Prole Hole vs James Bond

It wasn't unique in that way, either - Philadelphia in Rocky looks pretty blasted itself. 

Any opinions on this?

www.topgear.com/car-news/movies/these-are-the-best-and-worst-james-bond-cars-of-all-time

dＬᵒ Hmm, another reason to see A View to a Kill: Grace Jones, a Trump-by-way-of-Walken Bond villain, and a Renault 11 for beauté Robert Opronesque. I’m inordinately fond of all those slightly weird regular and midlevel European cars from the sixties through nineties—I don’t think we got the 11 in the States, just the bowdlerized AMC Alliance. And of course it makes more sense for Bond to be driving stuff like Renault 11’s, though no one watches Bond for realism.

I’m also very fond of the Sunbeam Alpine he drives in Dr. No—a nice little convertible that I’m surprised didn’t get mentioned. IIRC we also see Bond’s Bentley—his car from the novels—briefly in From Russia with Love, too. I can see why they didn’t continue with it—in the books it’s actually a pre-war monster (in Casino Royale Bond actually wishes he were driving Le Chiffre’s little Citroën Traction Avant, a car which also makes a cameo as a villain’s car in From Russia with Love), so I’m not surprised they wanted something newer and sportier for Bond (still there’s something classy about stodgy-but-fast prewar cars—pretty sure that’s part of why when they animated Lupin the specified a prewar Mercedes).

The only correct photograph of Connery with the DB5 is, of course:

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)



Will this be third time lucky for Roger Moore? So far, neither of his two Bond outings have exactly been knock-outs, and at this point the man with the Walther PPK desperately needs a straight-up good Bond movie to secure his position as a worthy carrier of the name. Connery’s third movie was the series-defining Goldfinger. Can The Spy Who Loved Me manage the same feat for Moore?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Well it’s got the Lotus, that beautiful white wedge and probably the most iconic car of the whole Bond series aside from the Aston DB5. Off the top of my head I know it’s also the first appearance of Jaws, who I remember from Moonraker much more than from The Spy Who Loved Me – for some reason Moonraker was one of those movies that was always on around 5-00pm on any given Sunday, whereas The Spy Who Loved Me was rarely seen. So I’m used to him being more of a comedy character in space, rather than anyone representing a genuine threat. Oh, and there’s the whole Atlantis conceit, which is one of those Classic Bond Villain things, but whose connection to the plot or reason for existing currently escapes me. Time to find out what it is, then!

The Actual Movie:
So, after our standard barrel and Bond theme…. We’re underwater. Oh no! Horrific flashbacks to Thunderballl! But it’s Ok, we’re on a submarine and we cut to a mess hall (complete with naked women pinned to the wall, the only full frontal boob action you’ll be getting in this movie.). Some tea is being shaken! It’s a crisis! “What the hell’s going on”, demands the captain. There’s a total loss of power. The sub surfaces and the captain, peering through the periscope, simply says, “Oh my god”, before we cut to the Admiralty, to be gravely informed, “we’ve lost one of our nuclear submarines”. Then, someone in Moscow is informed of the same thing (that they’ve lost one of theirs, that is). Cut to a spy in bed with a woman, doing a Bond but not Bond, and she’s draped over him in typical Bond style, and we find out her codename is “Triple X”. Well, of course it is. Then, London, and M. Bond, we are informed is on a mission in Austria. “Tell him to pull out!” demands M, so we get the inevitable cut to him in bed with a lady. His digital watch prints out a message on teletype – adorable – and it time for him to leave. Ah, but she’s a spy as well, and sends some people to chase him. And we’re off on a downhill ski chase. Because Austria. A couple of bits of ropey rear-projection aside, this is a terrific opening sequence, excellently shot (the disco Bond music over it, not so much, but it is the 70’s). There’s a few great bits of stunt work as Bond skis himself over the edge a cliff… complete silence…. He falls… and falls… Then he sheds his skis and parachutes to safety with a big old Union Jack parachute. It’s effortlessly the best moment in a Moore movie to date.

After Carly Simon’s done her thing, we’re back in Moscow and the agent from earlier, Triple X enters the room in full woolly-hat Russian mode. She’s informed that her partner from earlier has been killed… in Austria by a British secret serviceman. Can you guess who it is yet? The Comrade General is genuinely compassionate in a very unlikely way, even as she tries to maintain her composure, which is an appealingly different way of playing “the enemy”. Then Bond lands on a ship by helicopter, and meets the usual collection of stuffed shirts (plus M and Q). We’re informed that someone can now track nuclear submaries underwater, and that a third party has sent a tracing of the missing sub’s route as proof that it can be tracked. They want to sell this technology on the open market. There’s a contact is in Cairo, so that’s where Bond is off to.
But before that happens we pay a visit to a sumptuous room, and we meet someone who is very clearly this movie’s bad guy, the person responsible for the tracking technology which has been leaked. The two scientists who developed it are there. A woman at the end of the table is dismissed, steps into a lift, and is promptly shot down a chute where she is lightly nuzzled by a shark (to death, we assume), as it turns out she betrayed him. The two scientists in the room leave – very cautiously – in the same lift, and then it’s revealed that far from being in some sumptuous Viennese palace we are in fact on a massive underwater base. The model work here is pretty decent, all things considered. In come two henchpeople, one of whom is Jaws, who gets the big metallic grin, and one of whom is a bald guy. They are dispatched to retrieve a microfilm copy of the plans. Stromberg, for ‘tis he, then blows up the helicopter carrying the scientists who developed the technology. What a jackanapes!

So we’re off to the desert, and Moore doing his very best Lawrence Of Arabia by an oasis, riding a camel. He enters a tent filled with ladies in a fairly standard get-up as he meets a fellow agent. Someone’s putting the submarine tracking system on the market, and Bond wants to know who. Kalba, Bond is told, is the man he eventually needs to meet, but there’s a go-between to meet first, Fekkesh, so off to Cario we go. Bond is being watched as he enters a building, where he is greeted by a lady claiming that Fekkesh will be delayed and she will entertain him while they wait. Bond is got at, she reacts in time to see the shooter and the chase is on – it’s the first of Stromberg’s henchepeople, the bald guy! He’s not named, and doesn’t last long enough to get one. There’s a fistfight, where the henceperson ends up hanging off the end of the building, held only in place by Bond’s tie. Bond demand to know the location of Fekkesh, he’s told “The pyramids!”, then Bond lets the henceperson fall to his death. Cut to, naturally, the pyramids and a big presentation in front of the Sphinx. Bond spots Fekkesh and takes a seat nearby. Jaws is there, bathed in green, like the pyramids, and though it’s a static shot, he looks incredibly intimidating. Fekkesh spots Jaws and slips out, so Bond follows him. This results in a chase between Bond, Fekkesh and Jaws, and it’s quite brilliant. Jaws is a huge, stalking presence in these scenes, a massive physical threat. Fekesh slips behind an iron door padlocks it shut, only for Jaws to bite through the chain. He’s completely relentless, catches Fekkesh, bites him to death, then Bond catches up to Jaws. What follows is a monochrome chase (lit in stark green), while the intentionally over-the-top music from the presentation in front of the Sphinx makes everything sound like a Hammer Horror movie. It’s a very successful conceit. Bond finds Fekkesh’s body, and going through his pockets gets a location to follow up to try and find Kalber. Bond steps outside, only to meet Amasova, the Russian agent from earlier in the movie. There’s a bit of a dust-up with a few disposiable agents, then we’re off to the club Bond found the address of. It’s mostly the we’re-in-Cario setting you’d expect (no belly-dancers though). Amasova meets Bond at the bar, they announce they know who the other is, and they go through greeting each other. She mentions that Bond was married once, which he’s very defensive of (rather well handled, in fact). Bond makes his excuses and leaves to meet Kalber, the owner of the club, a handy Exposition Waiter informs us. Bond takes his seat, and announces he wants to buy something, after Amasova appears and informs us she wants to bid too. Kalber is called away for a phone call and is promptly threatened by Jaws, who is still a silent threat. As the music in the club reaches its climax, Kalber gives the microfilm to Jaws, who then lets his teeth glimmer… and that’s the end of Kalber. Bond finds Kalber’s body and realizes the film has gone, but spies Jaws making a break for it out the back, in everyone’s favourite disguise, a telephone engineer. Bond pursues, and managed to get in the back of the telephone van Jaws uses as an escape… only for Amasova to slip in beside him. They think they’re being discreet, but Jaws is listening in and knows they’re there.

