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Moonraker (film)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007) |
| Moonraker | |
|---|---|
 Moonraker film poster |
|
| James Bond | Roger Moore |
| Also starring | Michael Lonsdale Lois Chiles Richard Kiel |
| Directed by | Lewis Gilbert |
| Produced by | Albert R. Broccoli William P. Cartlidge Michael G. Wilson |
| Novel/Story by | Ian Fleming (novel) Christopher Wood (screenplay) |
| Screenplay | Christopher Wood |
| Cinematography by | Jean Tournier |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Main theme | Moonraker |
| Composer | John Barry Hal David |
| Performer | Shirley Bassey |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Released | June 26, 1979 (UK) June 29, 1979 (USA) |
| Running time | 121 min. |
| Budget | $34,000,000 |
| Worldwide gross | $210,300,000[1] |
| Preceded by | The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) |
| Followed by | For Your Eyes Only (1981) |
| IMDb profile | |
Moonraker, released in 1979, is the eleventh film in the James Bond series and the fourth to star Roger Moore as the fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond. In the film, Bond is set on the trail of a space shuttle that went missing during transport on the back of a plane. He visits the owner of the transport company, Hugo Drax, to investigate further. After befriending space scientist Holly Goodhead and a narrow brush with a centrifuge, Bond follows the trail of clues from California, to Venice, to the Amazon rain forest and finally into outer space in a bid to prevent a genocidal plot to conquer the world.
The end credits for the previous Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, said, 'James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only; however, the producers chose Moonraker as the basis for the next film, following the box office success of the 1977 space-themed film Star Wars. For Your Eyes Only was subsequently delayed and ended up following Moonraker in 1981.
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After a Drax Industries Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked while transported atop a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (a modified Boeing 747), James Bond is sent to investigate. The pre-title sequence involves both the incineration of the shuttle carrier aircraft during the Moonraker hijacking, and James Bond pushed out of a different aeroplane, over South Africa by the assassin Jaws; Bond survives using a parachute and reports to headquarters in London, where M briefs him about the hijacking. Bond is to investigate Sir Hugo Drax, and Drax Industries, the space shuttle supplier, travelling from England to his mansion-shuttle factory in California.
At Drax Industries, Bond is coldly greeted by Drax and henchman Chang, the latter immediately ordered to see that "some harm comes to him". Bond also meets Dr. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut-scientist employed by Drax, who, calling Bond on his sexism, tests him in a centrifuge; Chang sabotages the test. After surviving that, Bond sneaks into Drax's study and finds blueprints for a glass vial made by a glazier in Venice. Next morning Bond leaves for Venice, where he again encounters Goodhead, in a museum glass exhibition. He is chased by Drax's henchmen but his gondola that could transform into a hovercraft and move on land helps him escape. Bond learns the vials are to hold a nerve gas that only kills human beings; Chang ambushes Bond but is killed.
Later, Bond notices a flame-throwing perfume bottle and a concealed radio transmitter in Goodhead's handbag. He identifies the devices as those issued by the Central Intelligence Agency. He concludes that Goodhead is a CIA agent spying on Drax. With this knowledge, he "pushes the panic button" forcing M and the Minister of Defence to go to Venice and see the nerve agent laboratory for themselves. Unfortunately for Bond, the laboratories have been re-converted to a drawing room, where they encounter a surprised Drax. Bond, however, has saved one of the vials he earlier found when spying in the laboratory, giving it to M for analysis. Bond and Goodhead travel to Rio de Janeiro to investigate some of Drax's cargo only to learn that Chang has been replaced by Jaws. Jaws and Bond fight at a local warehouse owned by Drax and then again on top of a cable car, after which Goodhead is captured by henchmen disguised as hospital workers.
Bond reports to M's temporary headquarters in Brazil and learns that the vial contains a lethal toxin. Bond then travels up the Amazon River looking for Drax's research facility, which he ultimately finds after encountering Jaws again in a speedboat chase, and then killing Drax's pet boa with his ballpoint pen containing a hypodermic needle. Captured again, Bond and Goodhead are encaged in a blast pit underneath a Moonraker shuttle set for lift off. Bond uses an explosive charge connected to a wire in his Seiko watch to remove an entry obstacle. Thus he and Goodhead escape from the platform. After doing so they pose as pilots then board one of Drax's shuttles on a preset flight to outer space.
