Following the success of The Spy Who Loved Me which was one of the best Bond movies of all time (and brought in the best box office revenue since Goldfinger & Thunderball in the Sean Connery era) on a budget equal to 14 million dollars, which up until that point was the highest budget a Bond movie had received by far (in real terms) and was second in budget behind You Only Live Twice after accounting for inflation – the budget was over doubled for Moonraker in both real terms and after accounting for inflation. But Moonraker’s takings at the box office remained about equal to The Spy Who Loved Me, so budgets were reigned back in after Moonraker didn’t do as well as expected for the money spent – the same budget (after accounting for inflation) was not spent again until the Pierce Brosnan era nearly two decades later, and the box office takings of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were not surpassed until the soppy Daniel Craig era whose movies I personally find quite unwatchable.
If your tastes matches mine, don’t forget to bookmark this site for masses of carefully curated action hero movie reviews & recommendations just like this one – tailored specifically to my own taste and anyone who thinks like me – I know there’s not many of us left, but let’s still help each other out a bit!
Both movies – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) – were directed by Lewis Gilbert, but Moonraker lacks a woman with as much star power as Barbara Bach from The Spy Who Loved Me, and lacks an evil mastermind as convincing as Curd Jürgens. Still, at least we get the return of Roger Moore as James Bond (who performs excellently as usual) and his most legendary adversary, Jaws (another epic performance by Richard Kiel in the second of his only two ever outings as the most iconic Bond adversary of all time).
The main antagonist on the brains side, is Hugo Drax, played a bit demurely by Michael Lonsdale.
The lead females in Moonraker are played by American actress Lois Chiles (as Dr Holly Goodhead – on loan to Hugo Drax from NASA) and French actress Corinne Cléry (Corinne Dufour – personal pilot to Hugo Drax – she gets killed around half an hour in). They both deliver basic but adequate performances – both far less stunning or sophisticated than Barbara Bach from The Spy Who Loved Me, but that’s to be expected – they’re just about as tidy as an average Bond girl.
Blanche Ravalec plays the most fun female in Moonraker, called Dolly – a nerdy pigtail-wearing young woman who falls in love with Jaws and the feeling is reciprocated!
The most attractive woman in this movie is probably Emily Bolton who plays Manuela – James’s contact in Rio. She doesn’t appear until about an hour into the movie, and doesn’t get much screen time but she certainly brightens up the movie for a while.
The river boat chase after half an hour into this movie, is obviously inspired by the great boat chase in Live And Let Die, although this one is a bit cheap & nasty in comparison, but at least it’s original and not too close an imitation. And there is another boat chase in the second hour of this movie where James is given a much cooler boat. Then in turn, this movie’s boat races probably inspired Pierce Brosnan’s river boat race scene in The World Is Not Enough (1999).
When the boat becomes amphibious and drives around town about 40 minutes into this movie, that’s obviously inspired by the scene where the Lotus drives out of the sea in The Spy Who Loved Me. The reactions are a bit more developed this time round, but that’s not entirely a good thing – it’s all a bit cheesy, as if trying to be a comedy but not quite getting there, and the amphibious boat itself is a bit of a cheap looking stunt – something much improved in the second hour, and in The World Is Not Enough. Having said that, there is a nice bit of unspoken humour occasionally in this movie.
The fencing with the kendo swordsman in this movie probably inspired the swordfighting with Madonna in Die Another Day too.
It’s not till half an hour before the end when we finally see why the movie is called Moonraker – we finally see the hidden space city as James & Holly secretly board one of Drax’s shuttles.
I rate Moonraker an OK movie, like most Bond movies up until this one.
