The Roger Moore films tend to have the worst reputations of any in the Bond series, and Moonraker typically leads that charge.  Actually watching the film, though, I found myself pleasantly surprised.  There's simply no comparison between Moonraker and a crapfest like Live and Let Die.  Mind you, it's hardly in the upper echelon of Bond films, and the last 30 minutes are noteworthy for how ridiculous they are; it's also fairly derivative of previous films, with the villain's master plot bearing a shameless resemblance to The Spy Who Loved Me and part of the final battle basically being Thunderball in space instead of underwater (note: that doesn't improve it).  But before it leaves Earth, Moonraker is actually fairly decent.  I'm almost disappointed that it wasn't cartoonishly bad all the way through.

The product placement in this movie, particularly in Rio, is out of control.

The film opens with a British 747 transporting Moonraker, an American space shuttle.  In mid-flight, two men pop out of compartments in the shuttle, start it and fly off, with the fire from its rockets causing the 747 to explode and crash in a fiery wreck.  M receives the news and immediately asks Moneypenny where Bond is.  He's in another smaller plane, making out with the flight attendant or whoever.  She turns out to be bad, pointing a gun at him.  The pilot appears with a parachute; for some reason he doesn't just shoot Bond but instead tells him they're leaving.  Bond kicks the gun away and starts a fistfight; the pilot opens the plane's door and Bond eventually pushes him out of it.  Bond seems to be thinking of his next move when Jaws appears behind him and pushes him out of the plane.  In freefall, Bond catches up with the pilot and fights him for his parachute.  (This sequence took 88 jumps to fully film because there was so little usable footage that could be shot on a given jump.  The editing makes this pretty apparent.)  Bond gets the parachute, but is then chased by Jaws, who tries to bite his leg; Bond releases his chute and is pulled up and away from Jaws.  When Jaws tries to pull his own chute, it fails, and he crashes into a circus tent, the first of many scenes in the film that take away what menace Jaws provided as a hired killer and try to turn him in a lovable goof who just happens to kill people for a living but actually has a heart of gold.  Aside from the final sequence in space, this is this film's Achilles heel, if not the Achilles heel of the Moore films in general.  Obviously there's room for humor in the world of Bond, but there's humor and then there's just outright silliness.  Moonraker, not for the first time, leans too heavily toward the latter.

After the opening title sequence, Bond arrives at MI-6, where Moneypenny thinks he's joking about falling out of a plane.  M, Q and the defense minister reveal that while the official story for the newspapers is that the 747 and the shuttle were both destroyed, the shuttle is actually unaccounted for.  Bond opts to start in California at the headquarters of the Drax Corporation, makers of the shuttle.  Before he leaves, Q outfits Bond with a dart shooter that masquerades as a wristwatch.  Upon Bond's arrival, Drax tells him, "Your reputation precedes you," which is at least the second time in the last three films that this has been said to Bond.  Secret agent my ass.  Drax acts like a smarmy douche just so there's no mistake that he's the bad guy, and we're only 15 minutes in - aside from Live and Let Die, I feel like Bond hasn't had so much direct interaction with the main villain so early in the film since Goldfinger.  Bond leaves to start his tour of the facility, and Drax tells his henchman Chang (or Cha; there seems to be some confusion on this point), "Look after Mr. Bond.  See that some harm comes to him."

This is kind of odd on multiple levels.  First of all, you'd think Drax wouldn't really want to arouse suspicion by having Bond die while on his property; it seems like it would have made more sense just to do as much as he could to convince Bond he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Moonraker and wave goodbye to him.  Second, if Bond's reputation actually preceded him, shouldn't Drax be thinking, you know, this guy is pretty indestructible?  I guess you don't get to be a crazy supervillain who plans on wiping out all human life on Earth without being irrationally confident in your ability to succeed where others have failed, but still.  Anyway, Bond is taken to meet Dr. Goodhead, who turns out to be Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles).  Bond gets the relationship off on the wrong foot by acting all surprised that Dr. Goodhead should be a woman.  (Come on, James - didn't you hear her last name?)  She shows Bond one of the shuttles, and then the centrifuge trainer, which she suggests Bond try.  He climbs in and starts going around, but Chang shows up and turns the power up to dangerously high levels.  Bond manages to fire one of the exploding darts from his wrist gun just before passing out; stumbling away from the trainer, he spots Chang slinking away from the controls.

