Roger Moore is back in Moonraker, hot on the vapor trail of Industrialist Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), who has machinations to poison earth’s human population with nerve gas derived from a rare flower in the Amazon, and repopulate it in space with physically fit, beautiful, genetic human outliers. When the Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked in the film’s explosive pre-credit sequence, and Bond is getting thrown from a private jet by Jaws (Richard Kiel) without a parachute, you know you’re in for a thrill ride, and the Bond franchise delivers by raising the bar on its jaw dropping stunts. Lois Chiles is Holly Goodhead, a CIA agent who teams up with Bond to take down Drax on his space station. Toshiro Suga as “Chang” provides the loudest, and most entertaining hand to hand fight with 007 in the franchise, or at the very least, the one with most broken glass. The gadgets in Moonraker are inventively delightful and live up to the technical demands of the plot in this Bond film that is out of this world.
“The visual effects, stuntwork and other technical contributions all work together expertly to make the most preposterous notions believable. And Roger Moore… clearly has adapted the James Bond character to himself and serves well as the wise-cracking, incredibly daring and irresistible hero.” – Variety
“Moonraker is a movie by gadgeteers, for gadgeteers, about gadgeteers. Our age may be losing its faith in technology, but James Bond sure hasn’t.” – Roger Ebert
