Die Another Day (2002) | Story

Plot Summary

Bond investigates a leak that led to his capture and 14-month torture in North Korea.

Influences

Die Another Day is another new story, but it does draw inspiration from a couple of Bond novels and (because it was released on the 40th anniversary of Dr. No) the movie series in general.

One of the books it pulls from isn't even a Fleming one, but the first continuation novel, Colonel Sun by Kingsley Amis. Published four years after Fleming's death, just after the You Only Live Twice movie had been released, Colonel Sun has Bond teaming up with a female Soviet agent to track down a Chinese villain who kidnapped M. So it's more of a story influence on The Spy Who Loved Me and The World Is Not Enough than on Die Another Day, which just borrows the villain's name and Bond's being tortured. Even the villain's nationality and name are changed from the Chinese Colonel Sun Liang-tan to the North Korean Colonel Tan-Sun Moon.

There's also a minor influence from another important non-Fleming book when Bond adopts the cover of an ornithologist and has a copy of Birds of the West Indies. The author's name on the book has been scratched out in the movie, probably because it would have confused viewers who didn't know that Fleming stole James Bond's name from the author of the actual version of that field guide. Great homage.

A bigger influence over the plot is Fleming's Moonraker. Colonel Moon undergoes DNA restructuring to disguise himself as a wealthy Englishman named Gustav Graves, but he's secretly still loyal to his original nation. He announces a technological breakthrough that he's philanthropically developed on his own dime and is offering to the world. But his real plan is to use the technology as a weapon against his nation's enemies. There's also a woman British agent embedded in the villain's organization as his assistant whom Bond teams up with. All of that is right out of Moonraker (in fact, the assistant Miranda Frost was originally going to be named Gala Brand) as is the villain's membership in an English club called Blades. Die Another Day puts its own twist on all of it, of course.

From the movies, Die Another Day has all kinds of Easter Eggs. Here are as many as I could find, but let me know in the comments if you've spotted any others.

• Jinx's intro on the beach and her knife belt are deliberate homages to Ursula Andress in Dr. No. This used to bug me a lot until I realized that it's just one of many homages, but it's certainly one of the most obvious ones.
• The Chinese Secret Service tries to film Bond's having sex in a hotel, just like SPECTRE does in From Russia with Love. Bond also picks up (and smells?!) Rosa Klebb's shoe knife in Q's lab.
• Bond bets against Gustav with an irresistible diamond, similar to how he used Nazi gold to get Goldfinger's attention during golf. And Zao straps down Jinx and threatens her with a laser like in Goldfinger, too.
• The jetpack from Thunderball makes an appearance and Bond uses a re-breather very similar to the one he had in that movie. Bond also steals a grape from the clinic in Die Another Day, just like he did from Angelo's Shrublands room in Thunderball.
• In You Only Live Twice, Tiger Tanaka mentions that M has a private subway train. We get to see it in Die Another Day.
• Graves actually says the line, "Diamonds are forever." And his killer satellite is pretty much the same as the one Blofeld created, though not actually created out of diamonds.
• Sheriff JW Pepper from Live and Let Die makes an appearance. Not really; just seeing if you're paying attention. He wouldn't have been that out of place though.
• There are some spinning mirrors in the DNA replacement clinic that are similar to Scaramanga's in The Man with the Golden Gun.
• Graves uses a Union Jack parachute like the one Bond has in The Spy Who Loved Me.
• The Acrostar and crocodile sub from Octopussy are both in Q's workshop.
• The way Bond and Jinx escape Graves' cargo plane is similar to the way Bond and Kara escape theirs in The Living Daylights.
• Bond temporarily goes rogue as he does in License to Kill.
• He uses his laser watch from GoldenEye (and arguably from Never Say Never Again, if we want to go that far). 

It didn't make it into the movie, but originally the Chinese operative Chang was going to be Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies. Sadly, they couldn't work it out with Michelle Yeoh, but that would've been another one.

How Is the Book Different?

