Project Bond: Moonraker

This film doesn’t mess around, opening as it does with Bond being abandoned on a doomed plane for some reason, until The Man With The Metal Mouth reappears for some reason and pushes him out, so Bond has to catch up with the chap who abandoned him for some reason (which is possible because of science reasons) and beat him up and take his parachute. Then The Man With The Metal Mouth catches up with Bond (using science) and they have a fight and Bond wins, but The Man With The Metal Mouth survives because he lands on a circus.

Meanwhile, this fellow Drax has one of his moonrakers disappear, and it’s awfy suspicious, so Bond is sent to speak to the poor, seemingly bereaved chap. Bond reckons that something is afoot, but M and Q tell him where to go. “Nothing wrong with Drax,” they tell him, so Bond teams up with Dr. Goodhead (“No, that name’s not ridiculous, go for it!”), an undercover CIA agent formerly in Drax’s employ, to bring him down. But it turns out Venice won’t be any use, so they have to go to Rio de Janeiro. Obviously.

Roger Moore looks so uncomfortable wearing a massive poncho and riding a horse, that they might have been better off cutting the scene, even though it made a huge amount of sense. (They also play a piece of music that’s supposed to sound like The Magnificent Seven, but painfully isn’t.) Anyway, then it turns out that Bond was right all along, and Q and M end up with egg-splattered faces. Then The Man With The Metal Mouth starts chasing Bond while the pair of them are on speedboats, so Bond lures him towards a waterfall and makes good his escape on a hang-glider, as you do.

Oh no! A smirking Bond is dragged underwater (by a snake, no sharks this time), but then he kills it and everything is fine for a few seconds before The Man With The Metal Mouth turns up. Then we’re suddenly in space, bringing a Noah’s Ark of genetically brilliant humans into space to allow Drax to destroy the earth, where everyone lives. Seems a bit extreme to me, and Bond isn’t a fan either, so he puts a stop to it.

Then, in a shocking twist ending and a real departure from the norm, Bond saves the day and gets the girl and everyone else gets an eyeful. Lovely stuff.

This was a decent film, and certainly more PC than most previous efforts, Bond’s unconfined astonishment at Dr. Goodhead’s being a woman notwithstanding. There’s also a woman we are supposed to find as hideous as The Man With The Metal Mouth simply because she wears glasses and has her hair in pigtails, but you can’t have everything. Where would you keep it?