Nobody Reviews It Better: Moonraker (1979)

Hello and welcome again. From under the sea to outer space, CRN analyzes Bond from our purpose-built laboratory couches. Stay tuned. Thrasher will return in For Your Eyes Only.

To fully enjoy Moonraker, and frankly anything with Roger Moore in it, one must not take it seriously. Major plot points left me asking, what? The very first scene, which shows the hijacking of a Moonraker shuttle while it's being transported on a 747, sets things in motion, with Bond being sent to investigate. We find out later that Drax took it after having loaned it to the British. Bond later asks him why he would steal his own spacecraft and he responds that there was a malfunction with another aircraft so he needed this one back. It seems very mystifying to me that after hatching his plot for years in advance, Drax wouldn't have the patience to simply wait to get his spaceship back and avoid unwanted attention. He might not have had to deal with Bond if not for this indiscretion. Generally his dealings with Bond seem very reckless. First, he tries to kill Bond with an aeronautic centrifuge, and this could plausibly look like an accident. But then Drax tries to end him by a sniper while they are out hunting. My problem with this is that if Drax had instead tried to kill Bond by shotgun, there was at least the possibility of making it look like a hunting accident. If he just wanted Bond dead (with or without fabricating a cause of death without foul play), it seemed like he had ample opportunity to do so. As Thrasher points out in CRN Podcast 3, there is the Aristotelian notion that actions in drama should not only seem plausible and probable, but somewhat inevitable. The lack of adherence to this notion is perhaps the biggest problem with Moonraker.

Nevertheless, it does have its appeals. The gadgets range from the very practical to the somewhat outlandish. Twice Bond is rescued by his dart-shooting bracelet; the utility of such a device is apparent. However, Bond also has a canoe that can not only turn into a motorized speedboat, but also convert into a hovercraft for amphibious use. Later, he is driving a different speedboat that could transform into a hang-glider (just in case you're boating next to a waterfall). So, the appeal has diminishing marginal utility the more crazy they get, not in terms of the technology, but in terms of how Q or Bond would have the foresight to see their applicability and the logistics of having the ideal boat wherever in the world Bond may be. (Other Bond movies deal with this problem by Bond making use of what's available to him: in The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond "commandeers" an AMC in a showroom to give chase; in GoldenEye, a tank). Also, the space scenes are done quite well and to my untrained eye, the Moonraker space station looks convincing. The large space combat scene adequately pays homage to the massive underwater battle filmed in Thunderball. The climax in the final frontier is easily the highlight of the movie, and is what makes Moonraker as memorable as it is. (Also Jaws). To top it all off, there is a very good game adaption. It is called Night Fire.