Moonraker - 1979

I never liked Bond’s space scenes, but Jaws was back and his scenes were fun.

Bond ends his previous mission when his latest conquest draws a gun on him, on a plane. The pilot parachutes out but Bond is thrown out without one so he wrestles him an opens that one. Jaws tried to kill him but his chute won’t open. He lands on a circus tent.

When Bond tells Moneypenny he’s late because he “fell out of an airplane without a parachute” she thinks he’s joking. 

The Moonraker is a new type of space shuttle that was arriving “on loan from the Americans on the back of a 747” but two men took the Moonraker away destroying the plane. Since there’s no trace of the shuttle, and these shuttles are built by Drax Industries, that’s where Bond starts: California.

Corinne is one of the pilots, Drax is very very rich, “what he doesn’t own, he doesn’t want”. 

Drax Residence is like a castle, “every stone brought from France” and he even bought the Eiffel Tower “but the French government refused him an export permit”.

Drax pays for the Astronauts training program and considers “afternoon tea” Briatin’s “one indisputable contribution to Western civilization”. I guess he means the hour and the cakes, because it’s not really like tea comes from England…

One meeting is enough for Drax to want him dead, he tells his servant “see that some harm comes to him”, and he’ll try again and again, from “the centrifuge training” that “simulates the gravity force you feel when shot into space” when he put it on so high a level Bond really suffers and survives only by disabling it with one of Q’s gadgets, to their fight in the Museum of glassblowing, causing damage worth millions. It was painful to watch, to see all those beautiful things go to pieces.

There’s also Dr Goodhead who is a woman and this surprises Bond. Holly Goodhead is not a wanna-be astronaut, she’s “fullytrained, on loan from Nasa, the Space Administration”. She’ll soon be revealed as Cia, she’s probably both since she’ quite capable and at ease on a space shuttle.

The Moonraker is “capable of being launched into space by rockett, orbiting the Earth and reentering the atmosphere to land like any conventinal aircraft”. At first Bond wonders if she had a hand in his disadventure with the centrifuge machine but they’ll eventually join forces.

Corinne is useful to Bond, he seeks information and a kiss is enough to convince her to help him. They sleep together then he wants to know “what goes on here besides the manifacture of a moonraker” so he opens Drax’ safe and takes pictures of his documents with a small camera with 007 written on it. Because of this,, Drax not only fires her, but sets his dogs on her, the poor thing - I wonder how many girls are dead because of Bond…

When Drax is outside clay shooting, he wants Bond to try: he misses the clay target but he does shoot the sniper on a tree…

In Venice to check out Venini Glass - they provide first class glass for Drax, of course: Merano - Bond moves around on a gondola, and when the poor man is killed Bond uses its ‘gadgets’ to turn it quite challenging, ending with making it a hovercraft that can come out of the water and move around Piazza San Marco. When Bond checks out a place - I don’t know how he learned of it - he finds out that it’s a lab dealing with a highly toxic substance. He takes a sample before he knows what it is, and not knowing he moved things, so the men in there break a vial and die, but when Bond takes M and the Minister there, there’s nothing, no lab anymore, only Drax’s apartment. They entered with gas masks and Drax plays it cool but firm: “not being English I sometimes find your sense of humour rather difficult to follow” and Minister Grey is all apologies.

Of course Bond took that sample for Q to analyse, with “extreme caution” because “it is lethal” so M at least believes him. 

In Rio, Manuela is there to assist him, and she does by providing useful information other than Bond’s usual entertainment. Bond and Goodhead slept together in Venice and now join forces.

Bond killed Cha so Drax needs a new man and hires Jaws! He tries to kill Manuela and when Rio dancers pass by he lifts her up and moves her around like a doll; he tries to bite her but Bond saves her first and then other dancers drag Jaws away. Then Jaws stops the cable car with Bond and Goodhead in it and they fight. When she and Bond escape Jaws crashes but is unharmed of course. 

A pretty blond helps him and they go away hand in hand :-) it’s all very cute. She reminds me of a colourless Harley Quinn. She’s got two braids and a white dress, glasses and a dark red lipstick, and must be stronger than she looks :-p

When they’re on solid ground again, Holly kissed Bond for saving her, and when strange men arrive Bond only thinks of sending them away so he can have sex with Holly, and he turns his back on them… that’s stupid, and of course they’re captured. He frees himself but she’s taken away. 

