Which one is this? Bond in space.
Who’s who in this one? Moore (Bond); Lee (M); Llewellyn (Q); Maxwell (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? On TV at some point I choose not to remember.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Michael Lonsdale as industrialist Hugo Drax, who wants to exterminate all human life and repopulate the Earth with genetically perfect humans he has stored in space.
Who are the Bond girls? Lois Chiles as Dr. Holly Goodhead, and Corinne Cléry as Drax’s personal pilot Corinne Dufour, who looks like she’s having trouble remembering her own name, let alone how to pilot a helicopter.
Opening number? Shirley Bassey’s swan song with the franchise, singing balefully about the Moonraker, who is – in this context – apparently a person. We see women fall through space against litho outlines of James, the moon always in sight.
What’s memorable about this one? Well, the fact that the whole third act is set in outer space is probably the only thing you’ll ever need to know about it, as it shorts out all other related memories of the film.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 0. Not just the worst Bond movie, but one of the worst movies of all time.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Moonraker sort of exists outside quantifiable data, like the square root of a negative number. At the very least we can offer it this: it’s a hell of a thing to see.
I was on a flight to Iceland the day I watched Moonraker for From A to Bond, and the reason I knew the plane would not crash is that there was no conceivable way I would ever go out of this life having had that as my last movie. That same morning, I’d watched The Living Daylights and The Man With The Golden Gun, both of which would have been sound contenders for Last Movie Alive status. But not Moonraker. Never Moonraker. No.
Moonraker isn’t just the worst James Bond movie by a sizeable distance; it’s legitimately one of the ten worst movies ever made, occupying a space nominally held by Michael Bay atrocities and low-budget horror movies about the dawn of cyber-stalking. It represents the Bond franchise at its absolute nadir, the films having followed a foxhole of self-parody and self-congratulation down to an underground cavern of masturbatory sloth and nearly unendurable cliché. In Moonraker, any effort at linking the Bond tropes together into some kind of workable narrative seems to have been left wholesale out of the recipe, as though the chef looked at it in the kitchen one day and said, “nah, the soup’s fine without it.” Well I assure you, Mr. Chef: this soup ain’t.
Speaking of airplanes, why would you piggybag a space shuttle on a 747 while it’s fully loaded with fuel? That’s just asking for trouble, and it’s where Moonraker begins; from the ensuing explosion and annihilation of all human life on that 747, it’s squarely downhill. This is what the successes of The Spy Who Loved Me got us. We are only one film removed from the relatively straight-laced Man With The Golden Gun, and yet here we are opening a Bond picture with a stunt man who looks nothing like Roger Moore tossing people out of, and then being tossed out of, a small plane. One must give Moonraker credit for the execution of the no-parachute freefall stunt fight, except that it is so patently ludicrous that it is genuinely insulting to its audience in both notion and outcome.
But this is the name of the game in Moonraker. There are no median scenes between regular business and action – Bond can be floating up the river on a powerboat, and all of a sudden he’s under cannon fire from yellow-jumpsuited thugs that have appeared out of nowhere. The movie therefore, I suppose, expects us to presume that the life of James Bond is one of near-constant attack from all sides at any time, not unlike Inspector Clouseau being attacked by Kato whenever he goes home. Further, the action beats are so patently ludicrous that their sudden appearance nearly forces one into a kind of hallucinatory haze state. The elements are thrown together at such random whim that they might as well be surrealist theatre (look out! A samurai!). When in Venice, Bond boards a gondola only to have – of course – a villain attack him out of nowhere; but why does the assassin kill Bond’s gondolier before killing Bond, and why would he go to all the trouble of dressing up a funeral boat for the attack in the first place, if he’s got another couple of guys with machine guns and a regular speedboat waiting a block away? There is, memorably, a pigeon doing a triple-take at the end of the gondola chase, as Bond’s gondola transforms into a hovercraft (again, why the pretense of a gondolier at the outset?) and roars across the piazza into town. By the time the pigeon is triple-taking, I assure you, the casual Moonraker viewer will be wondering if these things are actually happening onscreen, or whether he or she has simply gone mad.
Moonraker’s greatest sin, though, isn’t even how dumb or random or unbelievable it is, but simply that it’s appallingly boring. In spite of its popular conception as “Bond in space,” the film is maddeningly coy on its purported value proposition: it doesn’t send anyone into space till the 90-minute mark, meaning that you have to watch 90 minutes of crap just to get to the theoretical reason you’re in the theatre in the first place. Star Wars, it ain’t; warmed-over Flash Gordon, it could never be, even with the “pew! pew! pew!” laser guns that appear as soon as the extraterrestrial battle is joined. Drax has a Utopian eugenic society living on a space station in orbit of the moon, but as soon as an American space shuttle shows up – its cargo bay conveniently loaded with space-suited marines – the entire goon squad pops into the airlock to take the fight outside. Cuz obviously if war in space is going to be fought, it’s going to be fought hand-to-hand.
Moonraker makes beautiful use of its Brazilian locations, from Rio to the rainforest, but otherwise reeks of corpulent excess (why does the villain need three villain lairs, two of which are – while unusually spectacular, even for Ken Adam – onscreen for less than four minutes? Get to space!) and thoroughly lame-brained humour (Jaws in one Bond film was dimly passable; Jaws in two successive Bond films is excruciating – and that’s before he falls in love with a dimpled Swedish chick half his height who, we must presume, has the vaginal flexibility of a six-time mother).
Sadly, this is Bernard Lee’s final appearance as M, before his death in 1981. Even he can’t quite seem to believe what he’s saying – nor can we blame him. This, truly, is 007’s darkest hour.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Moonraker is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 13 and 31. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.