Back to the Sahara, and we get some desert beauty shots as Jaws drives to some ruins in the middle of nowhere. Bond and Amasova slip out of the van, and follows Jaws (Bond thoughtfully pockets the van’s key before they do). They slip in-between some pillars (there’s a nice little power game between Bond and Amasova as to who goes first). This part is almost in complete silence – very effective – then we get some strings and some tension as they hunt through the ruins. Jaws is miles off the ground here, walking across the top of the ruins, and still a brutal, silent presence. There’s then a very brief fight between Bond and Jaws before Amasova pulls a gun and demands the microfilm. She gets it but Jaws throws it to the ground, and as she collects it uses the moment to start the fight again – she legs it with the film, and Bond tricks Jaws into whacking some scaffolding, which collapses on him. She runs to the van, which Bond of course has the key to… and just as they fight over the microfilm Jaws turns up and starts to peel open the van like a tin can. Bond makes a few (not funny) cracks about “women drivers”, but she does get them out of it, with the wryly amusic, “shaken… not stirred” put-down of him, which at least he has the decency to roll his eyes at in a way that implies he admits she won. They make their way off into the desert to some parp-parp music, and eventually the tatty remains of the van finally gives up. So off they walk to the Nile (accompanied by the Lawrence of Arabia theme, in case you missed the point) and get a boat back to Cario. There’s a bit of standard seduction – “shared bodily warmth” and swelling, um, strings. Yet it’s rather wonderfully subverted, when his hand makes its way up her thigh, only to find a cigarette case. She pulls out a cigarette, while he laments “just when it was getting interesting”… and she blows powder out of one which knocks him out. Very pleasing indeed.

Bond awakes at a dock, and obviously Amasova has made off with the film. He traces her (well, has her location pointed out) in another ruin. Bond slips down a darkened corridor… to find M, and also the Russian comrade general from earlier, alongside M and Amasova. M informs us that there working together – “a new era in Anglo-Soviet relations” – to find out what happened to their respective subs. Bond tells us the microfilm has crucial information missing so maybe Q can get it. We get a few “funny gadgets” – definitely “funny”, not funny – and they are able to trace this back to Stromberg. So Bond and Amasova are put on the case – and on a train, to work together. Oh, things never end well on trains, do they? There’s a bit of “the same but different” dialogue between between them. Bond attempts seduction with champagne, but gets nowhere. Eventually she slips into a nightie waiting for him to make a move and he slips out of a hideous brown suit waiting for her to. She goes to hang up her dress and Jaws is in the cupboard! Bond rushes in to the rescue, and is so physically outmatched it’s ridiculous. Again Jaws is played entirely straight, a killing machine, and as he goes for the killer bite, Bond defeats him with an electric light to the teeth. Nasty. Jaws is kicked out the window – “he just dropped in for a quick bite” – but he gets up after it anyway, brushes himself off and away he goes. Back on the train we get a “sexy sax” version of the Bond theme which is laying it on way to thick, and finally Bond and Amasova get down to it – though Moore still cant carry this off the seduction scenes.

Now we’ve arrived in Italy, and… fuck me, it’s the Lotus! Delivered by Q! Off to the countryside they go, to a villia and check in posing as husband and wife. They are to be taken to Stromberg by speedboat – “such lovely lines” mutters Bond (perfectly delivered by Moore) as they are speed-boated out to the big base we saw earlier. Bond and Amasova separate – she’s to be shown around as he meets with Stromberg (it’s a bit odd though – they arrived at sea level, Bond goes up in a lift, then they’re apparently underwater. The tense scene between Stromberg and Bond is pretty well staged as they both circle each other. Stromberg excuses himself and Bond meets up with Amasova again. Stromberg meets with Jaws, so Bond’s bluff is immediately uncovered, and Jaws is told to let them get back to shore, then kill them.. Then we’re back at shore and the Lotus, and as they head out of the village they’re followed by a motorbike and…. um, sidecar. Action music starts up! Then the sidecar is fired as a rocket, but the biker flies off a cliff, but is immediately replaced by Jaws in a… Ford. Ford v Lotus. Hmm… anyway the Ford is forced off the road (to land in the roof of a comedy Italian peasant). But wait, there’s more! Now there’s a helicopter after them! We get a bit more stunt driving and flying, all of which is good and keep the pace up, then the Lotus is forced off the end of a pier into the water…. And the Lotus becomes a submersible. Quite, it must be said, brilliantly. The helicopter is taken out by a roof-to-air missile (yes, that’s a thing), and the Lotus gets them over Stromberg’s base. Buuuut… it’s still not over! A funky disco beat kicks in and… some divers left over from Thunderball attack! They’re disposed of pretty easily, then a minisub attacks… but the Lotus springs a leak so they make for the shore. The Lotus emerging from the sea on to the beach is an absolute thing of wonder, carried off with an astonishingly amount of aplomb. Full marks all round.

Back to the villa, they agree to the course of action – to find the taker. Amasova comments on the quality of Bond’s lighter. He admits he picked it up in Austria, and she makes the connection – Bond killed her lover. She asks him directly if he killed him, he admits it, and she promises to kill him the moment the mission is over. It’s played entirely straight, and is all the better for it. Then they’re airlifted to an American sub (I assume the accent is American). The sub finds the tanker but they suffer electrical failure. They surface directly in the path of the tanker… only for the front of it to open and swallow the sub whole.  Yes, just like You Only Live Twice! But with subs rather than spaceships! Fair enough though, the special effects here are very good, despite some overly-melodramatic music. By the way, Bond is now in a naval uniform, and his Bond is immediately more credible for it (and he’s been great up till now). The sub is pulled in alongside two others, and Stromberg comes down to supervise the sub being opened. They surrender (under threat of cyanide gas), and though they try to hide Amasova as a man they’re discovered – because, you know, it’s Barbara Bach – and she and Bond are dragged before Stromberg. He announces that he will destroy New York and Moscow. Bond offers him money, but he cannot be bought – he will wipe out humanity with his nuclear missiles and humanity will survive in his underground Atlantis base. Sounds credible. Bond is to be thrown in with the other prisoners, while they fly out the side of the tanker in a speedboat (not the best special effect). Bond effects an escape (monorail!) and frees the other prisoners, while the disco music sadly strikes up again. Bond and the escaped prisoners take over the base in a vast shoot-em-out, with a lot of extras doing stunt dives and falling in water. There’s a lot of explosions and almost all of it is very well staged, with grenades getting flung about the place and great gouts of flame. A pretty boy tries to save the day but gets gunned down, then there’s more stunt-work and they head for the armoury. Bond managed to disarm a nuclear bomb, while the captain of the ship assured Stromberg that the bridge is impregnable. Yes, because saying something is impregnable never ends unfortunately, does it? There’s a tense scene where Bond removes the nuke’s core – like you do – and he takes the core up through the ship. He rides the security camera in the ceiling, which as strange as you might imagine, and the Bond theme parps up… But when Bond pulls the feed on the security cameras and the monitors go blank, the Bond theme cuts out at the same time, which is lovely. Bond attaches the nuke’s detonator to the camera, which stalls outside the bridge, and the detonation rips it open. The tanker’s dying captain informs Bond he only has four minutes to defeat the bad guy – thanks, ship’s captain! – and Bond announces he intends to use the two missiles to wipe each other out. Each one is sent instructions to target the other, and they fire. We get a loooong scene of two missiles tracking each other on a globe, with only the chirping of a computer, and its remarkably tense. Then… um, two nuclear bombs blow up in the ocean, which might be, well, just a tad overkill (we get stock footage of an actual nuclear explosion, so this definitely isn’t just conventional weaponry). Then… the tanker is blowing up for some reason. More stunt falls, explosions, some model work… the good guys run for the U.S. sub and make a break for it, while loading up a missile to destroy the bay doors so the sub can get out. This is all very well put together indeed. The sub caaaaarefully makes its way out of the disintegrating tanker – some more excellent model and Foley work here… then it’s free! The tanker self-destructs and sinks below the waves.

