Bond Films: Moonraker

Moonraker is the fourth Bond film with Roger Moore, and the eleventh in the series overall. It continues the trend of putting Bond in a flavor-of-the-year genre, in this case science fiction. It's a decent outing that continues to walk the line between silly and sublimely serious, as well as the shift to global industrialists rather than SPECTRE as villains.

The basic plot of Moonraker is: after a space shuttle is stolen off the back of a 747, Bond follows clues to the factory of aerospace industrialist Hugo Drax. There he meets the girl, a scientist who is actually a CIA spy, and he obtains clues that lead him to a glassmaker in Venice. There, he spies on scientists making a potent toxin on Drax's premises, but when he calls in the cavalry, everything is missing. Bond pursues a new set of clues to Brazil, where he finally learns the truth: Drax has a secret space station, and he is launching the seeds of a "master race" to hide there while he eliminates human life on Earth. Bond stows away on a shuttle with the girl, and together they foil Drax's plot, with the help of US space marines who conveniently has a shuttle to launch on.

Moonraker stretches the believability of Bond in new ways - it's one thing to have fantastic gadgets, such as handheld lasers, but here, the US military apparently has a platoon of marines who are trained and equipped to engage in EVA battles in space. Otherwise, it's a typical Bond romp - nice locales, a decent plots, and smug villains. The henchman Jaws, last seen swimming away at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, is here again, and for a child of the seventies, what could be cooler than six space shuttles all launching at once. It's what the shuttle program was supposed to be: colonizing space en masse. The only downside is the unfortunate song, which, while sung by erstwhile Bond chanteuse Shirley Bassey, is a pretty run of the mill easy listening lounge song. For once the song is more forgettable than the movie.