The rise in popularity of science fiction as a genre following 1977’s Star Wars led the producers to ditch the original plan of following up The Spy Who Loved Me with For Your Eyes Only and instead opt to develop Moonraker. The original novel had always been intended by Fleming to become a movie but he had never managed to get it off the ground. Would the studio and star Moore enjoy any more success with this venture, wonders Greg D Smith?

Moonraker is one of those Bond movies. You know the ones. The ones that everyone basically quietly laughs at. The ones where nobody can really quite take any of it very seriously, because it’s all so over the top and so very silly. It’s become a staple of film criticism that action movie franchises with nothing else left to offer will find any reason, however tenuous, to place their protagonists in space in an attempt to raise the stakes and whereas Moonraker may not have ignited that particular cliché, it certainly generally tends to be viewed as a movie which embodies it.

And that’s a little unfair, given that although the plot centres around a mysteriously hijacked space shuttle and the enigmatic Hugo Drax’s space travel program, most of the action takes place firmly on Earth, and is a fairly standard outing for our man Bond.

The opening sequence of the shuttle hijack, as intricately planned as it may well have been, can’t help but look surprisingly cheap, compared to other similar sequences in earlier movies, especially considering the (at the time) substantial budget of $34million, almost double that of The Spy Who Loved Me. Of course at least part of that expense may have been used on the following sequence, as Moore’s Bond finds himself hijacked on his plane en route to England, and is thrown out of said plane without a parachute. Though close up shots of Moore and the returning Richard Kiel were shot in the studio for obvious reasons, the rest of the stunt is entirely practical, having taken 88 separate skydives to fully realise, as well as some nifty custom-built kit. The stunt is massively impressive, and can’t help but feel like an attempt by the studio to ‘one-up’ the opening stunt sequence from the previous movie (which it has to be said, it does). But then, the movie reveals the first of its flaws – its treatment of a beloved villain.

Kiel had made a massive impression as silent, hulking, metal-toothed henchman Jaws, arguably outshining arch villain Stromberg in the previous movie, so it’s hardly surprising that the studio should want him back. However, here he is given a script that seems only to want to make use of him as a bit of comic relief, and this, coupled with the way in which that is achieved, means that much of the core appeal of the character is lost. In keeping with this attempt to make Jaws more ‘fun’, he also becomes a lot more incompetent, failing to kill a single target until his rather ham-fistedly handled switch at the very tail end of the movie. This switch was apparently absent from the original script, and came about as a result of so many letters from small children to the director asking why Jaws couldn’t be a ‘goodie not a baddie’. The perils of giving an audience what they want, indeed.

The other issue with this treatment of Jaws is that it rather takes away from the tone of the thing, which may sound strange given that this is a Moore Bond film, and the man himself made so much of a feature of the knowing look to camera that told the audience he was as much in on the joke as anyone else. But what tends to be forgotten in hindsight about Moore’s Bond is that while he absolutely played the character tongue in cheek much of the time, he was also possessed of the appropriate steeliness of character when required. Moore never forgets that Bond is a killer as well as a lover, and was able to tread a very fine line between the charming, witty side of Bond and the other, darker and more lethal side. However, when your main threat (and let’s be honest, as comical as they make him, Kiel still easily outshines Michael Lonsdale’s Drax) is made into a figure of fun, unable to be a threat and subject to various pratfalls and required to pull increasingly contorted faces, it can’t help but take away from that. For all Moore’s excellent work here, the tone of the thing is undermined from the moment Jaws lands in a giant circus tent, and is never really able to recover.

Exacerbating this further is the rather cruel demise of Bond girl Corinne Dufour, personal pilot of Drax and customary girl who will fall into bed with our hero before promptly being killed. The viciousness of setting a pair of attack dogs on her, the dispassion with which it is done and the drawn out way the camera follows the terrified girl as she attempts to run all feel genuinely disturbing, and don’t sit well with the silliness of antics elsewhere.

And to be fair, Lonsdale isn’t bad in this film. He plays Drax as an arrogant, aloof madman with a callous disregard for human life and an absolute conviction that his way is the right way. That all works fine, but the problem is that the movie doesn’t really spend enough time with the character to give him a proper sense of threat commensurate with the scope of his plans. It also plays very fast and loose with logic – his hijacking of one of his own shuttles at the start of the film explained away as his having found a fault in one of the others and needing to replace it. Why hijack it? Why not just not send it, or even just send the faulty one? It’s an awful lot of trouble to have gone to for very little reason. Similarly, his extensive operation in Venice (which is able to be spirited away with remarkable swiftness) seems a little pointless, as does his ultimate plan of carrying a lot of poison canisters into space only to lob them back down again to disperse in the atmosphere. It plays like a plot which started out as ‘We want the bad man to be in space’ and then rather made up the rest as it went along, on the hoof.

