SEE THAT SOME HARM COMES TO HIM.......HAPPY 40TH TO "MOONRAKER"

Moonraker (1979)   Millions and millions of Bond fanatics (BQ included) blow hot and cold on this one......

              So now that it just hit 40 years, I might as well weigh in with everybody else......broken down by all the beloved Bondian tropes.........

               Pre-credit wham-bam:  All the parachute-wrangling's terrific.....until they get to Jaws trying to fly like Dumbo without his magic feather.

                John Barry's score:   He's well into his slow, lush period, where even his action scoring never goes faster than 20 miles per hour........it somehow fits well with sheer heft of the movie itself and features one last bout of Olympian warbling by Dame Shirley Bassey.....

                The Bond Girl:  Dull, dull, dull. Lois Chiles' NASA toughie seems modeled after Barbara Bach's Soviet secret agent in "The Spy Who Loved Me"......neither of them had a shred of acting talent, but Bach displayed a sweet vulnerability and genuine sex appeal. Chiles behaves like a
dead-eyed, bored-out-her-skull fashion model, napping during a photo shoot.......easily the worst Bond girl.

                 The Villain:  Couldn't help thinking.......this guy's probably like that stiff who briefly played Blofeld in "You Only Live Twice" before they fired his ass and  replaced him with Donald Pleasence.  Michael Lonsdale barely registers a pulse through the whole movie, reciting his lines like he learned them phonetically.  A crying shame, since the script gave him some of the all time best Bond Villain lines in the entire series.....("You arrive with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.....")  When he's pitched into the void of outer space, he doesn't look any different than when he was alive and well.......

                 Jaws  and the Venetian pigeon:  Believe it or not, I don't have that big a problem with Jaws finding love with his tiny little girlfriend......(since it naturally sets them up as misfits in Lonsdale's dreams of deep space utopia).......but the double-take pigeon, achieved by reversing the film, looks left over from an old Jerry Lewis movie......beneath contempt.

                 Best use of Jaws:  Watching him shamble down an alley, engulfed in a jumbo, grotesque Rio Carnival costume. Creeeeepy............

                 The space battle:  This is the ultimate continuation of the trope first established in "Goldfinger" - a ferocious pitched firefight between a force of good guys and the villain's minions making their last stand......with heavy casualties on both sides.  You can rant and rail all you want about putting Bond in outer space, but this sequence remains stunning -   spectacular in its high-tech violence and in a few shots, strangely haunting......(the dead, fallen astronauts floating off into the stars, the universe serving as their graveyard...)

                  Farewell, M......before his passing, the wonderful Bernard Lee performs his final
tough-love oversight of 007......

                  Farewell,  Lairs by Ken Adam.....the legendary production designer's last Bond assignment....and the last time we'd see Bond villains cavort in his enormous, wondrous stainless steel hideouts......

                  And summing up....."Moonraker" may stand as the last Bond that advertised itself as a
technological special effects spectacle......(the franchise came back to earth with a vengeance in "For Your Eyes Only")........it's slow and clumsy in spots......but producer Albert R.Broccoli always got maximum bang for his bucks.......and 40 years later, it's still a good time. 4 stars (****).