Is there a store where crazed supervillains shop?  Why do all the really megalomaniacal Bond villains seem to dress the same?

Even though there's just been an obvious attempt on his life, Bond stays the night.  He comes into the room of Corinne Dufour, another of Drax's employees he'd met earlier.  Bond wants information; Corinne knows only that something very secret was being worked on, but it's been moved elsewhere.  After they have sex, Bond sneaks into Drax's study and with Corinne's help finds some plans, which he photographs.  They leave, but Chang spots them.  The next day, Bond prepares to depart while Drax is out pheasant hunting.  Drax attempts to take Bond out with a sniper, but when he offers to let Bond shoot a bird, Bond takes the sniper out instead, then leaves.  Drax lets him go, then turns his attention to Corinne, who he fires.  She starts to walk away but realizes that Drax's Dobermans are going to be released.  For whatever reason, rather than get back into the golf cart she drove up on, she runs into the woods where, after a bizarrely prolonged chase, the dogs get her.  This scene is really weird.  First of all, given that Bond is the hero I'm not sure I would have called this much attention to the fact that he's really good at getting women killed.  Second, I don't think we've ever seen a scene like this in a Bond movie before.  Corinne runs through the woods with this incredibly dramatic music playing until the dogs take her down in slow motion.  Why?  There's no need to get us to hate Drax; we're already inclined to do it.  And it's not like similar moments from previous films - such as Stromberg dumping a woman into the shark tank in The Spy Who Loved Me - have been played even remotely like this.  I couldn't stop thinking about how weird and jarring this was, in service of a character who isn't even much of a character.

Bond heads to Venice, home of the glass company named on the plans he photographed.  Holly is there also, telling Bond she's giving a talk that evening.  As Bond and his personal gondolier head down the canal, they're attacked by another boat.  Bond's gondola is naturally equipped with a motor, and he speeds away in yet another canal boat chase.  Did Moore really love boat chases and have it written into his contract that every film should have one?  At least J.W. Pepper isn't vacationing in Venice.  Bond eventually gets away by turning the gondola into a hovercraft and driving it through St. Mark's Square.  Then, we see a pigeon do a double-take, because it's so startled by the hovercraft.  No, really: that actually happens.  They filmed a pigeon turning its head, and then ran the film backwards so it appeared the pigeon was doing a double-take.  Remember what I said about outright silliness?  This qualifies.  Really, there are at least two or three scenes in this movie where you could play "Yakety Sax," a.k.a. the Benny Hill Show theme, and not only would it not be out of place, it might actually improve things.

Jaws was apparently so popular with children that he was brought back for this movie, given a girlfriend, and eventually turned into a good guy.  The real question: why the hell was the enormous murderer so popular with children?

That night, Bond sneaks into a lab of Drax's, the door code to which plays the tones from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, just to bash you over the head with the reason why Moonraker was bumped ahead of For Your Eyes Only in the films' sequence.  Inside he finds vials of a clear liquid which turns out to be a deadly poison; the two scientists in the room die after accidentally breaking vials Bond had moved while they were in another room, but Bond notices that their lab rats are unharmed.  Coming out of the lab, Bond is attacked by Chang.  They proceed to have an extremely destructive fight inside the glass museum, breaking pretty much everything in the place.  (Somehow the vial of deadly liquid in Bond's pocket does not break.)  Bond eventually wins the fight and throws Chang through a clock face on the third story.  He then goes to Holly's room and realizes from her gadgetry that she's actually a CIA agent working undercover in the Drax Corporation.  He asks where she's going next, and she claims not to be going anywhere, but Bond sees an airplane ticket in the drawer and bags in the doorway.  They have sex, and after Bond leaves, Holly calls the porter to take her bags.

Bond brings M and the defense minister to the site of the laboratory the next morning, but Drax has stripped the whole place down to look like a normal room and is waiting there alone.  The defense minister apologizes profusely and fumes at M that Bond should be taken off the case, but Bond shows M the vial and tells him to have Q examine it.  The two wink and nod their way through an exchange involving Bond heading to Rio for "vacation."  He meets (and sleeps with) his contact, Manuela, and the two move to check out a Drax warehouse in the middle of Carnaval.  Jaws, now working for Drax, approaches in costume and attacks Manuela, but Bond fights him off long enough for a crowd of revelers to sweep Jaws away.  Bond heads to Sugarloaf Mountain and scopes out the airport that Drax's flights operate from; he also runs into Holly, who is doing the same thing.  Bond again suggests they work together; "I still don't know if I trust you," Holly replies.  Um, they're British and American intelligence.  Since when are those two countries even remotely adversarial?  ("This is set during the Revolutionary War," Alma said when I made the same comment during the movie.)

