The James Bond Film Festival. Part 1: Dr. No
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 2: From Russia with Love
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 3: Goldfinger
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 4: Thunderball
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 5: You Only Live Twice
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 6: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 7: Diamonds are Forever
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 8: Live and Let Die
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 9: The Man with the Golden Gun
The James Bond Film Festival. Part 10: The Spy Who Loved Me
Moonraker. Oh, how much better it would have been if they had stuck to the book!
In actuality, Die Another Day follows the story better than Moonraker. In the book, Hugo Drax is an ex-Nazi who passes as a refugee at the end of World War Two. He makes a fortune in the mining industry and funds the Moonraker Project to aid his “adopted” country’s defense. Moonraker is a new nuclear missile in Britain’s arsenal. Drax intends to avenge his Führer by making the test flight of the Moonraker public and by diverting its path to London.
But Moonraker the movie is nothing like this. The plot is actually more like the previous film The Spy Who Loved Me. In this episode Drax (Michael Lonsdale) plans to kill the world’s population, saving himself and “genetically superior” specimens of the human race by taking refuge in a space station. Rather like the premise of The Spy Who Loved Me, where Stromberg plans to kill off the world’s population and save himself and selected individuals who will populate an undersea city.
The film starts out poorly with the theft of a Space Shuttle from the back of its 747 transport. The shuttle fires up (destroying the airplane) and goes to where ever it’s going (which we find out later is Brazil). But where does it get its fuel? It’s just wrong.
Bond (Roger Moore), meanwhile, is aboard a turboprop aircraft putting moves on the flight attendant. She pulls a gun on him and the bad guy comes out of the cockpit wearing a parachute. The bad guy shoots the instrument panel, which we are supposed to believe will make the airplane crash. A fight ensues and the bad guy goes out the door. Bond is booted out as well. The parachute fight is pretty well done. Two men fighting over one parachute. Not bad. Naturally Bond wins the prize. But Jaws (Richard Kiel) is close behind. He tries to bite Bond in the ankle, but Bond pulls the ripcord to escape. (Why didn’t he do that earlier, so he could avoid Jaws’s jaws altogether?) Jaws pulls his own ripcord, but his 'chute fails. After falling thousands of feet, Jaws’s life is saved when he hits a circus tent. :rolleyes: It was kind of funny watching him flap, though.
Bond flies to California to meet Drax, progenitor of the Moonraker shuttle project. This was interesting because I lived in the Antelope Valley. Drax Industries was protrayed by Lockheed Plant 42 in Palmdale. The transition to Drax’s opulent castle was decently done, although they seemed to forget that they were supposed to be in a desert. It is here that Bond meets Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles), a CIA agent posing as a NASA scientist who has been seconded to Drax Industries. For no good reason, Drax orders Bond to be killed. Bond is only supposed to be finding out as much as he can about the shuttle. At this point it’s not at all clear that Drax is a suspect. After the first attempt on Bond’s life – in a centrifuge – fails, Bond is still posing as a “guest”. He gets Corinne DuFour (Corinne Clery) to tell him where Drax’s safe is, gets the plans he’s after, and is invited to a pheasant shoot.
So Drax is going to have Bond shot at the pheasant shoot, eh? How original. Bond shoots the sniper instead. Too cute.
And speaking of cute: At the end of the hunt the guy with the horn blows Also Sprach Zarathustra (the theme from 2001: A Space Oddysey). Later on, an electronic lock plays the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the correct sequence of numbers is pressed. Too, too cute.
The musical keypad is in Venice, where Bond is tracking down the clues he found in Drax’s safe. Naturally, he must be killed. Drax’s henchman Cha (or “Chang” – Toshirô Suga) tries to take him out in a glassworks museum. “Huh huh. They’re breaking glass, Beavis.” Oh yeah, that appeals to the sophisticated American audience. “Huh huh. They just broke that 500-year-old bowl. Huh huh.” :rolleyes: There comes a point where Cha gains the upper hand, sending Bond backward into a display case. Cha pounces to finish him off. Oh, wait a minute. No, Cha runs off instead. Bond catches him and kills him. But before all of that happens…
This is the film with the famous – or infamous, depending on how you look at it – gondola hovercraft. There was no reason to have this thing in the film, other than so that people can say “Hey look. It’s a gondola hovercraft.” It is during this scene that we see the running gag of the Man Who Thinks He’s Drunk Too Much (Victor Tourjansky). We also get to see a pigeon do a triple-take.