But hey, remember the Atlantis base? Well that’s where the sub is off to now. There are orders from the Pentagon that the base is to be destroyed, but Bond begs for an hour to rescue Amasova. He heads in via jet-ski – sure – and Stromberg is waiting for him in his faux-Italian dining room (complete with real fire). Bond enters the lift with the shark-chute and Stromberg tries to kill him in the same way he disposed of the unfortunate traitor at the start of the film, but Bond steps aside from and survives. At the dining table (complete with Tabsaco sauce somewhat incongruously in the middle of it), Stromberg tries to take him out, and Moore’s Bond is quite, quite ruthless in gunning him down. After he’s killed, Bond makes a break for it… to encounter Jaws, just waiting for him. There then follows a soundtrack-free fight – quite nasty – before Bond finds an electromagnet, picks up Jaws by the teeth and promptly deposits him in the shark tank. Bond legs it, while Jaws bites the shark to bits. Bond finds Amasova just in time, the Americans launch a missile… And the base is struck! Cue massive sheets of water, tilting sets and a run for safety. Again the modelwork here is great as the base slowly sinks beneath the waves. They drag themselves into the plushest escape capsule in the world – complete with drinks selection and library. A slo-mo model launch is awful – a shame since everything else has been great – and they finally break the surface. Bond tries to open some champagne, and she stonily pulls a gun on him…. Before shooting the cork off the bottle. Oh, and we get a scene of Jaws swimming for safety, in case you were concerned. Then the escape capsule is brought on board a pursing Navel ship and we end the movie on the worst pun of the film – when M asks Bond what he’s doing (in bed with Amasova) his reply is, “Keeping the British end up!”

And then we get a showtune version of the Bond theme which is beyond awful and funny... and then Carly Simon is mercifully reinstated.

And then we’re informed that the next time James Bond Will Return, it will be in For Your Eyes Only. So naturally the next movie is Moonraker.


In Conclusion:
The Spy Who Loved Me is so manifestly better than Moore’s other two outings that it beggars belief. Everything here combines to make one of the most satisfying of all Bond movies, and there’s just something incredibly enjoyable in getting swept up in a semi-absurdist, light-but-well-balanced Bond movie. It suddenly becomes possible to remember why these movies are made in the first place, because it feels like a long time since we had anything this straightforwardly enjoyable. Moore has been on an upward tick ever since he took over the role, but if The Man With The Golden Gun was by degrees better than Live And Let Die, then The Spy Who Loved Me is the full three-hundred-and-sixty. Is this Moore’s knock-out that secures his position in the role? Absolutely 100% it is, but the obvious question to ask here is – why?

Because on the surface, this is just You Only Live Twice, but with submarines rather than spacecraft (and without the dodgy make-up and pig woman). The plot is basically identical, in fact – a third party plays the East and West off against each other by stealing some secret craft in order to get them to attack each other, with the third party seeking to gain from the resulting conflict. Even the more-is-more pitched battle at the end seems strikingly familiar. There’s no Blofeld here, but Stromberg is a fair substitute – he’s no Telly Savalas, but then, so very few people are. But there’s an absolute swagger and confidence to The Spy Who Loved Me that belies any comparison with the earlier movie – You Only Live Twice collapsed in the final third of the movie, but The Spy Who Loved Me never does. Indeed the momentum and tension keeps ratchetting up, so even after we’ve had the Huge Pitched Battle (split in two here, effectively), we still have Our Heroes trying to make their escape, just to add an extra layer to proceedings. That happens quite a bit during this movie, most obviously in the big Lotus chase, which starts with Bond and Amasova being followed, then attacked by a motorbike, then a car, then a helicopter, then they’re underwater, then there’s scuba-divers… it’s relentless, but more than that, it’s learned the mistakes from Moore’s other two outings. There was a well-executed chase in Live And Let Die (despite Pepper’s presence), but it was more of a technical success than actually exciting, and it went on for ever, which sapped all the tension and excitement out of it. Here the chase is of a not dissimilar length but by constantly swapping out one attacking enemy for another it never becomes repetitive or dreary. And it ends with the Lotus submarine, to which very little can compare. There’s a lot of action in this film, in fact, but it’s all in service to the actual storyline, as opposed to Live And Let Die, where it felt incidental to the storyline. In other words, the action actually serves to drive the plot forward, rather than stalling it while we get a few bits of stunt work to watch.

So that’s one way in which The Spy Who Loves Me triumphs. The most obvious other is its leading man. I’ve mentioned before that Moore has always been the best thing in his own films, which is true, but here he takes that to a whole different level. The flippancy of the performance is toned down – not a lot, but just enough that the character suddenly becomes Bond again, not Roger Moore Starring As James Bond, and the difference is vast. The same avuncular, English charm still shines through, but in a way that feels anchored to the film the performance is in, rather than floating around it. That means when Bond has to shift from the lighter, comedic material to the tough guy it’s a much smaller chasm to cross, and Moore can effortlessly bridge the gap. The shift to the hard man is, when needed, startlingly effective – his gunning down of Stromberg is a short scene, but Moore there is every bit the bastard Connery was, without losing his innate likability, a real feat. Gone is the over-reliance on creaky one-liners, which threatened to sometimes overwhelm the two previous outings – here Moore gets plenty of puns and quips, but delivered off-the-cuff rather than as if waiting for an audience reaction. It makes the character seems witty, rather than someone trying to write wit for an actor to deliver and, again, the difference is vast. It’s really impossible to over-praise what Moore does with the role here, and it shows what a difference a strong script, written towards the strengths of the leading man, can make. To say this is Moore’s best performance in the role so far feels like a vast understatement.

Amasova, too, is light-years better than the last couple of outings – sure, not a high bar to clear, but still the difference between her and the last two efforts is stark indeed. This is a character who actually has a character, rather than simply being a bikini prop. She has a well-thought-out background, she has a degree of complexity and inner life, and she’s every bit as loyal to the USSR as Bond is to Britain, but without some hackneyed “da, comrade” old chestnut – it’s a lovely moment when, undercover on Stromberg’s tanker, she can’t quite stop herself correcting him when he says it’s the biggest tanker in the world and she quietly adds the Western world, because the USSR has a tanker, the Karl Marx (of course), which is bigger. That’s exactly how Bond would react in the same situation – gently but firmly asserting his country’s superiority – and it nicely, and subtly, underscores the similarities between them in a way that’s much more effective that any number of, “in another world we could be friends” or “we’re not so different, you and I” speeches would be (though we do get one example of the latter). Equally the fact that agents East of the Berlin Wall behave in the same way as their Western counterparts, with dalliances in bed, love lives and hearts broken, shows a depth that’s rarely afforded the “other side”, and the revelation that Bond killed her lover gives an extra friction to their relationship that’s wonderful to see – theirs is a power game between equals, not a one-sided match with Bond in charge. In fact it’s a shame this isn’t taken a little bit further, since the movie ending with Amasova choosing not to kill Bond, but equally not give in to his seduction would have been even more fantastic, but this is mostly just quibbling. However, saying all that, Barbara Bach falls just short of greatness here and especially in her earlier scenes tends towards being rather robotic, before relaxing into the role and becoming a bit more effective. She works well enough with Moore, and by the end there’s some rapport, but it takes its time to get going. This makes Amasova a bit more of a success on paper rather than in fact, especially as she spends the last part of the movie tied up and waiting to be rescued – that’s not Bach’s fault, obviously, but it does undermine an otherwise very well-realized and well-rounded character. Certainly Bach is streets ahead of either Seymour or Eckland, but then again, who isn’t?