I said I was going to retire this section, but there's enough in common with Moonraker to point out some major tweaks that Die Another Day makes. Hugo Drax's original nationality is German and he remains loyal to the ideas of the Nazis. That's changed to North Korea for Graves. Also, the club Blades is now basically a super fancy fencing gym. And instead of the Moonraker rocket (a fictionalized, upgraded V2) for Britain, Graves has created the Icarus satellite that focuses solar energy year-round to agricultural areas that need it all over the world.

Plotwise, a major difference is that Miranda Frost is actually a triple-agent working for the villain she's supposed to be spying on.

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



In addition to the Moonraker stuff, there's plenty of Blunt Instrument talk in Die Another Day. In fact, it was this movie that put that term on my radar and explicitly stated it as Bond's primary tactic and use in MI6.

Die Another Day gets a lot of crap and a lot of it is deserved, but the script is smarter than we give it credit for. I love the conversation between M and Frost about tactics. Frost has been undercover with Graves for months and hasn't turned up anything incriminating. Of course, we later learn that this is because she's in league with him, but it gives M the chance to explain Bond's methods and why they're valuable in these kinds of situations. Fans poke fun at Bond all the time for being a lousy spy, but that's because he's not that kind of spy. He's not like Frost. But he's extremely useful in certain kinds of missions and Die Another Day makes that clearer than it's ever been before.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



As smart as the script sometimes is, there's also a huge amount of whackadoo, from ice hotels to invisible cars. And director Lee Tamahori isn't helping with his use of CGI for some of the bigger stunts. Fleming could get pulpy and crazy, but his novels always feel grounded in reality. Die Another Day doesn't; even more so than the nuttiest Roger Moore ones.

Cold Open



We get a sense for how outlandish Die Another Day is going to be right from the gun barrel sequence. The Bond Theme during it is way too busy with excessive percussion and then when Bond fires, we actually see the bullet from his gun shoot at us and into the gun barrel. Like the rest of the movie, there's not a lot of thought about whether something should be done bigger.

The teaser itself is good though. It opens in North Korea with Bond and some other agents surfing into the country. And the surfing is really cool, from the photography to the music to the way the surfers are gradually revealed coming out of enormous waves.

From there, they intercept a helicopter and Bond replaces a diamond courier, planting C4 in the briefcase that holds the jewels. They then go to Colonel Moon's headquarters where we meet the officer and his henchman Zao (who's introduced beating up his anger therapist, speaking of unsubtlety, but it doesn't ruin anything). Moon and Zao receive a message that Bond is a spy, so they kill his associates and try to kill him. He blows up the diamonds though in Zao's face (literally) and steals a hovercraft to escape across the minefield of the DMZ between North and South Korea.

The hovercraft chase is pretty great with the hard-to-control vehicles slipping all over the place and crashing into each other like bumper cars. Bond winds up jumping onto Moon's hovercraft and fighting him, then jumps to safety just as Moon and the hovercraft go over a cliff.

There are no awesome stunts, but it's so far so good until Moon's father shows up. Bond has plenty of warning that General Moon is coming, but doesn't even try to escape. He just stands around waiting to be captured and taken back to the base for some torture. As his head is plunged into icy water, the credits start.

Except for that convenient lack of escape instinct on Bond's part at the end, it's an intriguing teaser with some strong visuals and action. Nothing that's going to push it into the Top Ten, but a good, solid, mid-level teaser.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. GoldenEye
2. The Spy Who Loved Me
3. Moonraker
4. Thunderball
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. A View to a Kill
7. Goldfinger
8. The Man with the Golden Gun
9. The Living Daylights
10. Licence to Kill

Movie Series Continuity



A lot of the Easter Eggs build on movie continuity, especially in Q's workshop, but that's pretty much it for direct ties to previous films. Chief of Staff Charles Robinson is still around, so that's great, but he has less to do this time than the last couple of films.

Moonraker (1979) | Music

Like everything else about Moonraker, Maurice Binder largely repeats what he did in The Spy Who Loved Me. It's still a lot of acrobatic silhouettes tumbling in front of moody colors and lighting. But he does do some cool things to tie the ridiculous circus gag at the end of the teaser into the space theme of the rest of the movie. As the credits open, Binder gives us a net that's catching silhouettes of falling circus people and props, evoking the chaos of Jaws' crashing into their performance. Those silhouettes are then joined and replaced by naked women that fly and tumble as if they were in zero gravity.