This cable car crash brought to you by 7-Up!

As they descend in the cable car, Jaws and a partner mess with the cars so they stop halfway down, and then Jaws jumps from his car to attack Bond.  The ensuing fight is super slow-moving and reminded me somewhat of the elevator fight in Diamonds are Forever - it takes place in a small (and in this case quite precarious) space, and so you can understand why it looks so awkward.  But the simple fact is that it just looks really awkward.  Bond eventually locks Jaws inside the car and he and Holly slide down the rest of the cable on a chain.  Jaws crashes the car into the cable car's base station and, once again indestructible, is helped from the wreckage by a blonde woman with pigtails.  And then, to the strains of Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet Overture," the two fall instantly in love and walk away hand in hand.  Um... what?  This is the kind of scene I would expect to see in a Bond spoof.  I know that technically this helps set up the ending, but if that was their best idea I think they needed to work a little harder on it.  Bond and Holly are snatched up by three men posing as paramedics, but Bond escapes the ambulance as it drives conveniently past several large product-placement billboards.

Cue the theme from The Magnificent Seven for no good reason except Bond is dressed like a cowboy and riding a horse up to a monastery which MI-6 is using as a remote base.  (So, for no good reason.)  Q reveals that Bond was right - the vial from Venice contained a highly toxic nerve gas that has no effect on animals.  Bond is dispatched to the Amazon region to look for the rare orchid that produces the chemicals involved.  And... oh boy, another boat chase!  Jaws and some other henchmen chase Bond until his boat goes over a waterfall and he hang-glides away.  (Geography nerd break-in: the waterfall in question is Iguazu Falls, which is on the border of Brazil and Argentina very near to where both border Paraguay.  One thing it is not anywhere near?  The Amazon region.  It would be one thing if Iguazu Falls were not an instantly recognizable feature, but... anyway.  End break-in.)  Conveniently, Bond crashes in the jungle just near a pyramid that serves as an entrance to Drax's lair, which is full of attractive young women and the rare orchids.  The women, Drax's astronauts, push Bond into a pool where he must contend with a large snake, only getting away because he was apparently still carrying a poison pen first seen as one of Holly's gadgets in Venice.

My anaconda don't want none unless you've got Bonds, hon!

Drax takes Bond inside his control room and tells him his whole evil plan.  This is, of course, the mistake of every villain, but at least Drax actually tells Bond that he's been trying "to plan an amusing death" for him.  Granted, he should still probably know better, but then Drax is obviously a complete loon.  His plan: take off into space with a bunch of young couples, then release a huge amount of the nerve gas made from the orchid, killing all human life on Earth.  Then he'll send the couples back to Earth, where they'll start a new civilization he can rule over like a god.  Dude, you are nuts.  Drax tells Jaws to put Bond and Holly in a space underneath his rocket so they'll be incinerated when it takes off; naturally, they escape and manage to replace the pilots of the sixth and final shuttle.  The shuttle heads into space and makes its way toward a giant space station that apparently can't be detected from Earth because of radar jamming.  (I'm no astronomer, but wouldn't a massive object in near-Earth orbit be visible from the ground, at least with a telescope or something?)

At any rate, this is where things get bad, or at least worse.  The filmmakers weren't able to film in simulated zero-gravity, so they just had to use a bunch of wires and slow-motion and such.  Does it look terrible?  You bet it does.  The shuttles all dock at the space station and the crews fill the main area.  Drax comes out and gives a big crazy speech where he makes it clear he's interested in eugenics, using these selected couples to make a master race that will take over the planet once he's wiped it clean.  Bond and Holly make their way to the radar jamming system and turn it off; the Americans and Soviets immediately spot the craft, and the Americans send a shuttle to investigate.  Drax begins launching the globes of nerve gas; Jaws catches Bond and Holly (Bond inexplicably tries yet again to punch Jaws in the mouth, hurting his hand just like he did in the last movie).  Drax orders them pushed out of the airlock, but Bond gets him to admit in front of Jaws that anyone "imperfect" - like Jaws - doesn't fit Drax's dream of a master race and would have to be eliminated.  Thus won over to the side of good, Jaws fights off several henchmen, giving Bond just enough of an opening to turn off the gravity before Drax can blow up the American shuttle with his laser.