Drawing the toxin from a species of orchid located in the Amazon River basin, Drax plans to destroy all human life (the toxin affects only humans) from space by launching 50 globes containing the toxin from a radar-concealed space station; the toxin would be dispersed when each globe broke up during re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Before launching the globes, Drax also transported several dozen carefully selected young men and women to the space station. They would live there until Earth was safe again for human life; these people would be the seed for a "new master race". Bond persuades Jaws to switch allegiance by getting Drax to admit that that anyone not measuring up to his physical standards would be exterminated.
A radar-jammer hides the space station's orbital presence from observers on Earth; 007 and Goodhead eventually disable it. After that, the U.S. send a platoon of Marines in a military space shuttle to the station. On arrival, a laser weapons battle ensues. During the battle, Bond shoots Drax with a cyanide-coated dart attached to his watch, pushes him to an airlock, and ejects him into outer space. The space station is heavily damaged and falls apart. Jaws helps Bond and Goodhead escape the station in a shuttle. In celebration, Jaws speaks for the first and only time when he opens a champagne bottle with his metal teeth and toasts his girlfriend: "Well, here's to us".
Before the battle in space, Drax launched three of the globes towards Earth. On their way back, Bond uses the space shuttle's lasers to destroy them. Then, the Americans and British attempt to congratulate to Bond and Goodhead, but when visual connection is made, they see Bond and Holly making love under a white sheet in zero gravity. Exasperated, Fredrick Gray asks what Bond is doing, to which Q offers a suggestion: "I think he's attempting re-entry, sir!".
- Further information: List of James Bond vehicles and List of James Bond gadgets
- Roger Moore as James Bond: An MI6 agent assigned to look into the "Moonraker" space programme.
- Michael Lonsdale as Sir Hugo Drax: An industrialist who plans to poison all humans on earth and establish a human civilisation in space.
- Lois Chiles as Holly Goodhead: A CIA agent who joins hands with Bond and follows him to Drax's space station.
- Toshiro Suga as Chang: Drax's bodyguard, skilled at martial arts.
- Richard Kiel as Jaws: A henchman, afflicted by giantism and has a set of stainless steel teeth, whom Drax hires as a replacement for Chang. He helps Bond defeat Drax after learning that hormonally abnormal humans would be killed by the latter.
- Corinne Clery as Corinne Dufour: A spy posing as Drax's personal pilot. She is killed by Chang on being identified as Bond's assistant.
- Bernard Lee as M: The strict head of MI6.
- Lois Maxwell as Miss Moneypenny: M's secretary.
- Desmond Llewelyn as Q: MI6's "quartermaster" who supplies Bond with multi-purpose vehicles and gadgets useful for the latter's mission.
- Geoffrey Keen as Fredrick Gray: The British Minister of Defence
- Walter Gotell as General Gogol: The head of the KGB
- Emily Bolton as Manuela: Bond's ally in Brazil.
- Blanche Ravalec as Dolly: Jaws's Girlfriend
The Jaws character (played by Richard Kiel) makes a return, although in Moonraker the role is played more for laughs than in The Spy Who Loved Me. Jaws was supposed to be a villain, but director Lewis Gilbert stated on the DVD documentary that he got much fan mail from small children saying "Why can't Jaws be a goodie not a baddie", and as a result Gilbert decided to make Jaws gradually become Bond's ally at the end of the film.[2]
Executive Producer Michael G. Wilson continues a tradition in the Bond films he started in the film Goldfinger where he has a small cameo role: he appears twice in Moonraker, first as a tourist outside the Venini Glass shop in Venice, then at the end of the film as a technician in the NASA control room.
In 1955, the film rights to Moonraker were initially sold to the Rank Organisation for £10,000. Fleming eventually bought back the rights in 1959. Tom Mankiewicz had written a screenplay of Moonraker that was eventually discarded. Some scenes from his script were later used in subsequent films, including the Acrostar Jet sequence used in the pre-credit sequence for Octopussy, and the Eiffel Tower scene in A View to a Kill.
As with several previous Bond films, the story from Ian Fleming's novel is almost entirely dispensed with, here in favour of a film more in keeping with the era of science fiction.
In February or March 2004, an Internet hoax stated rumours about a lost 1956 version of Moonraker by Orson Welles, and a James Bond web site repeated it on April Fool's Day 2004 as a hoax. Supposedly, this recently discovered lost film was 40 minutes of raw footage with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax, and Peter Lorre as Drax's henchman.[3]
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Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (September 2007) |
Major shooting was at Pinewood Studios including Albert R. Broccoli's 007 Stage and Los Angeles International Airport. Drax's mansion in California was actually Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, France.
