Moonraker (1979) - film review

When a Moonraker space shuttle goes missing during its transatlantic delivery, agent James Bond is called in to investigate.  He begins by paying a visit to Hugo Drax, the multimillionaire owner of the company that manufactures the Moonraker shuttles.  For some reason, Drax doesn’t take to Bond and instructs his henchman to kill him.  The attempt fails and Bond heads off to Venice to probe more deeply into Drax’s activities.  Here, he discovers a secret laboratory equipped with a deadly nerve gas.  The gas apparently derives from a poisonous plant found only on the banks of the Amazon River.  During a stopover in Rio de Janeiro, Bond discovers that Drax has closed down the Brazil end of his operation.  Accompanied by CIA agent Holly Goodhead, he heads for the Amazon, and discovers an ancient city populated by beautiful people - and Mr Drax.  This is Drax’s secret base, from which the megalomaniac millionaire intends to launch a series of Moonrakers.  Despite the best efforts of Drax and his henchman Jaws, Bond and Goodhead manage to avoid being roasted alive by the shuttle exhaust fumes and end up piloting one of the shuttles.  Entering the Earth’s stratosphere, the Moonrakers dock with a huge space station, which is invisible to Earth tracking systems because it is equipped with a radar jamming device.  Here, Bond uncovers Drax’s dastardly plan.  He intends to wipe out the entire population of the Earth with his deadly Amazonian poison and replace it with a master race bred aboard the space station...

Moonraker is widely considered by far the weakest entry in EON’s series of James Bond films, and rightly so.  An all too obvious attempt to cash in on the success of the sci-fi extravaganzas of the late 1970s - Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Star Wars (1977) - it departs too far from Ian Fleming’s concept and reduces Britain’s most famous fictional spy to the level of a cartoon action hero.   Although the film was a massive hit, recouping its colossal 34 million dollar budget three times over, it is a travesty of a Bond film - mired in its own self-parody, crippled by a poor script and ruined by some ludicrous comic excesses.  And these are just some of its better points.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Moonraker is that it had so much going for it.  It was directed by Lewis Gilbert, a respected filmmaker whose previous two Bond films - You Only Live Twice (1967) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) - are two of the most well regarded films in the 007 franchise.  It takes in numerous exotic locations, with the canals of Venice providing the setting for one of the most wacky Bond chases.  The film also has one of the most ambitious pre-credit sequences of any Bond film.  And it includes some of the most stunning special effects work ever seen in a British movie.  Just how could it all go so wrong?

The problem is that Moonraker is a palace of gold built on the soggiest of quicksand.  Stunning production values are of little consequence if the film’s foundations, i.e. its concept and script, are made of decaying, beetle-infested balsawood.   The concept is as obvious as it is trite: put James Bond in a spacesuit and send him into outer space so that he can take part in a gigantic laser gun battle.  Of course it is no coincidence that the film’s climax almost exactly mirrors that of Star Wars.  Unfortunately, to get to this point, the screenwriter had to tag on a ninety-minute prelude, which resembles little more than a random splicing together of all the previous Bond movies - an endless series of fancy set-piece action sequences with next to nothing in the way of a plot to knit them all together.  Needless to say, virtually nothing of Fleming’s original novel found its way into the film - rather, this book would provide material for the later Bond film Die Another Day (2002).

All this might not have been so bad if the production team hadn’t been so inclined to go overboard with the humour.  Bond dashing about St Mark’s Square in a gondola-cum-hovercraft is borderline acceptable; startled pigeons doing a double take is obviously going too far.  It’s good to see Jaws back for another round of metal-dentured villainy, or at least it was until he goes all soppy and does his Tristan and Isolde bit with a myopic blonde midget.   Whilst the musical reference to Close Encounters are amusing, the wholesale rip off of The Magnificent Seven theme appears gratuitous.   Given how utterly bonkers the plot is, it is perhaps surprising that the screenwriter and director didn’t go all the way and make this a deliberate, rather than an accidental, Bond spoof.  Michael Lonsdale would have made an absolutely brilliant comedy villain.  

Trivia fans should note that Moonraker was the first (and to date only) Bond film to have been produced in France (to escape the punitive tax regime that afflicted Britain in the late 1970s).  This accounts for why many of the locations are recognisably French and why the cast includes an unusually high quota of well-known French actors - Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Clery, Blanche Ravalec and Jean-Pierre Castaldi being faces that will be familiar to French film aficionados.  (Clery was of course the star of Just Jaeckin’s 1975 erotic masterpiece, Histoire d'O).  The film’s instantly forgettable theme song was sung by Shirley Bassey, a dismal effort compared with her previous renditions of the themes for Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever.  This was the last Bond film in which Bernard Lee appeared as M (in fact it was Lee’s last ever film role), a sad way for him to leave the series.

Moonraker is easily the silliest and most ill-conceived Bond film of them all.  If the naff humour doesn’t irritate you, the egregious use of product placement certainly will - Air France, BA and 7-Up (to name just three) all got their money’s worth.  In his fourth Bond outing, Roger Moore looks so stiff that he risks being mistaken for a cadaver, although considering some of the dialogue he is given you can understand why.  The film just about passes for entertainment if you skip the first ninety minutes and get yourself seriously inebriated beforehand.  Watch it in its entirety stone cold sober and you will probably end up choking to death on your Dom Pérignon.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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