Q confirms “it’s a highly toxic nerve gas that appears to have no effect on animals” - which makes me wonder how did he test this theory - it’s developed from a very rare orchid. Bond goes to where it lives and it’s another boat chase. Now, I know they didn’t care about these things back then, and many don’t care even now, but I don’t like that Bond ejects many mines until the chasing boat hits one and blows up… what about the other mines? They’re still there, waiting for innocent boats? 

Jaws is on another chasing boat and when Bond escapes with a hang glider, un deltaplano, Jaws falls down the waterfall with his boat. 

Bond reaches a place with many pretty girls: a trap throw him in the water where he has to kill the python to survive. Jaws is there but so is Drax who stops him. “Mr Bond, you defy all my attempts to plan an amusing death for you” … and yet now he doesn’t kill him but takes him along, and eventually will explain his plan in details. The orchid is what wiped out an entire civilization because its pollen causes sterility. Drax “improved” it and now it’s lethal, but only for people, not plants or animals. Drax launches six moonrakers - he took that one back because he needed it, one of his six was faulty - to bring many young, beautiful couples on a secret space station. Drax plans to kill everyone no Earth and then “your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image”. 

Once again Bond is not shot, instead he’s reunited with Holly and left to burn under Drax’s shuttle 5; of course they escape and replace the pilots on shuttle 6. This space station is not visible on any radar, “an entire city in space” so they disable its “radar-jamming system” after docking. Now it’s visible to Earth and the US launch their own shuttle right away to investigate…

Jaws is also there, with his blond girl, listening to Drax talking of “a new super-race, a race of perfect physical specimens”, until Bond asks out loud what we were thinking : “and of course, anyone not measuring up to your standards of physical perfection will be exterminated”. Drax: “certainly” …Jaws hears this and he’s not so stupid as to not understand the problem… his girl looks at him, and smiles at him… and Jaws stops obeying Drax and rebels instead. So now Jaws fights with Bond and Holly against the others. When Drax wants to destroy the Us spacecraft, Bond pushes a button very conveniently labelled “emergency stop”, which also stops gravity. Now there’s a space battle with lasers, Drax people against the American crew, and they also dock and enter. They all fight together, Bond kills Drax. 

The 47 globes with the poison will be destroyed with the station harming no onne. Bond tells all ally soldiers to retreat with their shuttle. Bond and Holly take moonraker 5 because it has a laser and they use it to track and destroy the 3 globes already launched.

Jaws can indeed speak because now he makes a toast: “to us”, drinking with his girl. She tells him something and he helps Bond releasing their shuttle because it’s “docking release system is jammed”.

Holly pilots and Bond shoots the globes. Holly looked worried leaving the couple there but Bond reassures her: “don’t worry, they’ll make it. It’s only 100 miles to Earth” and indeed we hear that “colonel Scott reports picking up two survivors from the space station, a tall man and a short blonde woman”… but she’s not that short compared to normal people, only next to him, but Bond also looks short compared to him! Anyway, I guess this also mean that all those young people died… or maybe not, maybe they had pilots alive to come back to Earth on the same moonrakers they used to go up…

Mission accomplished; when Nasa establishes a connection with Bond and Holly’s shuttle, “patched directly to the White House and Buckingham Palace”, an audiovisual of course, they all see them in a very compromising and inappropriate position… of course… 

We see Gogol again, complaining “how can I sleep? Nothing but problems, problems, problems”… but he’s there with a pretty girl…

Opening titles start with Roger Moore as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker.

The title song is indeed Moonraker, performed by Shirley Bassey

James Bond is Roger Moore

Holly Goodhead is Lois Chiles

Jaws is Richard Kiel

Corinne is Corinne Clery

M is Bernard Lee

Q is Desmond Llewelyn

Moneypenny is Lois Maxwell

Manuela is Emily Bolton

General Gogol is Walter Gotell

Dolly is Blanche Ravalec   - but I had to ask google because I didn’t know Dolly was the name of Jaws’ pretty blonde.

ITA Moonraker operazione spazio