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Moonraker is both a James Bond book by Ian Fleming first published in 1955, and a
1979 movie adapted from the book. The title comes
from "moonraker," a synonym for moonsail,
the highest sail carried by sailing ships.
Plot
Warning: Plot details
follow.
In the book Bond is asked privately to come and observe Hugo Drax, who is winning money playing bridge at M's
club, and who M suspects is cheating. Bond confirms him as a cheater, and manages to 'cheat the cheater', winning a large amount
of money and infuriating Drax.
Drax is also the backer of the (fictional) 'Moonraker' missile being built to
defend the UK. Partly because of the cheating episode, M then asks Bond
to inflitrate Drax' missile-building organisation on the coast of England. Bond
uncovers a dreadful and fiendish plot which he foils with the assistance of a junior female (and, of course, attractive) fellow
MI6 agent.
In the 1979 movie, Drax' lair is relocated to outer space, although the
plot remains equally fiendish. In the movie, Drax has converted a toxin found in a
species of orchid found in the Amazon
River basin, which in its natural state causes sterility, into a lethal nerve agent. He plans to destroy all human life (the
toxin affects only humans) by launching a series of 50 globes containing the toxin from a space station; the toxin would be dispersed when each globe broke up during reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
Before launching the globes, Drax transported several hundred carefully selected young men and women to the space station. They
would live there until Earth was safe again for human life; these people would be the seed for a Hitleresque master race.
Bond reaches the villain's orbital lair by means of the space shuttle (which was soon to be launched for real when the movie was
released). Widely considered to be one of the most juvenile Bond movies, it is, unexpectedly, the first where Bond's female
companion is on a more or less equal footing with him. The "Bond girl", Dr. Holly
Goodhead (played by Lois Chiles), is a CIA agent who competently wards off bad guys and
pilots the space shuttle.
Miscellaneous info
The Jaws character (played by Richard Kiel) makes a return, although in
Moonraker the role is played for laughs, unlike the killing machine that he was in The Spy Who Loved Me. In Moonraker, his pre-credits
attempt to kill Bond in a daring free-fall stunt ends in disaster when his parachute fails and he conveniently plunges into a circus tent, to
emerge again, as usual, completely unscathed. Also, near the end of the film, Jaws turns against Drax and fights alongside Bond
to secure the space station, and removes a metal jam that prevented Bond and Goodhead from flying off in Drax' shuttle to destroy
several of the lethal globes.
Moonraker was the third of the three Bond movies for which the theme song was performed by Shirley Bassey.
External links
- MGM's official site for Moonraker
- The IMDb entry
on Moonraker
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