in 1985).

Ironically, the original "For Your Eyes Only" short story dealt with Bond being given a personal mission by M, one of the few times in the Fleming canon that 007 did his superior a direct favour.

[20] Italian actress Ornella Muti was considered for the movie, but she turned down the lead role (later given to Carole Bouquet) because her costume designer, Wayne Finkelman, was not hired by the production.

[20][47] Although the previous film had been shot almost entirely outside of the United Kingdom, the new Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's tax cuts allowed the shoot to return to Britain.

[20] Aquatic scenes were done by a team led by Al Giddings, who had previously worked on The Deep, and filmed in either Pinewood's tank on the 007 Stage or an underwater set built in the Bahamas.

[20] For the Meteora shoots, a Greek bishop was paid to allow filming in the monasteries, but the uninformed Eastern Orthodox monks were mostly critical of production rolling in their installations.

[20] Later in that same sequence, Rick Sylvester, a stuntman who had previously performed the pre-credits ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me, undertook the stunt of Bond falling off the side of the cliff.

[55] Bogner designed the ski chase on the bobsleigh track of Cortina d'Ampezzo hoping to surpass his work in both On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Spy Who Loved Me.

[9] The pre-credits sequence used the churchyard of the Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire as a cemetery, while the helicopter scenes were filmed at the abandoned Beckton Gas Works in London.

A smaller mock-up was built by Derek Meddings' team closer to the camera that the stunt pilot Marc Wolff flew behind and this made it seem as if the helicopter was entering the warehouse.

[46][59] The helicopter G-BAKS, an Agusta-Bell 206B JetRanger II, crashed in fog on 14 November 1997, killing the pilot at Cocking, West Sussex; it was built on 28 December 1972 for Galliford Construction.

[65] For Your Eyes Only was premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on 24 June 1981,[66] setting an all-time opening-day record for any film at any cinema in the UK with a gross of £14,998[67] (£72,611 in 2023 pounds[68]).

[70] This was the last James Bond film to be solely released by United Artists, as by this time its owner, Transamerica Corporation, finalized the sale of the company to MGM.

The promotional cinema poster for the film featured a woman holding a crossbow; she was photographed from behind, and her outfit left the bottom half of her buttocks exposed.

[78] It delivered a 16.3 household rating, a 26% audience share, and nearly 25 million viewers in Nielsen Media Research results, and finished as the 37th ranked program of the week.

[81] According to Malcolm, Bond "inhabits a fantasy-land of more or less bloodless violence, groinless sex and naivety masked as superior sophistication", with Moore playing him as if in a "nicely lubricated daze".

[81] Although Malcolm tipped the film for international box office success, he observed that he "can't quite see why the series has lasted so long and so strong in people's affections.

"[85] The New York Times critic Vincent Canby said that "For Your Eyes Only is not the best of the series by a long shot" although he did say that the film is "slick entertainment" with a tone that is "consistently comic even when the material is not.

"[86] Jack Kroll in Newsweek dismissed the film, saying it was "an anthology of action episodes held together by the thinnest of plot lines", although he did concede that these set pieces are "terrific in their exhilaratingly absurd energy.

"[87] For Time magazine, Richard Corliss concentrated on the stunts, saying the team "have devised some splendid optional features for For Your Eyes Only" whilst also commenting on Roger Moore, saying that his "mannequin good looks and waxed-fruit insouciance" show him to be "the best-oiled cog in this perpetual motion machine.

[99] In October 2008 Time Out re-issued a review of For Your Eyes Only and observed that the film is "admirable in intent" but that it "feels a little spare", largely because the plot has been "divested of the bells and whistles that hallmark the franchise".