It’s like The Spy Who Loved Me, only in outer space and with Bond teaming up with an American spy hottie. This was the 007 franchise’s answer to Star Wars (if that’s conceivable). The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me promised us the next outing would be For Your Eyes Only, but Star Wars came out, and since space adventure was on every cinemagoers mind, they took Ian Fleming’s novella Moonraker and put it on the big screen.
It’s goofy! It’s tacky! It’s Bond in Space! I think by this point in Roger Moore’s stint as Bond I had resigned myself to the fact that he wasn’t going to pull an about face and be cool like Sean Connery. Being a NASA nerd, I enjoyed the whole outer space bit, even if it was ridiculously cheesy by 70’s standards, let alone today.
It’s fun if you let it be fun, but Moonraker falls more under the banner of ‘guilty pleasure’ than anything else. It’s a Bond film I know I shouldn’t have liked, but did anyway. Compared to the series origins, Moonraker is absolutely terrible, but it’s more enjoyable than most of Moore’s films to this point. My eyes still roll when I think of two of the characters- Dr. Holly Goodhead and Jaws. Yeah, that’s right, Goodhead. Having a woman named Pussy Galore was funny for innuendo’s sake in Goldfinger, but the string of lousy names has outstayed its welcome for me. Holly Goodhead is the last straw, hopefully.
Jaws, on the other hand, is one of the few minor characters to appear more than once in the series. He was the highlighted henchmen over the main bad guy in The Spy Who Loved Me, and he returns in Moonraker for this new bad guy. How he got there, I don’t know, but Jaws has steel jaws and can bite through metal and stuff, so I guess he was popular enough to be brought back. I think he’s hokey, but that’s just my natural reaction to a guy with steel teeth.
The theme song is even forgettable in this film. All flash and no substance, but fun all the same.
Roger Moore takes over as James Bond in the eighth installment of the 007 franchise. Where Sean Connery was rugged and coarse, Roger Moore creates a more effeminate and campy Bond. Connery was a man’s man, while Moore introduces us to Bond the ladies man (which would largely be parodied in Austin Powers). Moore is a pretty boy (although he was 46 when the film was released) who, in my opinion, doesn’t look like he’s ever killed a man in his life.
The plot of the film seems more like blaxploitation cinema than a Bond flick but it remains to be true that even a bad Bond film is enjoyable on some level. Several MI6 agents and an American agent are found dead in the United States after investigating potential ties between a Caribbean dictator and a massive drug ring. Bond heads to the deep south, where he woos himself some brown sugar and information about the dictator’s nefarious plot to turn half the United States population into heroin addicts. Add to that a very harsh stereotype of southern whites and some slapstick comedy that does not belong anywhere near a James Bond film and you get Live and Let Die.
It’s a thin and quite poor way for Moore to break out of the gate. Granted, at this time the state of affairs in the world was not a happy one, what with Vietnam dragging many spirits down. Perhaps Moore’s incarnation of Bond was meant to provide an escapist delight for those who were down-trodden and looking to check reality at the door of the theater. This is very likely, but it’s simply not a context I can slip into.
Great theme song (perhaps the best of them all), lousy film.
It’s like The Spy Who Loved Me, only in outer space and with Bond teaming up with an American spy hottie. This was the 007 franchise’s answer to Star Wars (if that’s conceivable). The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me promised us the next outing would be For Your Eyes Only, but Star Wars came out, and since space adventure was on every cinemagoers mind, they took Ian Fleming’s novella Moonraker and put it on the big screen.
