The Cast
Roger Moore (James Bond) Lois Chiles (Holly Goodhead) Corrine Clery (Corrine Dufour) Richard Kiel (Jaws) Michael Lonsdale (Hugo Drax) Bernard Lee ('M') Desmond Llewelyn ('Q') Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) Blance Ravelec (Dolly) Toshiro Suga (Chang) Emily Bolton (Manuela) Walter Gotell (General Gogol)
Review
Following The Spy Who Loved Me, it was announced that For Your Eyes Only would be the next Bond film. However, with the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters Of the Third Kind in the summer of '77 it was decided that now was the time to boldly go where no Bond had gone before: outerspace. While putting James Bond in uterspace may be a good idea, at that particular time, it was the wrong idea. When one film tries to cash in on the success of another, rarely is the end product as good or better than the real thing. The James Bond series, and character for that matter, is silly by nature. If you think about it, we as an audience are expected to believe that a tuxedo clad Englishman can travel around the world, seduce many ladies, escape innumerable obstacles, destroy many villians, and without so much as getting his hair messed up. So why then go and remind the audience that Bond is just a fantasy character by making light of what is already a silly premise? That's exactly what Moonraker falls into. The films starts off with the disappearance of the Moonraker shuttle, right off the back of a 747 in midflight. Later, in a private jet, Bond is double crossed by a buxom stewardess, the pilot,and Jaws (making his second appearance in the series). Bond, the pilot, and Jaws all fall out of the plane, but only Bond is without a parachute. What follows is an amazing display of free fall acrobatics, and might've been one of the best precredit sequences in the whole series. But the mood is ruined when Jaws, trying to open his chute, rips his rip cord apart, and flaps like a bird to stay aloft. He ends up crashing into a three ring circus (perhaps a foreshadowing of things to come?) After getting through the precredits sequence and the titles, Bond has to investigate the disappearance of the missing Moonraker shuttle. Bond's investigation takes him to Los Angeles where Bond meets with the owner himself, Hugo Drax. Later, Bond is introduced to Dr. Goodhead who escorts him around the complex. There's more to Dr. Goodhead than meets the eye though. Besides being an astrounaut on loan to Drax from NASA, she's also undercover with the CIA investigating Drax's connection to a nerve gas facility in Venice Italy. Jaws later returns to the film, this time hired by Drax to destroy 007 and stop him from ruining his plans. Jaws though seems to be getting more goofy as the film progresses. Instead of playing him for scares, the director plays Jaws for laughs. He's a mute comedian in Moonraker, who now gets big laughs from the audience by twisting his face when crashing into a tram car station, or going headfirst over a 200 ft waterfall. This script had a lot of potential to delve deeply into the mind of a man with a "God complex". But instead, the producers opted for the easy laugh; the path of least resistance. Drax is more than just obsessed with the conquest of space. He feels he has the right to decide who looks good and fit enough to survive the onslaught of mass destruction he's about to perpetuate on the Earth. Unfortunately, the film doesn't give the Drax character enough depth to be mildly interesting. When it's all said and done, Drax is just another middle aged white man with an axe to grind. Moonraker proved to be too much of a good thing, as the filmakers decided to bring Bond back down to Earth, literally, for the next James Bond film.
