Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
After Drax Industries' Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked, secret agent James Bond is assigned to investigate, traveling to California to meet the company's owner, the mysterious Hugo Drax. With the help of scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, Bond soon uncovers Drax's nefarious plans for humanity, all the while fending off an old nemesis, Jaws, and venturing to Venice, Rio, the Amazon...and even outer space.
Moonraker is a notoriously over-the-top Bond entry that chased the Star Wars craze by sending 007 into space. The plot is formulaic Bond fare taken to absurd extremes — a megalomaniac with a eugenics-flavored scheme to destroy and repopulate Earth — and holds little dramatic tension. Acting is serviceable at best; Roger Moore is charming but lightweight, and Michael Lonsdale's Drax is amusingly cold, though most performances are flat. Cinematography is competent late-70s blockbuster work with some reasonable location photography in Venice, Rio, and the Amazon, but nothing visually distinguished. Novelty earns a modest bump for being the only Bond film set substantially in space and for its sheer audacity in escalating the franchise's excess to a cosmic level — it's a singular cultural artifact of its moment. The ending, a space battle and laser-gun showdown, is campy and undercooked, undermining whatever tension the film had built.