Having no experience with or fondness toward the source material, I don’t find myself particularly caring what is in the book. I imagine that were I to read it, I’d have the same reaction.
Ian Fleming was definitely working through some stuff.
Casino Royale was a deliberate attempt to move more towards the tone of the books, and away from… whatever Die Another Day was.
I was 8 when I saw Moonraker and it changed my life. Loved it so goddamn much I saw it again in the theater the very next day. I know it has a bad reputation but everyone is totally wrong about it. They should have seen it when they were 8.
Moonraker was also the best thing about Black Widow.
This article goes to great lengths to explain how the plot of Moonraker shares various similarities with the Red Room and Dreykov’s evil plan and it goes on and on but never once mentions the obvious reason for the homage… the parachute scene.
Moonraker was also the first James Bond movie I saw in theaters and I think that’s affected my opinion of it as well. I quite enjoy it. I loved all the Venice stuff, and the Amazon river fight stuff, and yes even the Space fight stuff. Hard to say what I would have thought about the Space stuff had I been older on first viewing, but I still really enjoy it on rewatch.
While it may not be the best Roger Moore film, it’s certainly not the worst (which IMO is “A View to a Kill”). In fact, looking over the list of Roger Moore films, personally I’d put Moonraker at the midpoint, with “Man with a Golden Gun”, “Octopussy” below it. “Spy Who Loved Me” is arguably the best of the Moore films, “For Your Eyes Only” was also very good, and I’m also fond of “Live and Let Die”.
My only real issue with Moonraker is that a lot of it’s beats seem to be straight up copying The Spy Who Loved Me. But with space instead of under water. But overall I’m fine with that. It was great to get 3 Roger Moore Bond movies that are just so over-the-top. Made all 3 very exciting to a young kid like me at the time. (3rd being Octopussy).
Is Moonraker the one where Jaws ends up being like a “good guy”? Because when I was a kid that was a transformative moment, the idea someone evil could redeem themselves. And I was probably about 8 when I saw it, though it would have been on satellite in the early 80’s.
Yeah, he falls in love with a very small (Eastern European?) woman on the space station. I think we are supposed to believe they live happily ever after in space.
That really is a terrible movie.
IIRC Jaws and his girlfriend get picked up by the US Space Forces. There’s a radio transmission that gets played where it specifically gets mentioned that they got rescued.
Also I think a key point is that she’s wearing braces, not just that she’s relatively petite.
Do Bond films go tongue-in-cheek with the advent of Moore, or before that? Moore definitely brought Simon Templar with him to the films, and that series was very much tongue-in-cheek.
The early Connery stuff was played pretty straight. Though by the time you get to Diamonds Are Forever, the campiness is definitely setting in.
Sean Connery definitely had his share of quips:
But the camp definitely went up quite a bit with Moore.
You’ve guessed roughly what my plan is :) But don’t worry, there’s plenty of really bad ones to go through!
I’m not sure Adam is talking of the Casino Royale ship scene. Because QoS indeed starts off with Bond dragging a prisoner to base, and M casually starting the interrogation with something like “you’re not in Britain, so we will torture you until you talk”. It’s just that things go wrong before M has a chance to open her instrument case.
Well Casino Royale is probably the most faithful adaptation to the book for a long, long time…
Sorry, I was talking about two different things.
- The QoS interrogation scene that devolves into another epileptic fight scene with a profoundly stupid setup is where I noped out of that movie after the opening chase scene damn near gave me a migraine
- The ball-whacking scene in Casino Royale is bullshit torture porn in an otherwise mostly-fun action/adventure spy flick.
I absolutely love his vocal performance on that song. I was trying to hit that high falsetto for months. It’s also unmistakably a Bond theme.
I feel like they did, while Connery had a lot of small humor moments from the writing, the overall movie was played as an action thriller. Then he would kill someone in an interesting way and make a quip and move on. Moore was very mich the funny Bond, what jokes were to Connery love scenes were to Moore, momentary distractions from the meta. Most of Moore’s films were exposition, setup, ridiculous action, jokes about it, repeat.
Die Another Day
The opening is kind of solid. A secret spy mission that’s simultaneously ludicrous (inserting a three-man squad into North Korea on surf boards filled with plastic explosives), but still somehow grounded by Bond standards. That impression lasts until the characters start talking, and then it turns just unintentionally silly. The dialogue will be bad for the whole movie, but Halle Barry’s introductory scene at about 35 minutes is probably the lowest point. They end up in bed in the next scene. Who wouldn’t, after such smooth flirting?
The early action sequences are watchable, but not super exciting. The special effects are pretty sloppy, like when a hovercraft hits a concrete bunker at moderate speed and it’s the bunker that explodes. big sword fight is the most engaging sequence.
So up to the one hour mark, it’s maybe a bit slow but doesn’t feel like it’s really the worth Bond movie ever made. But all we’ve been watching is just totally pointless setup. At that point, they basically reboot the movie and introduce all the modern Bond bullshit. The invisible car (gets used once). The VR glasses (only get used for a fairly cruel Moneypenny joke). The death beam satellite. The fistfight with lasers. Bond kite surfing on a tsunami using improvised gear. It’s all really hokey, the action sequences are just so boring, weightless, and long. The movie just refuses to end.
The theme by Madonna is one of the worst ones as well. Whether it’s even recognizable as a Bond theme depends, I suspect, a lot on whether you happened to see the music video often back in the day.
I really like Rosamund Pike in this despite the script not giving her a lot to work with, and I guess this was her breakthrough role? So at least something good came out of the movie.
Tomorrow: Like Rock8man guessed, I’ll have A View to a Kill on the menu. Other than QoS, this is the only other movie that I remember literally nothing about. So even though it seems hard to believe it could be worse than Moonraker, I think it’s the logical next choice.
Hmm, View to a Kill. I remember Grace Jones, Christopher Walken, something about a fire truck. That’s all I got.
Spectre is the only Bond movie I’ve fallen asleep watching.
I never had any desire to go back and finish it.
And a ridiculous plot involving intentional earthquakes. An absurd movie all around, made watchable only because Walken chewing scenery is always entertaining.
But compared to the predecessor Dalton films (which I generally quite like) it is an annoying turn for the worse.
God I hate Die Another Day though. Dumbest movie I’ve gone too see in theaters of my own sake.
The plot is utter trash, Moore is almost 60 and looks every year of it, but it has Walken just hamming the fuck out as a Bond villain while traipsing around SF in a blimp. In my mind, that takes it a peg over at least a handful of forgettable Bonds (okay, really just any Bronson Bond but Goldeneye, sorry, those sucked though I enjoyed Pierce in the role).