The cities which were filmed were London, Paris, Venice, Palmdale and Rio de Janeiro. Natural landmarks like Sugarloaf Mountain and the Iguazu Falls were also depicted. The exterior of Drax's pyramid headquarters in the Amazon rainforest were filmed in Guatemala. All of the space centre scenes were shot at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
Moonraker was the third of the three Bond films for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey. The soundtrack was composed by John Barry. The film uses two versions of the song; a ballad version heard over the main titles, and a disco version heard over the end credits. The song failed to make an impact on the charts.
The score for Moonraker marked a turning point in John Barry's output, abandoning the Kentonesque brass of his earlier Bond scores and instead scoring the film with slow, rich string passages - a trend which Barry would continued in the 1980s with scores such as Out of Africa and Somewhere in Time.
An instrumental strings version of the title theme was used in 2007 tourism commercials for the Dominican Republic.
Moonraker uses for the first time since Diamonds Are Forever a piece of music called "007" (on track 7), the secondary Bond theme composed by Barry which was introduced in From Russia with Love.
Unusually, the score was recorded in Paris - all previous John Barry Bond scores had been recorded at CTS Studios in London. A general strike in Britain had forced the production to relocate to France and it was decided the film would be scored there as well. Unlike all of the other Bond films, the score for Moonraker has never received an extended release, due to the loss of the original session masters which appear to have been misplaced in France. Some familiar pieces of music also appear in the film:
- Frédéric Chopin's Prelude no. 15 in D-flat major (op. 28), "Raindrop"): Drax playing a piano when Bond arrives.
- Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (op. 30) (forever associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey): a hunting horn plays its distinctive first three notes.
- Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka by Johann Strauss II: during the hovercraft scene on Saint Mark's square.
- The alien-contacting theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: as the key-code for a security door.
- Elmer Bernstein's theme from The Magnificent Seven: when Bond appears on horseback in gaucho clothing.
Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 63% "fresh" rating.[4] James Berardinelli of Reelviews.net said, "the solid special effects, well-executed action sequences, and a strict reliance upon the 'Bond Formula' keep this film among Moore's better entries."[5]
A novelization of the film was made by Christopher Wood. It was named James Bond and Moonraker to avoid confusion with Fleming's novel Moonraker. It was released in 1979.
The screenplay of Moonraker differed so much from Ian Fleming's novel that EON Productions and Glidrose Publications authorised the film's screenwriter, Christopher Wood to write his second novelization based upon the film.
His first novelisation, James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me, was based upon a script written by himself and Richard Maibaum for the film The Spy Who Loved Me, and released in 1977. In James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me there were many differences from the film including the villain's name, the re-emergence of the Soviet spy agency SMERSH, and the possible death of Stromberg's henchman, Jaws. The script for the film The Spy Who Loved Me went through several drafts before Wood was brought in.
However, in James Bond and Moonraker Wood writes a straight novelisation of the screenplay most likely because he wrote the script completely. One noticeable difference between the novelization and the screenplay for Moonraker is that Jaws does not gain a girlfriend and stays true to Wood's description as being a mute.
Glidrose Productions chose not to commission novelizations of the next few Bond films; the next film to be novelized would be Licence to Kill 10 years later.
- Moonraker at the Internet Movie Database
- Moonraker at Rotten Tomatoes
- Moonraker at Box Office Mojo
- MGM's official site for Moonraker
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| James Bond: | You Only Live Twice (1967) · The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) · Moonraker (1979) |
| 1940s: | Ten Year Plan · Under One Roof · Arctic Harvest · The Little Ballerina |
| 1950s: | Once a Sinner · There Is Another Sun · The Scarlet Thread · Time Gentlemen Please! · Emergency Call · Cosh Boy · Johnny on the Run · Albert R.N. · The Sea Shall Not Have Them · The Good Die Young · Reach for the Sky · Cast a Dark Shadow · The Admirable Crichton · A Cry from the Streets · Carve Her Name with Pride · Ferry to Hong Kong |
| 1960s: | Light Up the Sky! · Sink the Bismarck! · The Greengage Summer · H.M.S. Defiant · The 7th Dawn · Alfie |
| 1970s: | The Adventurers · Friends · Paul and Michelle · Operation Daybreak · Seven Nights in Japan |
| 1980s: | Educating Rita · Not Quite Paradise · Shirley Valentine |
| 1990s: | Stepping Out · Haunted |
| 2000s: | Before You Go |