A crew of Drax henchmen exit the station, where they meet a crew of Americans from the shuttle, and there's an awful-looking laser battle that, as I mentioned earlier, looks a lot like the terrible underwater battle between frogmen at the end of Thunderball.  Except at least that one actually looked like it was taking place underwater.  This looks like it's taking place between stuntmen hanging on wires against a black backdrop on a soundstage.  It sucks.  The Americans board the space station; Bond, Holly, Jaws and the Americans take out the main control room.  Bond chases after Drax as he attempts to escape; as Drax prepares to shoot him with a laser, Bond hits him with a cyanide-tipped dart from his wrist contraption, then pushes him out of the airlock for good measure.  The Americans take off in their shuttle, while Bond and Holly chase after the globes in Drax's Moonraker, which is equipped with a laser.  They chase the three nerve gas globes released, with Bond blowing each of them up before they can enter Earth's atmosphere.  The mission completed, Bond and Holly opt for a little zero-G sex - and, for a second straight film, they're caught in the act by M and the minister of defense, this time via video screen.  Bond turns the camera off and they fly around the world again, per Holly's request.  And then: disco version of the title song!  End credits.

The end credits actually claim that Moonraker was shot on location in outer space, which would be a lot more believable if we hadn't all just watched it.

I realize, reading back over the summary, that I probably don't sound like a big fan.  And, well, I'm not a big fan.  But Moonraker is not as bad as it's made out to be.  The structure is actually pretty classic: there's a mysterious crime, Bond investigates, we meet the villain, Bond gradually pieces together clues, there are a few action sequences, Bond is captured, we get all the details of the evil plan, Bond escapes and defeats the villain.  With the exception of introducing its main Bond girl and main villain much later in the film, Dr. No has pretty much the exact same structure.  So does Goldfinger.  So do a lot of the films, of course, and I don't intend to hold up Moonraker next to Dr. No, but aside from a few conspicuous missteps - the pigeon, all the Jaws wackiness, Corinne's weird death - the first 90 minutes is pretty decent and matches a lot of the other films in content.  It does all go off the rails for the final half-hour, however, not so much because going into space was inherently ridiculous as because the filmmakers simply did not have the capacity to make it look anything other than ridiculous.  Moonraker had a budget of $34 million - a fortune at the time, nearly twice what The Empire Strikes Back (released the following year) cost, and as much as the first six Bond films put together.  And yet the space sequences, for all the complexity of the space station set itself, rarely look like anything but total garbage.  The zero-G scenes are awful; the laser battle is awful.  Maybe in 1979 this still wasn't that big of a deal - after all, the original Star Wars was released with all kinds of matte lines and what we would now recognize as mediocre CGI, but at the time it must have been new and exciting - but I don't know.  It seems like the laser battle would have looked stupid in any era.

Nevertheless, just sitting down to watch it, Moonraker simply isn't that bad.  It's really not much more or less than a classic Bond story with a little too much silly humor and a bad ending.  In the review of The Spy Who Loved Me I said I'd try to rank the first 11 Bond films in this review, since we're now halfway home.  So here's my attempt at it, off the top of my head and bearing in mind that at this point I haven't seen some of these for a couple years:

1. Dr. No
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. The Spy Who Loved Me
4. Goldfinger
5. From Russia with Love
6. You Only Live Twice
7. Moonraker
8. Thunderball
9. The Man with the Golden Gun
10. Diamonds are Forever
11. Live and Let Die

So, Moonraker isn't that high; I can't really put it above any of the ones I thought were good or great.  But it's certainly not abjectly terrible.  It has some decent action, an entertainingly crazy villain, a typically smooth Moore performance, and a main Bond girl who makes up for some of the ways in which I felt Anya fell flat in The Spy Who Loved Me.  Holly is more than capable of standing up to Bond; she's a CIA agent who has successfully infiltrated the Drax Corporation, she's smart, she can throw a punch, she seems to be getting plenty out of her relationship with Bond rather than simply melting like others have, and she's present for the entire final sequence and even contributes positively to the outcome.  It's certainly a step forward for the series.  Granted, the double-take pigeon is probably two steps back, but we can't have everything.

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