![]() ![]() Nevertheless, after premiering on 26 June 1979 in the UK, Moonraker grossed over $70 million here alone and went on to take $210,300,000 worldwide, becoming the highest grossing film of the series so far, a record that stood until 1995’s GoldenEye.Ĭhristopher Wood’s screenplay is supposedly based on the novel by Ian Fleming. The audience did not believe any more and Roger spoofed too much.’ The scene in which Moore drives a hovercraft gondola around St Mark’s Square in Venice was widely criticised by film critics. Writer Richard Maibaum said: ‘With Moonraker, we went too far in the outlandish. But The Story of O star Corinne Clery has a thankless task as the Bond beauty Corinne Dufour, as she is all too soon dispatched by Drax’s hounds after she reveals the secret location of his safe. Lois Chiles makes a particularly feisty Bond girl as NASA astronaut Dr Holly Goodhead (oh dear!). Moonraker still holds the world record for the largest number of zero gravity wires in one scene. ![]() But the movie’s finest sequences come where they are most needed at the start and finish – the opening great free-fall fight and climax of the film with the laser-gun battle on Drax’s space station. In an action highlight, Bond gets to fight with a giant anaconda in Drax’s Brazil subterranean launch-site pool. And there are good heroes in the usual old-style vintage team of Moore, Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) Bernard Lee (M) and Desmond Llewelyn (Q). Despite its cynically campy tone, the impressive visual effects and stunts and all the flashy space-age trappings to give it a veneer of sophistication, it still looks like a slightly creaky and weary, spying-by-the-numbers re-run of earlier, more distinguished adventures.īut there are good villains in Michael Lonsdale as the sinisterly suave Hugo Drax, judo expert Toshiro Suga as his henchman Chang and Richard Kiel, who is happily back as Jaws, after his huge success in The Spy Who Loved Me. The perfect henchman, Kiel is so memorable that he became the only recurring 007 villain to be played by the same actor. Indeed it is notable for its the extremely high production cost of $34 million, almost twice as much as predecessor, The Spy Who Loved Me. Not the cost-cutting, the abandoning the UK. When they were splashing out money everywhere, this was a cost-cutting exercise, unpopular in the UK. The sound stages of Pinewood Studios in England, traditionally used for the series, were only used by the special effects team. ![]() And much of the film was shot in the cities of London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale, California, Port St Lucie, Florida, and Rio de Janeiro. Controversially, the film was primarily shot in France, along with the locations in Italy, Brazil, Guatemala and the United States. This is number 11 in the 007 series – and luckily director Gilbert (helming his third and final Bond film) has a budget as big as the GNP of a small country to deploy on stunts, gadgets and mouth-watering Venice, Rio and Amazon locations. ![]() Strangely enough, he discovers that there is another arch-villain out to threaten civilisation as we know it, in a plot to commit global genocide. Moonraker *** (1979, Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel) – Classic Movie Review 952ĭirector Lewis Gilbert’s spoofy 1979 James Bond movie Moonraker is the fourth to star Roger Moore, this time on a mission to investigate the mid-air theft of a space shuttle. ![]()
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