Binder uses more backgrounds than he did in The Spy Who Loved Me and they're all space-related: a cloud-covered moon, Earth from orbit, and stars in space, for instance. One of my favorite things isn't a background, but a flying woman whose silhouette fills with blue and red neon lines like an airline logo. A puzzling moment though is when a woman balances on a faceted, glass ball. I assume that's meant to represent the glass globes that Drax uses to try to destroy the world, but it looks totally different from those.

Over the credits is one of my least favorite Bond theme songs. John Barry was back for Moonraker and hired Hal Davis (the lyricist behind "We Have All the Time in the World") to help write the song. The words fall into my preferred category for Bond themes - a love song based around the title of the movie - but don't work all that well. "Moonraker" is used as a symbol for someone reaching for their dreams, but the singer refers to the dreamer as a third person, so it's just a simile when a metaphor - the singer is the Moonraker - would have been stronger.

The tune is no great shakes either. It succeeds in creating a soaring, weightless feeling, but by definition, that leaves it ungrounded. It's too ethereal. And sadly, even Shirley Bassey's voice can't rescue it. She's okay in it, but the song doesn't play to her strength, possibly because she was brought in at the last minute and didn't have time to make it her own. They'd wanted Johnny Mathis to record it, which would have been amazing, but he apparently didn't like the song and turned them down. There's a disco version over the end credits that I like a little more (because disco), but not even neon and spinning lights can make "Moonraker" a good song.

The rest of the music for Moonraker tends to be as goofy as the movie itself. I feel like a traitor for saying this, but I miss Marvin Hamlisch already with his generous use of the Bond theme. Barry goes for silly circus music as Jaws tries to fly and crashes into the big top, polka music while Bond's taking the hovercraft gondola for a tour around the Piazza San Marco, Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" when Jaws meets Dolly, and the theme from The Magnificent Seven for Bond on horseback. For that last one, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly would have been more appropriate since Bond's costume is clearly copying Clint Eastwood, but I'm never going to complain about having to hear the Magnificent Seven theme. It's dopey for a Bond movie, but sadly, that's where the series is headed.

All this novelty music doesn't leave much time for the Bond Theme, which only gets played a couple of times. It's in the teaser as Bond goes into a parachuteless dive after the pilot (probably my favorite moment in the whole movie) and again during the gondola/speedboat chase (before it gets ruined by the hovercraft). The From Russia with Love 007 Theme also comes up again during the Amazon River chase, but I think I enjoy spotting that nostalgic throwback more than I enjoy the music itself.

Top Ten Theme Songs

1. The Spy Who Loved Me ("Nobody Does It Better")
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Diamonds Are Forever
4. You Only Live Twice
5. From Russia With Love (John Barry instrumental version)
6. Live and Let Die
7. Dr No
8. Thunderball
9. Goldfinger
10. From Russia With Love (Matt Monro vocal version)

Top Ten Title Sequences

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

Moonraker (1979) | Villains

Hugo Drax has always been a villain I've loathed, but he's slowly forcing his way into my Love to Hate category. He's sort of lame, because he's just repeating Stromberg's motivations from the last movie, but more than that he's frustrating for being so undeservedly arrogant. He obviously has some intelligence, but you can't tell it from the way he conducts himself with Bond. There's something about him though and unlike Stromberg, certainly no one can claim that he's boring.

I've already mentioned how little information Bond has to go on in the Moonraker case. He shows up at Drax Industries grasping at straws and Drax immediately starts trying to have Bond killed. Bond knows nothing, and Drax hands him everything. His stupidity extends to his keeping around Chang, but we'll get to that in a minute.

Drax irritates me from his very first scene. He's stolen his own space shuttle and he has the balls to act snotty about Britain's "losing" it. He's so tickled over his stupid paraphrase of Oscar Wilde's quote about parents. The man gets under my skin on a personal level and that's as much Michael Lonsdale's performance as it is the way he's written. I hate Drax. I hate his stupid face. The scary thing is that that may mean he's the most effective Bond villain ever, but I hate him too much to let him have that.