Anyway, Bond has found a powerful nerve agent. He takes M (Bernard Lee) and Sir Frederick Gray, Minister of Defense (Geoffrey Keen) to see the lab, only to find Drax in an opulent room with no lab to be found. What an embarassment to MI-6! Bond gives the nerve agent to M, suggesting that he have Q (Desmond Llewelyn) check it out. M suggests that Bond take a holiday (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and Bond is off to Rio. There he meets an agent by the name of Manuella (Emily Bolton) whose purpose, it seems, is to be menaced by Jaws. Really, Bond could have found Drax’s warehouse without her help. He’s James Bond!
Bond is watching Drax’s cargo planes take off from the Rio airport. Goodhead is doing the same thing. They get on the aerial gondola which is stopped by The Strength of Jaws. Or is it? Oddly, it seems that when it suits the plot the conveyance can be controled by the operator below. Jaws gets on top of the opposite gondola and the operator puts the gondolas next to each other. There is supposed to be an exciting battle hundreds of feet in the air. I found it to be rather ho-hum. Bond locks Jaws inside of a gondola, and while Jaws tears his way out Bond and Goodhead use a chain to slide down the cable. The gondola operator sends Jaws after them. Somehow the car gains on them. I don’t know how a cable car works, but it seems to me that if Bond is sliding down the same cable the gondola is on, then it would not be possible for the car to catch up to him.
At the bottom Bond and Goodhead drop free while Jaws crashes into the building. Having been trapped under a large pulley, Jaws muscles his way out. He’s helped out by a petite blonde in pigtails and glasses (“Dolly”, played by Blanche Ravalec – who I found very cute) and it’s love at first sight. Bond and Goodhead, meanwhile, have been captured by fake ambulance attendants. There is a lovely bit of product placement as they speed by a Seiko billboard. (And yes, Bond wears a digital Seiko instead of the traditional Rolex Submariner.) Bond escapes but Goodhead doesn’t.
After finding out where Drax’s secret shuttle base is, Bond takes a boat down one of the rivers. He is chased in other boats by Jaws & Co. Exciting? Eh, we’ve seen it before. It’s really not all that different from the boat chase in From Russia With Love or Live and Let Die or The Man with the Golden Gun. Besides, there’s a boat chase earlier in the film, in Venice. Bond makes his escape from the abyss (there’s a waterfall in front of him) by using a hang glider that Q had thoughtfully provided in the boat. Off to Drax’s hide out…
… Where Bond battles a rather unconvincing python. He’s captured by Jaws – who has miraculously survived his own plummet over the falls – and Drax puts him with Goodhead directly beneath the hind end of an up-bound shuttle. (This is actually one thing that was in the book.) They escape and take the last shuttle to Drax’s invisible-to-radar space station. They disable the radar jammer and are soon captured by Jaws, who has come aboard with his new girlfriend. But the cavalry is on its way! Yes, the USA has sent up a shuttle packed with space-soldiers who do battle with the minions of Drax. An epic battle? Well, it was supposed to be. But it was too reminiscent of the battle at the end of Thunderball – and not done nearly as well. Drax wants to shove Bond and Goodhead out the airlock, but Bond asks Drax if Drax will exterminate anyone who doesn’t fit Drax’s ideal of a perfect human specimen. Stupidly, Drax says “Certainly.” Oops. Bad thing to say when the giant freak Jaws and his scrawny, nearsighted girlfriend are within earshot.
Jaws helps Bond and Goodhead escape as the space station collapses around them. They make it to the last shuttle to Earth, but it’s stuck. Jaws and Dolly are content to drink champagne and end their lives together, but they see Bond and Goodhead and free them. They survive to be picked up later in their bit of the space station that has broken free.
Bond and Goodhead track down the three deadly globes that Drax managed to launch (each capable of killing 50 million people) and destroy them. They are caught in flagrante delicto joining the Zero-G Club by a remote camera which broadcasts their antics to the Queen and the President.
I’ve already mentioned the Seiko product placement, but there are others. Goodhead has a packet of Marlboros in her drawer (although she apparently doesn’t smoke), there’s a plug for Christian Dior, and 7-Up is prominently displayed. British Airways also gets a billboard in the show.
Moonraker is a muddled mess. Its pacing is slow, and its action scenes had already been done to death. There is a battle on the space station where everyone is armed with laser weapons. Much too Star Wars. I did like that Jaws turned out not to be such a bad guy after all, and he finally did get a line. But IMO this is one of the worst of the Bond films.
