Moonraker 1979

A Space Shuttle disappears after a hijacking. There’s a crash but it’s nowhere to be found in the wreckage. Bond is sent to investigate. His first port of call is the manufacturer, Drax industries.

We’re flying high after The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker starts on a promising note. Bond gets pushed out of a plane without a parachute. Someone else is on their way down already and he has to catch up, steal their parachute and fight off other bad guys before hitting the ground.

This is a brilliantly executed scene that clearly took a lot of work. I since read they did 88 skydives to complete the shot, it was not a waste of time.

Bond plummets and manages to pull his chute just in time, but unfortunately Moonraker decides to go splat head first into the ground. Things start to go south very early on, in that same scene even, when Jaws (yes, the same Jaws from the last film) has a parachute failure but fortunately manages to fall onto a circus tent.

The stupid tone continues throughout. Coffins with knives hidden in them, gondola hovercrafts, boats with hang gliders built in… One wonders if this is supposed to be some sort of Austin Powers style parody.

It’s not all bad. Roger Moore is comfortable and fun to watch on screen, he’s got the role down to a tee now. However it’s already starting to feel as though he just turns up, looks at women, says jokes and goes home. There’s a lot more stunt work involved here, including liberal head-on shots of the doubles. Moore just doesn’t feel quite as involved.

He gets paired up with CIA agent Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles, and no I did not make up the character name). Again the notion of having the two as professional partners works in the film’s favour, but for some reason she gets largely written out of the story until the last half hour.

Richard Kiel is back as Jaws. This is a bad idea. He seems to serve no purpose other than to milk out the success from the previous film.

Michael Lonsdale plays Drax, the villain. He does manage to capture some of the petulance that all good crazy villains have, but all in all he’s not particularly threatening.

This isn’t helped by the fact that his plan (and therefore the plot) is never going to work. He wants to wipe out the world and breed a master race of sexy people on a space station. Even Bond calls him out on how stupid this is and Bond is a fucking idiot.

The last 45 minutes or so occur in space, another terrible misstep. Shamelessly trying to cash in on the success of Star Wars is a waste of everyone’s time, especially when they had just started making James Bond work on its own merit again.

As with all slap-dash sci-fi, these scenes raise far too many questions. How did they get anti-gravity stuff to work? How and why do NASA have laser guns? How did NASA even manage to scramble a space shuttle with a ten minute warning? It’s frustrating, and encourages us to point out flaws rather than to enjoy the film.

One more thing; there’s yet another stupid shoot out at the end that goes on forever. It could be argued that they shouldn’t have made the film at all, but if they insist, they why make us sit through these ridiculous scenes that drag on and on? Edit it out!

This is easily the worst film we’ve seen so far. From the forgettable theme tune to the idiotic space battle, Moonraker has stolen two hours of our time without giving anything back at all.

http://benoliver999.com/film/2015/06/14/moonraker/

James Bond ventures into Space. How much bigger can it get ?

I know I'm rating this movie rather high but this one I must have watched a dozen times as a teenager. I absolutely loved it - I was kind of a space junkie. It sure is a product of its time with the Space Shuttle and the battle in space with laser guns. This was around the time that Star Wars and Star Trek were made so there might be some reason for that. According to imdb this movie was actually brought forward due to the success of Star Wars. The end credit of "Spy" said the next movie would be FYEO.

This one is another fun ride with the typical portion of Bond humor along the ride. There are some nice easter eggs in this one. Is it repetitive ? Of course, it's a Bond movie. It's almost in its DNA. You have a formula that works (stunts, beautiful women and grandious sets) so why change it. Those were the blockbusters of the time. And if you look at franchises like Marvel or Transformers they all follow there own formula. The story is mostly just the canvas.

James Bond in space doing goofy things and Jaws falling in love with a girl that he just met during his important mission to kill Mr. Bond. I'm sorry, but is this a James Bond movie or an 'Austin Powers' movie?

This has to be the most cheesiest and the most gooiest James Bond film I've seen out of them all. The visual effect's at times can looking good, but most of the times it looks out dated. I loved the character Jaws. I though he was pretty awesome in the other Bond films, but here he falls in love... wait WHAT?!

The good things about the film: Roger Moore once again does a fine job playing Mr. Bond. The theme song was nice to listen to, even when it's not the best theme song for a James Bond film, and yet, I still found something to like in it. And the movie may be a comedy at times with it's cheesiest, but I still enjoyed those parts of the film because it's very rare to see that in a James Bond film.

Overall rating: 'Moonraker' is a straight up goofy ball with a plot that goes nowhere, and a boring main villain. But the movie can be laughable but in a good way and I found some enjoyment in that.

Bond goes galactic in this crappy, slappy attempt to capture the 2001 vibe without upsetting his usual audience. Those genres make for an exceptionally awkward match under the very best circumstances, of course, and this attempt is far from graceful. Poor special effects and an absurdly loose grasp on physics and technology kneecap the orbital scenes, while a redundant gauntlet of traps and action sets, plus a dry, repetitive bit of recon work, spoils the Earthbound action.

It's a bad spy movie, but a terrible sci-fi movie. Bond has never before felt so formulaic and played-out. It seems like the series has blazed through a dozen boat chases by this point, and they all feel like the same scene set upon a slightly different waterway. The random addition of GI Joe-grade laser weaponry, plus a continuing descent into forced, groan-worthy one liners, makes this installment feel like a particularly pedestrian dose of self satire. It doesn't help that the screen is so thoroughly drenched with blunt, obvious product placement, either.

A real sellout moment for the series, ditching its soul in favor of an expired, gimmicky flavor-of-the-month that can't even justify its own existence. Worst of the entire franchise? It's certainly in the running.