One moment makes me feel something for Drax other than seething malice. After all the stupid ways he's tried to kill Bond - by flight simulator, by hunting "accident," by freaking Coffin Gondola and anaconda - he complains that Bond persists "in defying my efforts to provide an amusing death for you." It's a wonderful moment of clarity for a character who's otherwise blind to his own faults.

AND the guy has an awesome hideout in an Amazon temple. So that's cool. I have no idea why he leads Bond right to it, but that's just the preposterous kind of person Drax is. I'm shocked that I'm actually going to put him in the Top Ten (for now), but he'll be low on the list.



Chang is the worst henchman ever. He's incompetent and clumsy, even when he's had time to prepare and surprise. He and Drax are peas in a pod.



Is Jaws the only henchman anymore? Stromberg hired him for The Spy Who Loved Me, then he was working for whomever Bond was investigating pre-Moonraker, and finally Drax hires him to replace Chang. I do like that he doesn't start off working for Drax. Drax's reaction when he finds out that Jaws is available is also pretty great. "Oh yes, well. If you can get him of course."

I notice that when Jaws attacks Bond at the cable car in Rio, he's got another bald accomplice with him like Sandor from The Spy Who Loved Me. I'm tempted to read too much into that, but don't have the energy.

Another cool thing is the creepy clown costume that Jaws wears during Carnaval. He cuts a horrifying figure as he silently shambles through the crowds of people. Sort of reminds me of Michael Myers in Halloween actually.

One really weird thing is that Jaws' teeth apparently aren't the only parts of his body that have been replaced with steel. Bond finds this out the hard way when he tries to kick Jaws in the balls. I wonder if Jaws' new girlfriend knows.

Which leads us to Dolly. Moonraker is a clash of tones and Jaws' girlfriend is the poster child for that. She's cartoonishly nerdy and silly; barely a character at all. But she brings real emotion to Jaws' story when he realizes that Drax is never going to let her live. The way I read that scene, I don't think Jaws is thinking about himself and his own place in Drax's future. He gives a significant look to Dolly and that's when he switches sides. Which is pretty great, because it means that Jaws' transformation is probably going to stick. If he was just out to save himself, we might expect to see him fighting Bond in a later movie. But Dolly has softened him and it's really sweet. I love that moment when he finally speaks and his voice is so gentle. Makes me wish we had seen Jaws later on, but as an ally.

Top Ten Villains

1. Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
2. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (From Russia With Love and Thunderball)
3. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
4. Francisco Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Dr. Kananga (Live and Let Die)
6. Doctor No (Dr. No)
7. Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me)
8. Emilio Largo (Thunderball)
9. Hugo Drax (Moonraker)
10. Rosa Klebb (From Russia With Love)

Top Ten Henchmen

1. Baron Samedi (Live and Let Die)
2. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
3. Grant (From Russia with Love)
4. Nick Nack (The Man with the Golden Gun)
5. Naomi (The Spy Who Loved Me)
6. Oddjob (Goldfinger)
7. Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me)
8. Irma Bunt (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
9. Miss Taro (Dr. No)
10. Tee Hee (Live and Let Die)

Moonraker (1979) | Women

I really like Drax's helicopter pilot, Corrine Dufour. Corinne Cléry plays her sweetly and also very smart. She doesn't fall for Bond's baloney, but she likes him anyway and I get the feeling that she's helping him simply because she knows Drax is creepy and up to something and she wants to do the right thing. It makes me legitimately sad when she dies, even though I kind of love how dramatic and spooky that scene is. It doesn't match the tone of the rest of Moonraker, but then Corrine belongs in a better film herself.



Manuela is an MI6 agent from Station VH in Brazil. She's a rubbish agent who obviously knows Bond's reputation and is looking forward to nothing but screwing him. She meets him in his hotel room wearing negligée and even tries to talk him out of investigating Drax's warehouse for no good reason that she offers. The impression that I get is that she wants to spend the whole evening having sex, but Bond is professional enough to cut that down to just the afternoon.

When they do go to the warehouse, it's being guarded by Jaws. I guess? It's not really clear why Jaws is there. At any rate, Jaws attacks Manuela while Bond's inside and she pulls a knife on the metal-toothed giant. I'm not saying that she should have come prepared to fight Jaws, but she doesn't even carry a pistol? And when he picks her up and tries to kill her, she doesn't make a peep, even when a crowd of people show up. It's no wonder we never see her again after that night. Bond's clearly dumped her and moved on alone with the investigation.