And there’s just so much attention to detail here, all of which pays dividends. The fact that the Russian comrade general is genuinely compassionate and understanding towards Amasova when informing her of her lover’s death is a million miles away from the usual stoic Russian clichés. Bothering to film the naval scenes early in the movie, when Bond is told he needs to go to Cairo, in an actual naval base (in Scotland), rather than just doing a bit of rear-projection or studio-set shows attention to detail rather than sloppy shortcuts. Sure, there’s a couple of dodgy rear projections elsewhere in the movie (mostly in the prologue, trying to show Moore as the skier on the mountain), but they’re quick, snappy and not used long enough to cause any problems. The scenes in Egypt have a great sense of scale, and it’s a fantastic new location for the series to visit – indeed this is the most globetrotting Bond has ever been, which gives everything a grand sense of scale. Even the classical music that Stromberg listens to strikes a different tone than we’re used to. In fact the only production failing is the use of the “disco Bond” theme, which, while deeply unfortunate, isn’t anything like a fatal mistake. Indeed the one or two mistakes the film does make – which are few and far between – never seem like anything more than a couple of loose threads on an otherwise perfectly-assembled tapestry. Because in absolutely every single respect, The Spy Who Loved Me is simply a brilliant movie, a complete and irrefutable vindication of Moore’s casting, and arguably the best Bond movie since Goldfinger. It’s a straight-up, straightforward classic.

Setting off two nuclear bombs in the Pacific might have been taking things a bit far, though.

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
The rarely-awarded 0%. Really, this is a movie you’re either all in with or all out. If you buy into its silly but just-about-plausible tone then this is a joy to behold and if you don’t then it’s just a stupid runaround. Whatever else it is though, it’s absolutely it’s own thing. But to cut it? What would be the point? There’s no Sheriff Pepper or egregious racism, there’s nothing that seems out of place or extraneous, and there’s very little that could be described as disposable. So yes, it is what it is. Let’s all get on with it.

Quip Level:
High. Yet the weird thing about the quips in The Spy Who Loved Me is that they’re almost entirely delivered straight. Moore has plenty of opportunity to ham it up or to wink at the camera, but for the most part this is the perfect alignment of the script giving him quips, and his ability to not overplay them. When the quips have misfired in Moore’s previous two outings – and I want to make it clear that most of them don’t, even though a few do – it’s the productions desire to milk them as “funny”, rather than off-handed, that sinks them. That’s not the case here, and the much more underplayed quip and pun delivery means that the film can stand to have a lot more of them without it simply becoming tiresome. There is one huge crashing example of it going wrong here though, and sadly it’s the very last line of the movie, “keeping the British end up.” So near, and yet so far.

2017 Cringe Factor:
Odd, to be honest. Amasova is, as previously discussed, a better character on paper than she is on screen, even though on screen she’s perfectly OK, so for once the cringe factor doesn’t come from the second lead (unlike the last two outings). And, as with the sequence at the ruins where she manages to engineer their escape from Jaws even as he tears the van apart around them, she’s shown to be capable, and actually puts Bond in his place, a rare gift indeed. She does spend the end of the movie tied to a chair, which is more than a little unfortunate for an otherwise-competent agent, but at least she’s a reasonable motivator for Bond to invade Atlantis rather than just blowing the damned thing up. But there’s a jingoism that starts to slip into Bond here that’s never quite been present before, a sort of rah-rah Britain (by which this film very clearly means “England”, rather than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) that feels… off-key somehow. Bond may well have been cast as the Great White Saviour in Live And Let Die, but in that movie it was a clearly constructed archetype. Not a forgivable one, for sure, but certainly one that lent on previously established literary or cinematic traits, there awkwardly shoehorned into a Bond movie. Here it’s different. When, in the pre-credits sequence, Bond’s squeeze tells him, “but I need you!”, his reply is, “so does England.” Not Britain, not the Empire, not for the throne. Not even for the Secret Service. It is, in other words, very specific. This isn’t for Queen and country, and this isn’t Lazenby drunkenly saluting Her Majesty or the concept of Britain as something worth defending. Instead it seems calculated to defend England in the 70’s in a very specific way, and it ages the film terribly (and in a way neither Lazenby nor Connery had to put up with). It’s… defensive, even as it hides behind its brashness. Bond has never been defensive before, not in this way. And five minutes after “England needs him” he’s parachuting off a cliff-edge with the world’s least discreet parachute, a whacking great Union Jack (no, I’m not calling it the Union Flag) slap bang in the middle of the screen. It’s funny in the context of the film (and it’s an absolutely astonishingly well-put-together sequence), but it’s also more than a bit uncomfortable when considered contextually. Bond has always been an instrument of Empire, defending Britain simply on the grounds that its existence is seen to be inherently worthwhile, but here it tips over into something different. This will all end the unmitigated disaster of a Thatcher impression, the initial impulses of this movie taken to their logical extreme, but it’s not quite fair to blame that on The Spy Who Loved Me. Let’s give this an Ouch… for now, but keep an eye on where we go from here.

I disagree. I believe this movie would be literally infinitely better if all the God-awful close-ups of Roger Moore "skiing" were eliminated from the pre-credits sequence. I estimate this at 1.5%, although they were so bad that they felt more like 10%.

Moonraker was the first Bond film I saw in the theater. I saw The Spy Who Loved Me years later on television and I was surprised at how menacing and kind of scary Jaws is in his first outing, considering how silly he ended up being in Moonraker (at least, as I recall). That whole sequence in Cairo with Jaws really impressed me.

I know that this film was the basis for almost all the James Bond stuff in "Our Man Bashir", Jean Luc de Lemur so if this movie reminds you of that episode then I guess that means they did their job properly. Interesting about their being no X in the Russian alphabet, I didn't know that, which makes her codename even more hlarious (unless she's about to start her own brand of adult movies, and is pandering to Western Capitalist decadence). Stromberg isn't a Blofeld, that's for sure - this was written with Blofeld / SPECTRE in mind, which makes sense given the events here, but it didnt happen because of legal wrangles. This might actually be to their advantage - this film is already enough like You Only Live Twice without having extactly the same antagonists to play off as well.

The Lawrence Of Arabia theme playing here is deeply weird. Prole Him wandered in while I was watching that section and his reaction was basically, "are you fucking kidding me?", which, while not unfair is... well, look, this movie is often very tongue in cheek so it just scrapes through with scenes like that. Any more and it would all just collapse (Hey, hello Moonraker, how you doin'!) but I think it manages to just pull off here.

And you are not wrong about the "basic level" patriotism neutering Bond. Again this film just about gets away with it, but it's going to get a whole lot worse... That ambiguity is very important to Bond, and the latter Moore movies (if memory serves) get rid of almost all of it, not to the benefit of the series. I guess I shall find out soon enough though...

