Bond-arama: No. 0020 Moonraker (1979)

Today we continue our journey through the James Bond films with No. 0020 of 0023: Moonraker. It’s fitting that Moonraker starts with a theft because everything in this film was stolen. This film uses a carbon copy villain, a recycled henchman, and a plot stolen from the prior movie. That’s really lazy writing. In fact, everything about this movie feels incredibly lazy.

Plot Quality: Moonraker tries to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars and other science fiction films. They even play the Close Encounters theme at one point. On its own, the plot doesn’t sound half bad. Crazed billionaire misanthrope Hugo Drax wants to wipe out humanity so he can repopulate the planet with his own master race. To do this, he’s built a secret space station. But he draws the attention of James Bond when he steals back a space shuttle he’s loaned to the British government. Bond investigates and saves the day.

Unfortunately, this is the exact plot of the prior film, The Spy Who Loved Me, except that Spy’s villain Stromberg built his paradise under the ocean. Again, Jaws (Richard Kiel) is brought back as the henchman. Again, Bond is quasi-competing, quasi-partnering with a hot secret agent, only this one is American instead of Russian. And, once again, Director Lewis Gilbert gives us a rage-inducing moment as Bond emerges from the ocean in a Lotus drivable gondola as we watch animals do double-takes, people stare mindlessly as others somehow don’t notice, and a f***ing drunk look at his drink as if he’s %$#@#% hallucinating!! I swear to God, Gilbert, I will p*** on your grave one day! Oops, did I say that out loud?

So... what else to say? Well, beyond that, this movie is just lazy and there seems to have been no filter on whether or not ideas made sense. Let’s start with the theft of the space shuttle. Why is a space shuttle being loaned to the British? They have no space program. Who in their right mind would load the space shuttle with fuel before putting it on the back of a 747 to transport it? The space shuttle is not even close to capable of launching off the back of a 747 in any event. Why would someone wire the 747 to give them a sensor to tell them that someone was starting the shuttle’s engines? Why wasn’t the shuttle destroyed in the same explosion it caused which blew up the 747? Why on earth did no one ask these questions and change this whole idea?

It gets worse. Doctor Goodhead (Lois Chiles) infiltrated Drax’s empire long before the shuttle was stolen, yet the shuttle theft is supposed to be the reason she’s there. I guess the CIA’s psychic branch sent her. . . they felt a great disturbance in the farce. When Bond gets to Brazil, after a brief stop in Venice, he needs more equipment, so he puts on a poncho and hops on a fricken horse and rides out into the countryside to the local headquarters of MI-6 in a fake monastery. Uh. Did no one ask why MI-6 would be somewhere Bond couldn’t get to quicker or easier? How does he plan to bring his equipment back to wherever the action is? What if he doesn’t have a horse? Did no one ask if anyone with a brain would really set up a spy agency like this?

Finally, Bond hops a boat and heads straight to Drax’s hidden lair. There is no way he would ever find the hidden lair except that Drax’s henchmen chase Bond right to it, where Bond kills a snake and finds Drax’s super-harem. Bond is captured and escapes and he and Dr. Goodhead, who was not killed for reasons unknown, sneak aboard a space shuttle as the pilots. Conveniently, the space shuttle is programmed to take them directly to the space station. Once there, they turn off the cloaking device, which allows NASA to see them and to immediately launch two shuttles so we can have a zero-G space fight. But where did NASA get the two shuttles and how can they be ready to launch immediately? How does this cloaking device work anyway? Launches are monitored. Satellites can be seen from earth. How did everyone miss this? And why build a space station at all? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to build a large bunker? And why didn’t Drax kill Bond and Goodhead? This has become such a cliché you can’t do that anymore! This is all because the writers were too lazy to work their way through problems. They just pretended the problems weren’t there.

Bond Quality: This is Roger Moore’s fourth outing and he’s well past his prime by this point. He’s lost the tough-guy Bond he played in his first couple films and by now consists largely on being smug and providing comic relief. He’s not too old yet to play the role, but he already comes across as disinterested. This is a Bond who does not run, he walks. This is a Bond with no sense of urgency. This is a Bond who does not seduce, he lazily assumes women want him because it’s in the script and he lets them do the work for him. This is a Bond who needs to take a breather during his fight scenes. This is a Bond with “low T.” And at no point, does Moore develop any chemistry with any other actors in the film.