I feel like Holly Goodhead gets a lot of grief as a Bond Girl. Among my friends, she was the Christmas Jones of the series before the actual Christmas Jones showed up. I may have even felt that way myself. But the last few times I've watched Moonraker, I've decided that she gets a bad rap. It's probably her name.

Lois Chiles is as good an actress as most of the Bond Girls up to that point and I really like her character. She's smart, she's tough in a fight, she's a great pilot, and she is absolutely Bond's equal partner in saving the world. If anything, she may be so multi-talented as to be unbelievable, but this is a movie where Bond is an expert in the history of missionary work in South America. We need to cut her some slack for being a CIA agent and also an astronaut.

I also like that she's at least partially inspired by Gala Brand from the novel in that she's a law enforcement agent disguised as one of Drax's top employees. Brand is one of my favorite characters in Fleming, so I like that she's at least partially represented in Goodhead. On the other hand, Goodhead is also inspired by Anya Amasova from The Spy Who Loved Me with the whole rival-agents-who-learn-to-love angle. Moonraker is a giant copy cat.

One other minorly irritating thing about Goodhead is that it's never really explained why she's undercover at Drax Industries. What put the CIA on Drax's trail? There's no more reason for them to be investigating him than there is for MI6 to be there.

My Favorite Bond Women

1. Tracy Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)
2. Paula Caplan (Thunderball)
3. Tatiana Romanova (From Russia With Love)
4. Fiona Volpe (Thunderball)
5. Domino Derval (Thunderball)
6. Holly Goodhead (Moonraker)
7. Mary Goodnight (The Man with the Golden Gun)
8. Andrea Anders (The Man with the Golden Gun)
9. Honey Rider (Dr. No)
10. Anya Amasova (The Spy Who Loved Me)

Moonraker (1979) | Bond

Actors and Allies



Roger Moore is doing a fine job as Bond (or at least as his version of Bond). Connery didn't really settle into the role until his fourth film, Thunderball, and would never be that comfortable with it again. Moonraker is Moore's fourth and he's felt good in the role from the beginning.

I don't always give him credit for being as active as he is. He has a reputation for just joking and smooching his way through missions, but Moore's actually very good at the physical stuff whether he's being choked by Jaws or recovering from a bad spin in the spaceflight simulator. Even in a movie as silly as Moonraker, Moore is doing great work.

My only problem with Bond in this story is a script problem and even then it's not really Bond's issue. When he's given the assignment of figuring out what happened to the space shuttle, he has no clues whatsoever. He decides to begin his investigation not at the crash site or even talking to the people who inspected it, but at the facility where the shuttle was made? Why? What logical reason is there for starting there? Of course his "instincts" prove correct, but there's no believable rationale for his trip to visit Hugo Drax. What happens when Bond gets there is a subject for the Villains post, but it really irritates me that the movie kickstarts the investigation in such a horrible, obvious way.

Once Bond knows that he's on the right trail though, his detective work isn't half bad. Drax makes it easy for Bond to know who did it, but Bond has to work pretty hard to stop the scheme and that's fun to watch.

M seems unnecessarily irritated at Bond when the movie opens, but maybe he's just stressed about the missing shuttle. When Bond shows up in M's office, the boss is highly impatient and chastises Bond even though Bond was returning from another mission when he got the call to come in. I suppose though that there have been a lot of times when Bond's taken his time coming back. We don't really know how long it's been since the teaser sequence, so maybe M has reason to be cranky. How many times have we seen M check in with Bond at the end of a mission only to be embarrassed by catching Bond in a compromising position.

That's what happened at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, which might explain the souring of Bond's relationship with the Minister of Defense. In Spy, Bond calls him "Freddie" and the Minister seems to truly value Bond's skills. In Moonraker, the minister dismissively refers to Bond as "your man" when he's talking to M. That's after a huge embarrassment that he thinks is Bond's fault, but it's still a long way down from the relationship they appeared to enjoy in Spy. I'm wondering if catching Bond in bed with Major Amasova in front of General Gogol had something to do with that.

