Word: bond
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Moonraker, the first James Bond film since 007 producer Albert Broccoli released The Spy Who Loved Me two summers ago, Roger Moore proves that his two-time failure to live up to Sean Connery's characterization of the super-spy is more the fault of poorly written dialogue than Moore's often overdone tongue-in-cheek manner. In the current film, Moore and screenwriter Christopher Wood do a superb job of reanimating the classic 007 without going to gory extremes or poorly disguised reruns of former 007 themes...
...true that this film starts off like any other Bond extravaganza (including undulating female silhouettes). Something gets stolen (in this case, a U.S. space shuttle on loan to the British), and Bond has to find out what happened and try to get it back. But this is classic; even Sean Connery Bond flicks used such plots. (Goldfinger bought up most of the world's gold supply, Spectre took bombs from a hijacked American submarine in Thunderball, and arranged the thefts of two American and one Russian space craft in You Only Live Twice...
...Bond is quickly summoned to the headquarters of the ever-British spy chief, M, after 007 neatly wraps up his former mission (narrowly averting a nasty fall out of an airplane in an opening scene no less impressive than Connery's skiing in On Her Majesty's Secret Service). M dispatches him forthwith after the missing shuttle...
Producer Broccoli strains in Moonraker to take us to locations heretofore untouched by his vacation-spot-hungry camera crews, and if the final scene is any indication of the length of Broccoli's list of locations, then it's just about used up. While searching for the missing shuttle, Bond visits California, Venice, Rio, a lush but foe-infested South American river, and finally, several hundred miles up in Earth orbit...
Needless to say, Bond finds there is more at stake than the mere theft of a space shuttle. A power-hungry aerospace magnate, Drax (Michael Lonsdale), who prides himself on a sense of drama in his death-traps, brings together the seedlings of a master-race. He plans to take over the world after he destroys all intelligent life by spraying the planet with a deadly extracted nerve gas from a rare South American orchid. Drax surrounds himself with luxury, not to mention an Asian Martial arts expert, two hungry Dobermans, and steel-mouthed giant Jaws (Richard Kiel) who pursued...