Our favourite Bond film I remember watching it with my mother and her cringing at the space battle with men spinning off into space and her asking me and my dad if we would of screamed like those guys.
Moonraker, The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice are my comfort movies since I was like 8, we had them all on VHS tapes and I always watched them during holidays or when I had flu or something. So much fun and as I grew older, I started to appreciate all the practical effects, stunts and music even more.
In the book Drax was a Nazi throwback. He couldn't stand facial hair and didn't allow anyone of his male trainees to have facial hair and preferred them blonde.
Richard Kiel was also in force 10 from Navarone, Happy Gilmore, Pale rider and did voice work for Tangled amongst many other things. I have his autobiography Making it Big in the movies.
Your death in space explanation is spot on about what happens when exposed to vacuum. However Drax was already about to die from the cyanide dart anyhow so I doubt he had time to worry about the 15 seconds.
I love this movie! The reaction between you and your mom when Jaws meets his girlfriend in Brazil….. that made my day, week, month and just maybe my year! I love this!
I love how much fun you had with this movie! Is it ridiculous? Sure, but it's so well crafted in many ways. Drax is a brilliant villain with such great dry, sarcastic wit and flowery monologues. Michael Lonsdale had such a strong presence. And it will never not impress me how something so stupid as a love story for Jaws ends up working story wise, because it conflicts with the main bad guys evil scheme. This movie also has a plethora of fantastic camera work, cinematography, special effects and stunt work. For the pre-title-sequence parachute jump/fight sequence they filmed it over 17 times, if I remember correctly. They had to develop special camera equipment, so that the camera men's neck wouldn't break as soon as he pulled his chute. It's so impressive! Mission Impossible Fallout took a lot from that sequence, I'm sure.
Richard Kiel also co-starred in The Silver Streak (1976) - a Gene Wilder comedy thriller which also happens to be the first time he and Richard Pryor appeared on screen together. Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor would go on to star in Stir Crazy (1980), which was the most successful film comedy ever at the time. See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) is also hilarious. If you've not seen any of these films, I recommend you do a reaction to all.
Except for the closeups (which were obviously done in a studio) the scene with Bond, Jaws and the pilot falling from the plane was actually filmed in freefall. Michael G. Wilson had come up with the scene some years earlier, but reasoned it would be impossible to film. The way a sequence like that would typically have been filmed was by strapping a Bell & Howell Eyemo camera (small camera originally made for newsreel filming during WWII) to a skydiver's head, but the weight of the anamorphic lenses used on most of these films would have broken the camera operator's neck. Then Wilson stumbled across a discarded Panavision prototype lens made of plastic in a used camera store in Paris. With this lens and a custom-built lightweight titanium camera it was finally possible to film the sequence. The whole sequence had to be filmed in short segments (a few seconds each) over several days. A film editing machine was brought to the airfield, and the director would show the skydivers the assembled footage from the previous day, so they could see which segments needed to be filled in. My mother actually met Richard Kiel several times when he and his wife were regulars at the restaurant where she worked. They used to bring their kids there for birthdays. She says he was the sweetest guy in real life, quite the opposite of many of the characters he typically played. The cable he bit through was made of licorice. Final appearance of Bernard Lee as M. He died before filming began on For Your Eyes Only. Michael G. Wilson cameos as the NASA engineer who says "it's over 200 meters in diameter." One of this few cameos with dialogue (though the line may have been dubbed). The exterior shots of the space station disintegrating were done by closing off the soundstage and blasting the model with a shotgun.
Moonraker has always gotten a bad rep but as of late gained a lot of love which is great because it’s one hell of a fun film! The scale of it is massive and is still one of the most expensive films of the series. The next film is very grounded and takes Bond back to the ground. Back to spying again. For Your Eyes Only is one of my top 5 Bonds
So I've seen this too many times to count now. What I notice now is how easy it would have been for everyone involved in this movie to rest on past successes and just phone it it, given the borderline ridiculousness of the plot But they don't. Everyone does really well with what they're given, Roger is still peak Roger, the producers spent a ton of money on the special effects and locations, and it all works, and that's entertainment.
When The Spy Who Loved Me ended, the words "James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only". But Star Wars made its debut at the same time, so Albert Broccoli jumped on the bandwagon with this movie.
Drax’s plan was certainly better than Stromberg’s in the last movie because he actually included women in his plan for a new society. Strindberg only had men.
I can see Anya Amasova being one of the best Bond girls. She was definitely one of my favs as a kid. For me personally, my favorite is and always will be Tracy Bond. I mean, he married her for god's sake!
'Moonraker' gets a lot of flack for it's outlandishness and admittedly once the characters get to space the film stops to a halt but before that? Pound for pound 'Moonraker' has some of the best set pieces and action scenes of any film in the franchise. Also a terrific cast. Michael Lonsdale is having far too much fun. "Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him." The next film is much more grounded (pun intended) as a reaction to the reception to this one. (I love it too though!)
This film gets so much stick, but it's the first one I saw as a boy in the cinema, and I will always have a soft spot for it. It is ludicrously over the top, and it's not Roger's best, but I will always like it.
This Bond movie was a missed opportunity. It had the grandest scheme a Bond villain could come across (world destruction/depopulation). Space war, Amazon adventure, Jaws at his peak, etc. Still highly entertaining.
SORRY, but PLEASE travel to Venice (in Italy!!) sometime by yourself and see, hear and feel with all senses what a cheap and "what Americans think Venice does look like"-imitation of it you got in Vegas!
Moonraker is lots of fun.... Definitely one of the most over-the-top films in the series. For the next entry, they brought things back down to earth. The next two are my favorite Roger Moore Bond films... I'm looking forward to your reactions.
