Moonraker (1979, Dir. Lewis Gilbert):
Suddenly Drax looked sharply, suspiciously up at Bond. ‘Well. Say something. Don’t sit there like a dummy. What do you think of my story? Don’t you think it’s extraordinary, remarkable? For one man to have done all that? Come on, come on.’ A hand came up to his mouth and he started tearing furiously at his nails. Then it was plunged back into his pocket and his eyes became cruel and cold.
‘Yes,’ said Bond. He looked levelly at the great red face across the desk. ‘It’s a remarkable case-history. Galloping paranoia. Delusions of jealousy and persecution. Megalomaniac hatred and desire for revenge. Curiously enough,’ he went on conversationally, ‘it may have something to do with your teeth. Diastema, they call it. Comes from sucking your thumb when you’re a child. Yes. I expect that’s that the psychologists will say when they get you into the lunatic asylum. “Ogre’s teeth.” Being bullied at school and so on. Extraordinary the effect it has on a child. Then Nazism helped to fan the flames and then came the crack on your ugly head. The crack you engineered yourself. I expect that settled it. From then on you were really mad. Same sort of thing as people who think they’re God. Extraordinary what tenacity they have. Absolute fanatics. You’re almost a genius. Lombroso would have been delighted with you. As it is you’re just a mad dog that’ll have to be shot. Or else you’ll commit suicide. Paranoiacs generally do. Too bad. Sad business.’
Bond paused and put all the scorn he could summon into his face. ‘And now let’s get on with this farce, you great hairy-faced lunatic.’
— Ian Fleming, Moonraker
What’s the worst James Bond movie? Ask a Bond fan and Moonraker is a frequent response (or at least it was until Die Another Day, but that’s a story for another review). Let’s confirm a few facts up front: Moonraker is one of the loopiest Bond adventures, cynically constructed to cash in on the craze started by a little film called Star Wars a few years before. It has stuff that takes a long flying leap over the line separating fun and silliness. It’s gratuitous, excessive, and over-indulgent. It also exerts a strange charm, not unlike a merry car wreck.
Consider when Moonraker came out, and the box office leaderboard at the time. You have Star Wars, with everyone from Disney to Italian exploitation hacks rushing to get their own versions out. You also have Smokey and the Bandit, which aimed to satisfy the most reptilian parts of our brain stems (cars smashing up real good). Canny as always, Bond producer Albert Broccoli decided to split the difference: outer space plus hi-jinks. At the conclusion of The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, we were promised in the credits that Bond would return in For Your Eyes Only, but with Spy restoring Bond as a front-line franchise and the threat of Lucas looming, plans shifted toward Moonraker. Ironically enough, Ian Fleming’s Moonraker is one of the moodier, more modest entries in the Bond canon. London might be under threat of nuclear annihilation, but apart from a fiendish torture by rocket engine steam and the absurd origins of antagonist Hugo Drax (which would be adopted down the line in Die Another Day), little about the story dips into the realms of the fantastic, and the novel even bravely concludes with Bond and the heroine Gala Brand going their separate ways, without so much as a single roll in the hay. Needless to say, both the tone and plot of the novel were jettisoned for the movie adaptation. Director Lewis Gilbert and writer Christopher Wood were back after the success of The Spy Who Loved Me, and given a simple brief: do it again, but this time in outer space.
Give the film some credit: It goes way over the top, but at least it does so with conviction. Filmed at French studios in order to take advantage of tax breaks, Moonraker takes on some of the wacky excesses of French comedies. Why have a chase through the canals of Venice when you can have a chase with a gondola tricked out with a motor and hovercraft abilities? Why settle for mere craziness when you can have pigeons doing double takes, monks blasting away with lasers, and bad guys getting shot-put into British Airways billboards? Why have just a simple plot to exterminate the world when you can also introduce a genetically perfect super race ready to take over when the path has been cleared (naturally this super race is comprised mostly of lovely women dressed in skimpy nothings)? This is a movie that Jerry Lewis, and the 9-year olds in all of us, can love. Never before and never since has Bond been so eager to embrace the current zany Zeitgeist: in the soundtrack alone, there are pop culture references galore, from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Magnificent Seven and Romeo and Juliet. Moonraker might give you a hangover in the morning, but it has the soppy inclusiveness of a three-keg rager.
The movie cannibalizes from everything it can find, including the Bond series itself. It’s not surprising, given the success of The Spy Who Loved Me, that Moonraker‘s plot is a virtual repeat, only bigger and louder. Substitute Space Marines for a U.S. submariner crew, and the climaxes of both movies are interchangeable. Bond was teamed up with a female KGB counterpart in Spy, and this time around he dallies with CIA agent Holly Goodhead (a sleepwalking Lois Chiles). Where Spy began with a classic ski jump off a cliff, Moonraker starts with Bond (Roger Moore) thrown out of an airplane without a parachute. Filmed with real stuntmen, it’s a genuinely thrilling sequence — or at least it is until indestructible henchman Jaws (Richard Kiel), fresh from surviving Spy, shows up, flapping his arms and plunging through a circus tent. The opener sums up Moonraker‘s impact as a whole: there’s no doubt that plenty of expertise has gone into the product, but the film is tone-deaf.
Every time you’re about to give up on Moonraker, though, a moment or two resonates. Scenes where Bond nearly gets ripped apart by a centrifuge and obtains a first-hand look at a deadly nerve gas are treated with an understated seriousness that lingers. Michael Lonsdale is bone-dry and amusing as Drax, gifted with the script’s best one-liners (“Look after Mr. Bond… see that some harm comes to him”). If nothing else, the film is pretty to look at: Bond hopscotches around some gorgeous locations (France, Venice, Rio, and the Amazon), and in his final bow with the series, Ken Adam goes all-out with his space-age production designs. John Barry buttresses it all with a symphonic score that is as grand as Bond films get. The last truly epic 007 movie, Moonraker may be empty at its core, but it’s sure easy on the senses. Still, all of the above can only go so far when Jaws gets googly-eyed with his dainty new girlfriend Dolly (Blanche Ravalec), or a Rio cable car smashes through a conveniently placed 7 Up ad (product placement indeed). At the time of the film’s release, Broccoli bragged that the film’s concepts were “based not on science fiction but science fact”: you’ll be hard-pressed to remember that statement by the time the film concludes with dueling astronaut armies and space shuttles skipping around the Earth’s atmosphere. In response to this and the rest of the madness around him, Roger Moore can only resort to his default mode: an arched eyebrow, a smirky quip. Nothing sticks to his Bond, and while his performance is a valid survival strategy, it accentuates the film’s lack of substance.
Despite its artistic shortcomings, Moonraker gave the people what it wanted — ditzy and ingratiating, it captures the spirit of the times, capped with a humdinger of a final line (“I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir!”) and Shirley Bassey’s title number with a disco beat. It was one of the highest-grossing Bonds up to that date, but at a price: while it made more The Spy Who Loved Me, it also had twice the budget of the previous film. “Outer space now belongs to 007!” the ad copy for the film trumpeted — with Bond seemingly triumphant in space, where was there left to go? Another turning point had been reached, and with United Artists about to enter a down cycle that would lead to eventual bankruptcy, it was time to downshift, to pinch those pennies. Reagan and Thatcher were ready to usher us into a decade of exorbitance, but having already been launched into orbit, Bond would soon head in a more sober, earthbound direction.