Generic Poster - totally. There was "five captains" thing on Netflix at one point (not sure if its still there) where interviews were conducted with Shatner, Stewart, Brooks, Mulgrew and Bakula. Brooks is really like that. It's... fabulous.

Yea, it really made me appreciate all the quality acting that went into the parts of DS9 where Sisko was acting relatively normal.


That being said, god I wish Avery Brooks was actually interested in being in stuff again.  Where's his Mulgrew turn as a beloved supporting character on a prestige dramedy, you know?

There was NTSF:SD:SUV.

Oh yea, you probably need a bit to sober up then.

Moonraker (1979)



What a straight-up triumph The Spy Who Loved Me was. What a terrific realisation of what Moore could bring to the role of Bond it turned out to be. But the question with any big success like that is – what next? In this case, For Your Eyes Only was quietly put to one side and Moonraker brought forward. That’s thanks to the fact it had space stuff in it, and Star Wars suddenly made that a very bankable approach to take. But does chasing the 70’s Big Movie Trend^tm mean sacrificing what made the last movie so great?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Well it’s the one at least partially set in space, obviously. And it’s also the one that brings back Jaws, to less than terrifying results, and gives him a love interest in the form of a very diminutive lady, because a big man and a small woman is always funny, right? Lots of bits of this one are stuck in my head thanks it being apparently on endless Sunday reruns, so let’s see if any of it manages to be good, or whether just about holding the attention of bored nine-year-olds on any given Sunday is the fate it deserves.

The Actual Movie:
So after the usual gun barrel sequence, we open on a Boeing with… a space shuttle strapped to the back of it, with the name Moonraker prominently displayed. Perfectly normal. Ah, but on-board the shuttle, two henchpeople sneak out of concealed spaces and into the shuttle’s cockpit. They launch the shuttle, which blows up the plane (some reasonable, but not spectacular, model work here). Quick cut to London, and M looking for Bond – he’s finishing a mission and is on the last leg, Moneypenny informs M, so naturally we cut to Bond’s hand working his way up some lady’s thigh. He’s on a small private jet, where the lady in question pulls a gun on him (no further explanation is forthcoming). There’s a brief fight, he pushes out a parachute-wearing bad guy out of the plane, but then Bond get pushed out too, sans parachute! By Jaws.no less (he’s an awfully big man to be concealed in an awfully small plane, it has to be said)! We then get some genuinely brilliant areal acrobatics as Bond free-falls towards the bad guy in question, steals his chute, and straps in. Ah but Jaws has followed him out. More acrobatic swooping, Bond pulls his rip-cord to escape Jaws, but when Jaws does the same, nothing happens, so he crashes into a circus big top.

Sure.

Oh, Shirley Bassey’s back! That’s nice! (I know I don’t comment on title sequences as a rule, but this one is pretty terrible, with just a bunch of random floaty ladies about the place. Pitiful.).

Bond meets the Minister of Defence and M and Q. Q’s back to saying one line then just wandering off until he needs to display some exposition – they realize that the shuttle was stolen because there’s no wreckage of it with the plane. Bond is tasked to find it, so he’s off to California and Drax Industries, who built the Moonraker. Though before that he gets a handy wrist-dart weapon and some open contempt from M. Bond is delivered to Drax headquarters while an Exposition Blonde (Corrine Dufour) fills in some details, including a mansion that was brought over brick by brick from France (read: we can afford to shoot in France, but probably not California). Landing at the mansion, we get to meet Drax, playing piano in the drawing room. Drax is quietly arrogant but not overwhelming so – certain of himself like any CEO but not obviously evil yet, despite having the Goatee Of Evil. Bond is taken off on a tour, while Drax informs his silent Asian butler, “look after Mr Bond. See that some harm comes to him.” Ok, well that didn’t last long. Bond meets Dr Holly Goodhead. Bond is surprised to discover that Dr Goodhead is a woman – though he must be the only one – and she gets a couple of snippy lines. We then reach the centrifuge that, we are told, simulates the gravity of re-entry. Bond is invited to try it and, for no real reason, agrees, which leads to one of the movie’s most striking scenes when Bond is catapulted round in the centrifuge in what looks like a genuinely nauseating sequence (some good cameraworks and direction really helps here). He’s just able to fire one of the darts Q gave him earlier (there’s a little flashback as Bond almost passes out, which is very effective) and damage the capsule so it stops. Moore does a good job of looking actually hurt as he staggers out of the capsule.

Night. Bond enters Dufour’s chambers (not a euphemism. Well, not yet), but she resists him. For all of five seconds. He gets a bit of information out of her – something secret is being worked on but also being moved to a new location – then it’s time for a truly terrible seduction scene. Next morning, Bond slips away to search for clues in Dufour’s room, but she catches him. He opens a safe – she’s remarkably unperturbed by any of this – and finds plans which he photographs, including some information on glass made in Venice, before replacing in the safe. The chemistry between these two is… well, it’s not even on the charts never mind off it. But our still-nameless Asian henchperson (Chang in the credits, it should be pointed out, though as far as I can tell un-named on screen) is lurking in the shadows, watching…. Now a pheasant shoot, because that’s a smooth transition, and some forests which are absolutely categorically not anywhere in California. Drax is there, blasting away, while Bond is driven up in an open-top Rolls Royce, and a man with a rifle slips out of sight. Drax persuades Bond (his arch enemy, lest we forget) to try his hand at shooting with a loaded gun. Bond aims at a pheasant, pulls the trigger… and the man with the rifle falls out of the tree. As Bond leaves, Dufour’s subterfuge is revealed, and Drax informs her that her employment is to be terminated immediately. The dogs are then set on her and she runs through the forest, only to be chased down and mauled. This is a long sequence, excellently shot, and it’s strangely unpleasant. Not in a “so Drax really is the bad guy!” here, it’s more that it feels uncharacteristic of this movie. But before we can linger on it, we’re off to Venice and a glass-blowers. Bond slips into a museum where a tour group is being shown around. Goodhead is there! He catches up with her, and she informs him that she doesn’t like being spied on. There’s a bit of back-and-forth between them – playful, but not bad – then Bond is on a gondola. The Bond theme starts up, so we can presume this isn’t going to be relaxing, and black funeral ship hoves into view. Someone gets out of coffin and starts throwing knives at Bond! Bond throws one back, killing him, but now there’s a chase on! Turns out this gondola has a bit of grunt to it, as its outrunning a speedboat. A tramp does a double take, a gondola is cut in half, then…. Um, well how to explain this. Bond’s gondola becomes a hovercraft and glides on to the streets. A painter gets his easel knocked over. A drunk does a double take. Then a pigeon does a double take. Yes. A pigeon.

Night. Again. Bond break into the glass blowers, and finds a secret door which is opened by the five-note sequence from Close Encounters, which is, it says here, funny. Behind the door, there’s a lab. Some kind of satellite is being faffed about with. Bond finds something inside a test tube, a clear liquid, but is nearly found out when two scientists, who can’t see a door closing when it’s directly in their eye-line, return. One of them knocks over the vial Bond was just holding… and they both die a horrible death. Which is to say the acting is, truly, horrible. Bond still has one of the vials though – he tries to slip out but some random person in a black kung fu outfit screams at him and attacks with a quarterstaff (it’s actually very funny, though I don’t think it’s meant to be). Bond legs it into the glass museum – can you guess what’s going to happen here? Still, Moore looks genuinely angry here, which makes a nice change. Bond eventually knocks the guys helmet off and to nobody’s surprise it’s Nameless Asian Henchperson. More fighting, etcetera etcetra, until Nameless Asian Henchperson gets pushed out a window and ends his life in a grand piano. “Play it again, Sam,” says Bond, which isn’t quite a quip, but you know. It ends the scene.

