Moonraker

THE BIGGEST BOND OF ALL!

Moonraker is a joy from beginning to end. Huge spectacle, stunning locations, lashings of humour, superb stunts, sexy ladies, a despicable and memorable villain, great special effects and of course, the legendary Sir Roger Moore as James Bond.

Elements of You Only Live Twice - spaceships swallowing spaceships - are expanded upon here and Moonraker fits right in with the classic silliness that the Bond franchise has always embraced.

It's a shame that the 2006 reboot threw it all away and chose to run away from being Bond films.

One of the best of the Moore era

I steered clear of Moonraker (1979) for years because critics almost unanimously said it was awful. So when I finally sat down to view it I fully expecting a dog. Wrong! Moonraker is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end and is one of the best of Roger Moore's 7-movie stint in the series.

The plot revolves around 007 investigating Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) after a space shuttle on loan to the British is stolen. James slowly discovers that Drax has a mad scheme to recreate a race of perfect human specimens. The giant Jaws (Richard Kiel) returns from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) as Bond teams-up with the beautiful Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles). The story climaxes with a spectacular battle ...

Now my geography isn't great, but I am not sure you can actually fly from the Yukon to the British coast in fifteen minutes! That's how this outing for Roger Moore begins, and it's symptomatic of the rather weak storyline and sloppy production that seems intent on getting "James Bond" to capitalise on "Star Wars" (1977) fever. Anyway, a space shuttle is stolen and "007" is sent to visit gazillionaire industrialist "Drax" (Michael Londsale) who lives in a genuinely imported French chateau in California. A dizzying experience introduces him to "Dr. Goodhead" (Lois Chiles) and pretty soon the pair, after a bit of a sticky start, are trying to find out what happened to the missing spaceship and to thwart an ingenious plan to replace the populat...

They can't all be winners.

I mean, yeah it was action packed and the fight over the parachute was really cool. And Bond did have space elements in the movies before... but Moonraker kind of felt like it was jumping the shark a bit here.

Thankfully it recovered, but this was a little too much for a 007 movie. And that is saying something because, when you go see a 007 movie you expect it to be a little too much from the start.

This has the great 007 elements, but misses a bit. We get the wit, we get the beautiful women, we get the gadgets, we get the non stop action, and we even get Jaws, a fan favorite, back. Jaws even gets to speak. Maybe it was in the contract. What is missing is the exotic locations and beautiful scenery. We do get outer space and jungles and water, but we don't quite get the exotic beauty that makes Bond films so spectacular. While the cinematography is not as good as others in the hay day, it does still beat the 21st century Bond movies which are so dull. Here, the victim is a maniac intent on genocide. His plan is insane, but he's a tycoon and that just makes him "eccentric" to other VIPs. The big scene is possibly during a festival,...

Moonraker is another guilty pleasure Bond film, that with all the camp is still quote a serious film.