Speaking of Gogol, he also shows up briefly in Moonraker. It's almost a cameo appearance where he appears just long enough to deny that the Soviets had anything to do with Drax's satellite, but it's an important role. Of course the US and Britain would wonder if that mysterious, hidden satellite was Russian. And they wouldn't have much reason to believe Soviet denials about it, except that it's Gogol. Viewers trust him because we saw him being so chill in Spy, so we believe that the US and Britain trust him too.

Back to Bond's bosses though. They have reason to be ticked at him, but M does show some conspiratorial camaraderie with Bond after they're both chewed out by the MoD. Instead of following the MoD's suggestion about taking Bond off the case, M gives Bond even more freedom by letting him have a two week leave of absence to keep after Drax. That's the third time something like that's happened (On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Man with the Golden Gun being the other two), but I always like how it reminds me of the wonderful relationship between Bond and M in the books.

This is also the third time that Bond hasn't flirted with Moneypenny. There was a little of it in The Man with the Golden Gun, but their relationship is purely professional (though friendly) in Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker. I don't remember how it goes for the rest of the Moore films, so I'm curious to see if we're done with that. If so, it may suggest not very nice things. Lois Maxwell was exactly eight months older than Roger Moore. Was she considered too old for him to flirt with? Lois Chiles (Holly Goodhead) was 20 years younger than Bond, but that's okay? I don't mean to sound surprised. This is an old, old story in Hollywood and Bond movies were never known for their awesome treatment of women. But I also need to be careful about getting too upset, because for all I know, we'll see Bond and Moneypenny affectionately teasing each other again in For Your Eyes Only. I'm expressing some preemptive indignation and that's not really fair.

Best Quip



"He had to fly," after blowing Drax out an airlock.

That's Bond's best quip. Top honors actually go to Q though for "I think he's attempting reentry, sir."

Worst Quip



"Play it again, Sam," after dropping Chang into a piano.

Gadgets



There are a bunch of cool ones in Moonraker. M's apparently got a mirror that turns into a briefing monitor in his office. I bet he hates it and never uses it.

The big, personal gadget of the movie is the wrist dartgun. It has blue-tipped armor piercing darts and red-tipped cyanide darts. Either of which would've been great against Jaws or that anaconda if Bond had remembered to use them. That's keeping this one out of the Top Ten for me. I hate weapons and powers that only get used when it's favorable for the plot and don't exist the rest of the time (see: The Force in Star Wars: The Clone Wars).

A similar case is Bond's watch with a built-in explosive and detonator. I can't decide if I like or hate the way he pulls that out of his butt. It's not like the wrist gun, because I don't know of an earlier instance where it would have come in handy, but it does seem very convenient for him to suddenly have it. Then again, why wouldn't he have something like that? I don't necessarily need it to have it explained.

Q's safe-cracking technology has improved since You Only Live Twice. I like the x-ray device in a cigarette case. I question the need for "007" monogrammed on his microfilm camera though. Seems a little ostentatious, but then again, Bond is world-famous and I bet it helps him hook up in bars.

The two major gadgets are both watercraft, but they couldn't be more different. First, there's the totally ridiculous motorboat/hovercraft gondola. The motorboat part is actually kind of cool, but the hovercraft is bonkers. It's there as a joke and nothing more. I know a lot of people like that kind of thing about Moore's Bond, but it's too excessive for me.

The other boat though is amazing. It's a Glastron CV23HT outfitted with mines, a torpedo, and roof that converts into a hang glider. All of that stuff is cool, but not as cool as the look of the boat itself. That chase sequence on the Amazon River is my favorite part of the whole movie.

Top Ten Gadgets

1. Lotus Esprit (The Spy Who Loved Me)
2. Aston Martin DB V (Goldfinger and Thunderball)
3. Jet pack (Thunderball)
4. Glastron CV23HT (Moonraker)
5. Little Nellie (You Only Live Twice)
6. Rocket cigarettes (You Only Live Twice)
7. Ski pole rocket (The Spy Who Loved Me)
8. Magnetic buzzsaw watch (Live and Let Die)
9. Attaché case (From Russia with Love)
10. Propeller SCUBA tank with built-in spearguns (Thunderball)

Bond's Best Outfit



I continue to be surprised by how much I like Bond's '70s fashions. I especially dig this all-black outfit, even with its giant-size collar. Very dangerous and romantic. Bond actually wears it twice in the movie. I would too.