Bond meets up with Goodhead, but it turns out she has a number of defences (poison pen, deadly dart in diary, that kind of thing), but it’s because – ta da, she’s CIA. Another not-great love scene – has nobody noticed Moore can’t really do these yet? Really? Anyway, next morning M has been allowed out on location, which must make a nice change for him, along with the Minister of Defence. Bond has called them in to view the lab he found the night before but… ah it’s not there any more. Instead we just have Drax. The Minister Of Defense says he’s “never been so humiliated in my life”, so he doesn’t know Octopussy is coming up soon. Bond is taken off the case – M makes it clear he doesn’t want to this but has no choice, and lets Bond go to Rio to follow a lead under the cover of taking some leave, while Bond gives him the vial he took from the lab for Q to analyse. Jaws – remember him? – sets off a metal detector at an airport. Hilarious. Bond arrives in Rio by Concorde (!) and is followed to his hotel by a lady with a camera. He arrives at a hotel room of spectacular tat (mustard-yellow sofas are not a good look in any decade) only to discover she’s already there behind the bar – Manuela is her name, and she’s there to help him. Naturally, it’s Carnival time, because you know… Rio. Bond and Manuela make their way to Drax’s warehouse through the crowds, and Bond goes to break in, leaving Manuela alone in a back-alley. A carnival clown approaches her while Bond explores… It’s Jaws. Crowds keep turning up at inopportune moments… Jaws goes for the kill, but another crowd sweeps him away. Bond found one clue – a whacking great Drax Industries sticker that might as well have had “here’s a clue!” printed on it.

This means we’re off to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain where Bond spies a Drax Industries plane taking off, then spies a spy spying on him. Ah, it’s Goodhead. Drax has been moving out, and Bond assures Goodhead they will be working together, despite a mutual lack of trust. They get in a cable-car to go down, but…. Jaws again. He stops the cable car, and Bond and Goodhead climb out onto its roof, while Jaws crushes the cable with his teeth. Jaws then works hand over hand to reach the other cable car, and when the two cars draw level we have a fight sequence in front of some very bad rear-projection (some of it isn’t even in focus, which is particularly slipshod). The cuts between stunt men fighting on actual cable cars and poor attempts to pretend that Roger Moore is doing any of this are especially lamentable. After stuffing Jaws in one of the cable cars and locking him in, Bond slides off down the cable holding on to a chain, while Jaws pursues in the cable car, or at least a cheap model of one. Bond lets go of the chain and he and Goodhead fall safely to the ground (try not to think of how physics works in this shot), while the speeded-up-footage cable car slams into the café, having no time to stop. Yet when the cable car does strike the café at the far end, it’s a very expensive shot, all slo-mo exploding concrete, rather than the rubbish model from earlier. Weird. Anyway, digging himself out from the rubble, Jaws meets a Heidi-a-like (boobs, bouncy, blonde) and they fall instantly in love. Crap. We cut to Bond and Goodhead on the mountainside, and a couple of medics turns up, but they actually knock Bond out and we’re off to the next bit of the plot.

Goodhead and Bond are tied up in an ambulance which makes its way high up into the hills. There’s a poor, too-long fight inside the ambulance once Bond slips free of his bonds, which ends up with him and the henchperson that’s guarding them getting thrown out the back (the henchperson, strapped to a gurney, ends up in a British Airways poster that declares “we’ll take more care of you”, but really, fuck that), before Bond, in full Clint Eastwood mode, makes his way to the top of a hill and a monastery. This is not a great look for Moore. Moneypenny’s there. Q’s there too. There’s the usual couple of “comedy” gadgets, then we’re off to meet M. Apparently the vial Bond found in Venice does indeed contain a nerve gas, but one that’s harmless to animals yet fatal to humans. It’s made from a rare orchid in Brazil, so that’s where we’re off to. A speedboat makes its way down an un-named river, driven by Bond, which is suddenly opened fire upon. Of course the boat has a few defences of its own – first mines, then a torpedo – and we’re given a fairly standard boat chase. Eventually Jaws turns up via some rear projection, and it turns out Bond is accelerating towards a waterfall. He straps on a helmet, because this boat has a hand-glider, while Jaw’s boat of course goes over the rapids. Bond lands safely and makes his way through the jungle to discover… A pyramid with, surprise surprise, a lady in a long flowing white robe., who he follows. She leads Bond inside, and it’s a fairly standard Bond Villain base – metal walkway over a pool, that sort of thing – while a bevy of beauties all turns up to strike poses. Bond is unceremoniously tipped into the pool while a snake is released. Makes a change from sharks I suppose. The intercutting between the real snake, as it’s released, and the rubber one, which Moore gamely pretends is crushing him, is… not fantastic. Bond stabs the snake with the poison pen he took from Goodhead earlier, makes his way to the pool’s edge, and Jaws is there looming over him. And Drax is there too!

“Mr Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you,” says Drax, in a spectacularly flimsy piece of lampshading as to why Drax hasn’t Just Killed Him Already. Mind you, check out his guards in kinky yellow PVC and boxers’ crash helmets – that’s quite the look for space technicians. Bond is taken through to Drax’s mission control. Drax finally explains that he’s “improved” upon the orchid so it kills humans but not anyone else because he wants to preserve the balance of nature, then Moonraker is launched (decent special effects here, to be fair). In fact, four Moonraker’s are launched, and another is on stand-by. But if he has that many, why does he need the one he stole? Because one of his own developed a fault. On the one hand, that’s a fairly poor reason but on the other at least they bothered to explain it. Jaws is told to place Bond where, “he can be sure of warmth”. Under the rocket engines, unsurprisingly. Oh, Goodhead is here too. They make a break for the air vent – Bond’s watch has a small explosive charge in it which blows open the vent and they make their exit just before the engines fire. The other end of the vent emerges near the snake pool from earlier, which suggests some odd design priorities for a thermal vent from a rocket. Bond and Goodhead slip out of the vent, steal a couple of guard uniforms (how does all that PVC not squeak?) and sneak on to one of the launching shuttles. They’re on a pre-arranged fight schedule into….

Space! Yes, we’re leaving both the Earth and credibility behind as Bond blasts into orbit. The effects work here is fairly decent – not spectacular, but not Thunderbirds either, and there’s a proper effort being made to make things seem weightless at least. Bond checks the cargo, and it’s another bevy of beauties – male and female this time – and works out this must be some kind of ark. In space. They converge on… a massive space station that apparently no nation has notices being built in orbit (OK, there must be radar jamming, we’re told, but there must have been a lot of launches for “an entire city in space”). It’s rather wonderfully gothic in appearance (the music backs this up somewhat), and a good piece of design – the way the shuttles dock with it almost prefigures Deep Space Nine. Hey they’re really committing to the anti-gravity stuff as an astronaut floats about the place. Oh wait, they’ve turned on “gravity control”, but to get this the space station starts to spin, a very unusual nod towards scientific… well accuracy is overstating it but still, good effort all round. Oh hey Jaws and his missus are here too. So they have all these perfect humans, a dwarf and a giant. ‘Kay. Bond spots the vials he identified in Venice, and Drax gives his beautiful people a speech about creating a new perfect race after exterminating the existing population. He also wants “law and order in the heavens”, so he’s basically a standard-issue Nazi. Bond wants to knock out the radar-jamming system so the nations of Earth will investigate. Goodhead gets to convincingly beat up a couple of technicians and they take out the jamming system. The U.S. and Russia talk to each other, the Americans are sending up a shuttle of their own to investigate (there’s a rather sweet scene with Gogol in Russia). Bond and Goodhead watch the first globe full of nerve gas launch, while Jaws silently slips up behind them and takes them prisoner. Drax is less than thrilled to discover Bond is on board, and he’s aware of the U.S. launching a shuttle against his station. He witters on about his pretentious dream – a “necklace of death” around the world that will kill the human race. The U.S. shuttle approaches, and is taken out by a laser. Bond gives a speech about how anyone not measuring up to Drax’s perfect standards will be exterminated, and the words finally get through to Jaws. He realizes his fate and rebels, but it’s for nothing. Guns bring their little rebellion to a stand still. They prepare do fire on the shuttle, but Bond dives at a console, spins the station, and knocks out the gravity. This means a lot of extras on wires as the gravity fails, but it’s a very good sequence indeed. A few people suit up and exit the station, but the U.S. haven’t come unprepared, and opening the bay doors release a platoon of space-suited soldiers. We then have an extended laser battle which… I mean it’s not badly shot, and again some fealty is being given to actual physics, but the only thing missing from this sequence is Imperial Stormtroopers. From Russia With Love it is not. The Americans board the station, but Drax has gotten it back under control and we have gravity again. More globes are being launched. The American reach the command centre (I’m hesitant to say “bridge”), and we get another extended laser battle while Drax attempts to leg it. Bond is in pursuit though, and they confront each other in that most dramatic of locations, a corridor. Drax slowly backs away until stumbling over a body. He picks up a laser gun. Shoot Bond! But he doesn’t, instead he’s given a bit of minor gloating, giving Bond the chance to shoot him with the wrist dart gadget. Bond pushes Drax into an airlock and jettisons him (“take one giant leap for mankind”).