Main Bond Girl Holly Goodhead (that’s enough sniggering at the back) is engaging enough, and shows early promise as another strong-minded woman operating in a man’s world who isn’t about to take any nonsense. Though she does end up falling, inevitably, into bed with Bond, the film does at least take a stab at her being less one-dimensional than similar characters in the past. Goodhead sleeps with Bond the first time basically for something to do to pass the time – not unlike our man himself – and there’s never really (until the very end) any suggestion that she’s in any way fallen for him so much as that she just enjoys his company when it’s convenient. Her competence is a refreshing change to the stereotype, it has to be said, and it’s also extremely noticeable to a modern viewer that of all the female characters in the movie (save Moneypenny), Goodhead is the only one who isn’t permanently wearing low cut clothing with no apparent underwear. There’s never quite the same sense of danger about her as there was with Barbara Bach’s Major Amasova, but Lois Chiles does the best with what the script and the production give her.

Everything rather jollies along like a normal Bond film for the most part – there are chases, punch ups, death-defying exploits and a fair amount of actual espionage thrown in for good measure. The locations are exotic as ever, with Venice looking particularly stunning, though there are also some of the elements which seem to be rapidly becoming a feature of the Moore era, not the least of which is extended boat chases. Here, it feels especially silly as Bond, in a Gondola that as far as I could tell he had randomly hailed in Venice, suddenly presses a few buttons to turn it into a speed boat, then a hovercraft and then (apparently offscreen) back into a Gondola. I’m not certain why boat chases seem such a prominent feature of this age of Bond, but I wish they’d stop – they’re always too long, slightly dreary and they rarely do anything they haven’t already done before.

But eventually, the movie can avoid the central premise no longer, and 007 does indeed end up in SPAAAAAAACE. And yes, that’s where things start to really get silly. FX wise, it’s actually not bad, considering the period. It’s no Star Wars, but then many other franchises tried and failed to emulate a portion of Lucas’ unique vision and style, so it’s tough to hold that against it. The shuttles – emulating NASA’s real world versions (the test shuttle, the Enterprise, had launched in 1977) – are handled pretty decently, and the space station looks suitably impressive from the exterior, though pretty similar to every other Bond Villain Lair on the interior. And then…well, then it just starts to go very off the rails.

First, there’s the final actual revelation of Drax’s masterplan – to wipe out all human life on Earth with his engineered poison while preserving everything else and then re-populate the planet with superior specimens preserved by him on the station. So far, so promising. As Bond Villain plans go, it’s surprisingly sophisticated, and not a little horrifying.

Then there’s the way in which Bond and Goodhead are able to easily infiltrate one of the shuttles, walk onto the station, deactivate the cloaking screen so it can be seen from Earth and only then – incredibly conveniently – be picked up by Jaws. What makes that more confusing is that it then still takes the arrival of a NASA shuttle to make the villain realise the cloaking has been interfered with, prompting the question in my mind at least of why exactly Jaws had suddenly noticed them at that particular moment, other than because the plot needed him to in order to get to the next part.

And then there’s that switch. Bond, by the cunning plan of getting Drax to monologue very specifically about his plans, reveals the truth to Jaws that he and his new found love, the diminutive Dolly, will not be required in Drax’s New World, and will be exterminated. Cue Jaws suddenly and with no further persuasion required turning against his new employer and joining forces with Bond. OK, sure.

Finally, we get to the Big Final Set Piece Battle, in which hordes of US Marines (apparently) sally forth on their Manned Maneuvering Units to do battle with Drax’s own force of similarly equipped soldiers. Yes, it’s your standard (by now) Bond film ending where faceless hordes of goodies and baddies engage in a battle that’s supposed to be a big spectacle but fails to hold the attention because you don’t know or care about any of the participants and there’s only so many different ways people can get shot and fall over (or in this case float away). But the film saves the worst for last.

With three of the deadly spheres having launched from the space station, it’s down to Bond and Goodhead to chase them down in a shuttle and laser them out of the sky before they can activate. Cue the most dull chase ever, where Moore and Goodhead basically stare intently at a screen and occasionally press a button on a laser. I don’t envy the director or anyone else who had to deal with trying to make this look exciting because it would be a nigh-impossible task, but suffice it to say, they fail.

It’s a film then, which struggles with pretty much everything. Tonally, it never really settles, it makes poor use of its cast and it makes an ill-advised attempt to take advantage of a zeitgeist for which it is unsuited as a movie and a franchise. It’s never unwatchably bad, but it’s also never really very good, just not for the reasons you might think.