Having revitalised the Bond series with The Spy Who Loved Me, Albert Broccoli and team promptly remade that movie with Moonraker and were rewarded with their biggest grossing work to date... but I think thats because Spy Who Loved Me was so good (and loved)... Moonraker cashed in on its popularity (the same way Thunderball performed so well off the back of the much more loved Goldfinger).
I can understand why they did what they did but it's a shame so much good stuff was jettinsoned from the novel: the heroine name Gala Brand, the villain's plan of setting off a bomb in London, the villain's backstory of being a secret Nazi. Instead there's another megalomaniac who wants to destroy the world and start anew - only in outer space instead of underwater. He employs Jaws and a series of other incompetent assassins and has trouble killing Bond.
Michael Londsale isn't bad as said villain, Hugo Drax - a little laid back. Richard Kiel is charismatic as Jaws although the character is completely neutered here - the genuinely scary baddy of Spy is now more Will E. Coyote, falling out of planes without parachutes and off cable cars and much more without a scratch. But this suits the tone of the movie which is Bond at his most cartoonish.
And if you can accept that you'll enjoy the movie. I loved this when I was eight and that's the ideal age to watch this. There is plenty of production value and action and it unfolds in a simple eight year old style - watching it I kept thinking of old serials, or 50s science fiction movies. One minute we're falling out of a plane, then we're in France pretending to be California, then Venice, then Brazil - going from location to location with the thinnest of pretexts.
Yes, other Bonds have been like serials but the screenplays were better structured and there was some emotional undercurrent - for instance Spy had a great subplot where Bond and XXX were on opposite sides of the Cold War and he'd killed her boyfriend. Here Bond and Dr Goodhead both work for basically the same side and don't have any sort of personal confict. (This also means that Lois Chiles, who is as pretty and equally bad an actor as Barbara Bach, doesn't come across anywhere near as well because her character is much worse). The most emotional bit about this movie is that brief scene where Jaws realises he and his girlfriend won't fit in to his boss' plans for the perfect race of humans and changes sides (because this is such an archetypal theme which strikes such a universal chord I went with this).
But this has its own integrity. It's a silly movie which at least commits to being silly: a space station with a fleet of shuttles, a Noah's ark, a rocket launch platform in the Amazon, a platoon of space soldiers who NASA sends up to outer space at the first sign of a blip on the radar; sex in outerspace.When its stupidity stops being insulting it's almost endearing.
There's also some genuinely spectacular moments: the opening freefall action sequence (though this is marred by a silly Jaws end gag), an attempted murder of Bond on a centrifuge chamber, a fight on top of a cable car. Moore plods through with amiable lecherousness, having a good old time. I enjoyed seeing Geoffrey Keene repeat his turn as "Minister for Defence" in order to help Bernard Lee with his exposition (this was Lee's last appearance - he doesn't look well), Desmond Llewellyn has great fun as Q, and the women are pretty.
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