But the station is coming apart now and the three launched globes need to be destroyed. The sets here don’t look great, though the model of the disintegrating space station isn’t bad. Bond realizes that Moonraker 5 – Drax’s – has a laser so can be used to destroy the globes and makes a run for it with Goodhead. They get in, but can’t launch because the docking release has been jammed. Drama! But no, cut to Jaws and his yet-to-be-named beau finding each other in the shattered remains of the control centre and surrounded by dead bodies. How very romantic. They even find some champagne (naturally he opens it with his teeth and Jaws gets is sole line (“well, here’s to us”), as well as his moment of heroism as he helps Bond’s shuttle get free. He and his diminutive love get away in an escape pod and the station finally explodes. There are some more special effects, and the score works hard to convince us that there’s a sense of threat here as Bond goes after one globe after another in the shuttle. Still the sequence is fairly well shot, especially as they skip on the atmosphere. Goodhead sounds not remotely concerned that they might break up, which is nice change from the usual screeching and wailing, but doesn’t exactly add to the atmosphere. The shuttle’s auto target fails so Bond has to shot the last globe down manually, which he does, though in a surprisingly tense sequence. We then get a cut to mission control (who confirm that Jaws and Mrs Jaws made it down successfully), the usual end-of-movie one-liner (“I think he’s attempting re-entry), then poor old Shirley Bassey suffers the indignity of a crap disco version of the movie’s theme song.

Oh, and James Bond Will Return, in For Your Eyes Only. Again.

In Conclusion:
What even is Moonraker? That’s the question, because this is a vastly deranged film compiled of bits you’ve seen from previous Bond films, bits you’ve seen from other films, a few bits which are unique to this movie, and a whole lot of stuff. One thing you can say of previous Bond movies, whether good or bad, is that they all tend to be distinctively of one thing, so Thunderball might be dull, but it’s easy to appreciate the scope and ambition that went into it, and it’s very clearly “the one that’s mostly under water”. It’s very much it’s own thing. Even something as unforgivably awful as Diamonds Are Forever manages to establish what it is – basically a chase movie in which nobody seems very interested in the actual chase – without too much of an effort. But Moonraker? What is it? And is it actually any good?

One thing it very obviously is, unfortunately, is chasing cinematic trends, rather than defining them. So references to, say, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind or The Good, The Band And The Ugly, can look cute on screen (indeed the little Close Encounters tune on the keypad is actually quite charming), but they rsepresent a fundamental shift in the way Bond is being produced. No longer is Bond leading the way, cinematically, but is instead being forced to play catch-up. For a while, Bond strode out in front, so movies such as In Like Flint followed in Bond’s wake, while movies like The Ipcress File were a deliberate reaction against Bond, but either way Bond was central to how those films worked. No longer. Now it’s Bond that’s doing the following, and of course nowhere is this more clear than in the extended space sequences, which are openly and brazenly chasing the Star Wars market. From a financial perspective the appeal of this is obvious – Star Wars was a massive smash, and suddenly everyone was scrambling to get in on the space action in the hopes of soaking up some of the box office returns that come with it. But from a creative perspective? We’ve come a long way from Bond’s mission being things like stealing a top-secret typewriter (From Russia With Love) or dealing with the Cold War. How much this is a good or bad thing very much depends on what you want out of a Bond movie.

Because what Moonraker also is, it’s worth pointing out, is a comedy. This seems to be something a lot of people miss, though in fact that takes some effort of will. This is basically taking the essence of Bond, and then gently, and rather lovingly, sending the whole thing up. The key to this here is the pigeon doing the double-take. Yes, that’s right, the pigeon. Because, if what you want from a Bond movie is a gritty thriller in which a hard-nosed agent of British Empire does things for Queen and country, this is clearly and obviously not the movie for you, and that pigeon can stand as the ultimate betrayal of concept. But if you want a relaxed, easy couple of hours in the company of some ludicrously over-the-top schemes, insane world-ending plans, and patently ridiculous space fights, well this is the movie for you, and a pigeon doing a double-take is a perfect encapsulation of that. Drax, who seems to be every bit the model for Dr Evil in Austin Powers as Blofeld, never remotely convinces as a serious threat, but then again that presumes that he’s ever intended to be in the first place. Michael Lonsdale gives a clipped, controlled performance in the role and never once raises his voice (a far cry from some of the eye-rolling loonies Bond has faced off against), which makes a refreshing change and he gives a great performance, but it’s also more than just a little camp. The idea that this guy is going to be the one to bring the world to its knees just seems laughable – at least Blofeld had a few movies to ratchet up his credibility. Drax’s plan is a typical-Bond villain scheme, but unlike Blofeld in You Only Live Twice, there’s a sense that it’s being consciously written as absurd, rather than the absurdity emerging from ill-thought-through attempts to go for bigger-is-better. That is indeed sending up the idea of a typical Bond villain, or at the very least resorting to pastiche, but crucially it’s also quite funny, and in the end when Bond get’s his confrontation with Drax mano a mano in the space station corridor he doesn’t really have a hard time defeating him, because of course he doesn’t. Drax is never a real threat, so taking him out isn’t really what the film is about, it’s just how the film needs to end, because the bad guy ha to be defeated somehow.

One of the strengths of Moonraker, surprisingly, is the character work it does, and that goes a long way to making this work as a movie. Dr Goodhead might have a typically stupid Bond-ish name, but the actual character is really terrific, and Lois Chiles is a terrific lead opposite Moore. She’s intelligent, capable, she’s given a couple of fight scenes to show off her physical as well as intellectual prowess, and she never resorts to screaming or needing rescued. Well, she does need rescued from beneath the rocket vents in Drax’s Brazilian base, but so does Bond, and there’s no sense that this weakens her as a character. And she gets to pilot the space shuttle that saves the day at the end of the movie! Could you imagine Solitaire doing that? It’s actually a shame the film doesn’t use her a bit more, but what we do get is genuinely terrific, and Chiles deserves a lot of praise for the work she does here. And while this film has received some criticism for turning Jaws into a “goodie”, what’s remarkable here is just how long the film takes to do this, and also the fact that it’s done in a way that actually gives the character a little emotional arc (I don’t mean his girlfriend), and one which remains true to his characterization in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws twice gets to be a proper, genuine threat in this movie, once when Goodhead narrowly avoids being killed by him in a Rio back-alley (when he’s dressed as the carnival clown), and once during the cable-car sequence, but the point here is he really is a genuine threat, when even him simply standing at the side of a pool implies danger. And that sense of threat remains right up until Bond points out that he isn’t going to fit in with Drax’s plans for a perfect species, at which point he switches sides. That’ exactly what he should do – it’s made clear that Jaws is a hired killer (“he kills people” is Bond’s succinct summary of the man in The Spy Who Loved Me) who owes Drax nothing and has no loyalty to country, so when he realizes he’s overplayed his hand and put himself in danger, it’s perfectly consistent with who he is that he changes side to save himself (and, conveniently, Bond in the process). That’s a really lovely character moment for him, and Moonraker deserves some real credit for bothering to treat an otherwise one-note character that well.