Bond isn’t helped by the script either as Drax, Goodhead, Jaws and even Drax’s generic henchmen Chang all prove smarter than Bond at one time or another, and Goodhead is always one step ahead of him. Moreover, Goodhead and Jaws both save him during the movie. And while Drax proves more than a match for Moore’s Bond, it’s hard not to think that Connery’s Bond would have just shot him at the start of the film and been done with him. It really feels like Drax only gets as far as he does because Bond isn’t really interested in catching him.

The Bond Girl: As usual, this film has two Bond girls: Lois Chiles and Corinne Clery. Clery plays Corinne Dufour, Drax’s personal pilot. She flies Bond to the estate and tell us about Drax through exposition until she hands Bond off to Chiles. Later, she finds Bond in Drax’s study and he seduces her. She never really realizes that Drax is evil, but Drax has her killed by his dogs in any event. In a strange way, her death is unsettling. As far as I can tell, she’s the only Bond girl who is truly innocent of knowledge of the evil of the villain and whose death then goes completely unnoticed by Bond. Usually, Bond kills the evil Bond girls or laments/avenges the deaths of the good Bond girls. Corinne kind of gets the cinematic equivalent of an unmarked grave.

Lois Chiles plays Holly Goodhead, a CIA agent and astronaut, who infiltrates Drax’s space program and then competes with Bond to solve the mystery. Chiles is sexy and smart, which is good, but she’s also rather disinterested, which is bad. As with everything else in this film, she comes across like she’s going through the motions and can’t really get worked up about anything. Shoulder shrugs and “oh well” seem to be the extent of her interest in the film.

Villain Quality: Oh boy. The main villain is Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale). He’s an industrialist who wants to kill everyone and then repopulate the planet with his own master race. Unfortunately, he’s a carbon copy of Karl Stromberg from Moore’s prior film, The Spy Who Loved Me. What’s more, Lonsdale’s acting feels totally lazy. He speaks in a monotone. He doesn’t even move around – every scene has him standing in place or sitting. He seems bored by the film and disinterested in Bond or Goodhead or even his own plot.

His plot is kind of nonsense too. He plans to drop nerve gas on the human race from a string of satellites, but it’s not really clear how that will work. Then his team of about 50 people will “descend from the Heavens” and rebuild mankind. Sure, but why put them in space at all? Why not just build a bunker? And doesn’t that seem like a small number of people to use? Talk about inbreeding! And why bother killing everyone else anyway? Why not just buy an island and start the master race there? It doesn’t seem that Drax has really thought this through, yet he doesn’t seem crazy enough to plan what he’s planning either.

Beyond Drax, you have two henchmen. First, you have Drax’s Asian manservant, who is actually Japanese and does Japanese martial arts, but answers to a Chinese name because the writers were too lazy to think through his character. He tries to kill Bond, but fails. There’s not much more to him.

After Chang dies, Drax needs a new henchman, but the writers are too lazy to think of one, so they bring Jaws back from the prior film. . . a retread. They don’t even explain how he gets there, except through some garbage phone call which makes it sound like Drax called a temp agency. Jaws is not a great character either. Jaws is one of those henchmen who only works when everyone else gets stupid. Indeed, Jaws has no skills except the bear hug, so the people he kills need to mysteriously run out of bullets right before he arrives and then need to freeze in terror so he can grab them. Deus ex Machina is lazy writing.

Jaws arrives and tries to kill Bond by doing things with his metal teeth which just aren’t possible, but again, the writers are too lazy to do it right. Then it gets worse. After Jaws fails to kill Bond, Jaws somehow survives a crash which should have killed him – he’s tall, ergo he’s indestructible. He then meets the Swiss Miss and they fall in love on the spot. Completely against character, Drax takes both Jaws and the Swiss Miss to his space station of love, where they realize (after Bond tells them this) that they will eventually be killed by Drax to preserve his master race, which means it made no sense for Drax to bring them. Jaws then becomes a good guy and saves Bond. He also impossibly lands safely on the earth after riding debris to the surface. Lazy, lazy writing.

Conclusion

There is something about this film which makes it watchable. It has the grandeur and the big themes of a James Bond, which make it feel like a James Bond film. But the details and the execution really do stink: a stolen villain, stolen henchmen, stolen plot, uncaring Bond-girl, and a lazy Bond do not a great Bond film make. That’s why this film is No. 0020 of 0023.