Yet we can’t possibly discuss Moonraker honestly without also pointing out that there are more than a few flaws here. For one, the production is nearly as schizophrenic as the film itself. That pre-credits sky-dive sequence is genuinely stunning, a phenomenal piece of areal photography that takes the cliff-dive from The Spy Who Loved Me and one-up’s it in spectacular style. It’s amazing. Yet we also have the return of genuinely awful rear-projection. I know I’ve mentioned this a few times, but it really screws up the cable-car sequence, because the stunt work on location is clearly very well done indeed – it looks properly vertiginous and dangerous – and then we cut back to Moore or Richard Kiel in front of what might as well be a painting of Rio for all the realism is brings. It completely takes you out of the scene and it’s hugely undermining to the sequence, destroying much of the tension from the fight. Equally, why did anyone think it was a good idea to speed up the footage of Drax’s dogs eating steak? It’s a short moment, but it’s absolutely ludicrous, and not in the fun way that much of this film embraces the ludicrous, it just looks stupid. There’s lots of moments like that, where obvious eye for detail lavished on one part of the film is completely absent from others.

Still, there is one thing that Moonraker is excellent at doing, and that’s basically leading up the garden path. Because to get from that sky-dive sequence to space battles and laser guns is a big ask of any film, but Moonraker is incredibly deft in the way it moves from one set piece to the next, always escalating the absurdity by just enough that it keeps you on board. So the opening sequence, when the Moonraker is stolen from the back of a 747 is very much to 70’s Bond what Thunderball’s sequence of stealing a plane with atomic bombs was to 60’s Bond. This is how a Bond movie operates, it’s the catalyst to get things going. Then that sky-dive? That feels very much a part of a traditional Bond too, but bigger and better than we’ve seen before. And so things proceed, step by step, until we reach the Big Villain Base. In any other Bond movie that location would be the climax, but here it’s just another step on the ladder as we eventually get launched in to space. Yet because the movie is very careful about how events escalate here, it’s very easy for the audience to get drawn along with the action, even though when you take a step back and look at what’s going on it seems ridiculous. It’s a great trick, and suggest that some real care and attention has gone into the narrative geometry of the script – each event flows logically from the one before it (OK, maybe logically isn’t quite the right word…), and sets up the one in front of it. It’s exceedingly well constructed.

So with all that, we return to the opening question – what even is Moonraker? To be honest, it’s everything and nothing. It’s a light, comedic take on Bond that seems to be custom-built to piss off fans who think Bond should be serious or gritty, yet effortlessly embraces the fans who love the lighter, tongue-in-cheek approach that Moore typifies. It’s a film that contains some of the most impressive moments of any Bond movie (that sky-dive again), along with some of the most forehead-slappingly stupid ones (the hovercraft gondola). There’s astonishingly good script work and character work going on, but it’s going on in a film that can’t even be bothered to get its rear-projection properly in focus. You can see that Moore is already starting to age out of the role, yet still has more than enough zip to bring the character to life. It’s a remarkably easy film to love, but it’s also an easy film to completely rip apart, if one so chose to do so. One thing that does seem clear though – if this is a Bond pastiche (and I’m pretty comfortable in saying that it is), this is about as far down that particular road as a Bond movie can go without destroying itself. This works on its own terms, but the problem with pulling back the curtain and sending up Bond conventions is that you run the risk of never being able to use those conventions again in the future. This is a glorious, all-encompassing shambles, at once brilliant and dumb, smart but stupid, funny but serious. It is utterly its own thing, and yet it’s utterly not any thing at all. It’s a complete mess of a movie that’s incredibly easy to enjoy.

Whether it’s actually any good or not seems to be entirely beside the point.


What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
Fuck knows. I think I’m going to plump for around 5% though, but it’s mostly trims here and there, there isn’t a lot of fat to the movie that needs to go. Each sequence flows clearly to the next, so to remove any one would damage the film’s narrative structure. You could cut the opening sky-dive sequence, because it contributes nothing to the plot (other than reminding us that Jaws is A Thing), but then you’d be losing a genuinely spectacular sequence. Some of the California-and-absolutely-not-France material near the beginning could get trimmed down, and Dufour really doesn’t contribute anything, other than the oddest-shot death sequence in any Bond movie so far, as she’s mauled to death by dogs in almost lovingly romantic tones (it’s a seriously weird tonal disconnect). But other than that? Yeah the rest can stay. Even the pigeon.

Quip Level:
Frustratingly, after working out how to get Moore to deliver the quips and puns properly last time out, we’re back to them being written and delivered as if waiting for an audience reaction. The actual number of puns here is a Medium – not excessive certainly, but nearly every single one of them seems to be waiting for the cinema audience to calm down again before moving forward. There are a couple of exceptions to this, and they almost become even more annoying because we see how things ought to be done, so when Bond tells Drax he’s “heartbroken” after shooting him in the heart with his wrist-gun, the action moves straight on, and Bond seems witty for making the one-liner. Then about fifteen seconds later, Bond stuffs Drax into an airlock and does the “one giant leap” line (long pause, then Drax is ejected) and we’re back to it being a written line, not a character line. There are many things to commend Moonraker for, but how it handles the puns is not one of them.

2017 Cringe Factor:
Low here, rather pleasingly. Though perhaps that statement should be clarified. Dr Goodhead, name aside, is a strong, considered and intelligent woman, basically Bond’s equal and a terrific role all round. That means the “standard female protagonist” role has absolutely nothing that could cause someone to cringe. Once we find out about Drax’s plans to repopulate the Earth with genetically perfect people we do get a fair amount of flesh on show, but the fact that these people have been chose by Drax because of their physical appearance means that it’s not sexist or exploitative, it’s the whole point of the being there in the first place (it’s also worth nothing that these perfect specimens of humanity seem remarkable sanguine about the genocide of their entire species). Jaws’s romance with Dolly (she’s named as such in the credits, though not at any point in the movie) is cheesy as hell, but it’s meant to be cheesy as hell, complete with swoopingly romantic strings when they first clap eyes on each other. It’s not meant to be serious at all. If you’re going to cringe at Moonraker, then you’re going to cringe because drunks glancing at their bottles as a gondola floats past them on the street or double-taking pigeons are not your thing, and that’s fair enough. Some people will find that buttock-clenchingly cringe-inducing. But there’s no point in criticising the film for that – they’re certainly a product of their time, but they’re also intentional and deliberate and the film is really rather gleeful in the way it embraces those aspects. If you don’t like it, well, that’s perfectly reasonable, and From Russia With Love and Casino Royale are still out there. Bond is a broad church, and it can embrace many different approaches, and this is absolutely one of them, even though it’s absolutely not for everyone. But none of that makes the film look dated, or outmoded, or redundant (the yellow PVC space scientists do that). So yes, definitely a Low, with the caveat that, again, this is about as far as that particular approach to Bond should be taken.