Bond's Worst Outfit



The yellow space jumpsuit is bad enough, but what the heck's going on with that "helmet"? Goodhead makes both work, but as long as we're ripping off Star Wars, Bond should trade his in for a black vest and a blaster.

Moonraker (1979) | Story

Plot Summary

A space shuttle disappears and its creator pretty much raises his hand and says, "I did it!" so that Bond can catch him while hoping to evoke Star Wars and copy everything about The Spy Who Loved Me.

Influences

The end of The Spy Who Loved Me announced For Your Eyes Only as the next movie, but Cubby Broccoli had made that decision before he knew about Star Wars. After 1977, everyone was trying to cash in on Star Wars' popularity and the Bond movies were no exception. Moonraker, the only Bond novel that hadn't yet been adapted, had the perfect title for a scifi film. Or at least Bond's version of one.

By 1979, everyone was buzzing about NASA's new space shuttle program. The first test flight wouldn't be until 1981, so the program was still a huge source of excitement and speculation when Moonraker was being developed. That made it a perfect science fiction plot element for Bond and the bad guys to fight over.

The space stuff doesn't really come into play until the final half hour, but the movie reminds viewers of where it's headed by throwing in references to other scifi movies from around that time. Drax's gamekeeper signals the end of the pheasant hunt by sounding the first three notes of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra," made popular in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And a Drax laboratory is protected by a keypad that opens the door when the five-note tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is entered.

But it's in that last half-hour that everything goes nuts with laser gun battles on a space station. The biggest homage to Star Wars is when Bond is in a space ship trying to blow up a planet-destroying globe (and even has to switch to manual at the last minute to do it).

But for all the scifi references, Moonraker is just as inspired by the huge success of The Spy Who Loved Me.

How Is the Book Different?

In the novel, Hugo Drax is trying to destroy London, but that's not enough for a movie following Karl Stromberg's plot to wipe out all life on Earth. Moonraker lifts several plot points right out of The Spy Who Loved Me, including Bond's relationship with a rival agent from another country. In the novel, Bond doesn't end up with the girl, which makes that story unique and cool, but we certainly couldn't have that in the movies. I'll point out other similarities to Spy as we go.

Moment That's Most Like Fleming



Holly Goodhead is very different from Gala Brand in terms of personality, but the idea of Bond's working with a female agent while dealing with some mutually adversarial feelings is right out of the book.

There are a couple of other nods to the novel, too. One is the Minister of Defense's reference to playing bridge with Drax (though it's M in the book). The other is the scene where Drax leaves Bond and Goodhead in an office that's going to be destroyed by rocket flames. In the movie, they escape through the exhaust vents, which is also a reference to a scene from the novel. The movie's just putting them closer together.

Moment That's Least Like Fleming



Like with The Spy Who Loved Me, it's all the gags. The Bond films have always put a light, humorous spin on the stories, but now we're getting into over-the-top, goofy territory like the couple who won't stop kissing after their gondola is destroyed by the villains' speedboat. Or a smoker with a hacking cough who throws away his cigarette when he sees a coffin floating by.

There are also a couple of recurring gags from The Spy Who Loved Me that I'll mention in the Continuity section below.

Cold Open



Moonraker's teaser doesn't quite top The Spy Who Loved Me's, but it's in the same ballpark. The focus is on another big stunt and Moonraker has a good one.

The teaser begins with the theft of a space shuttle off the back of a plane that's transporting it. It's a cool idea, but not all that exciting to watch in execution. Still, it's weird and raises questions about what we're dealing with.

Since the shuttle was on loan to Britain from the US, cut to M who's trying to get a hold of Bond to give him the assignment of solving the mystery. Bond is still in transit home from his last mission though and in some trouble since everyone on his plane are actually bad guys out to kill him. We don't know anything about his mission, but it seems to be one of those situations where Bond has succeeded and some of the henchmen (including Jaws, another Spy Who Loved Me element) are trying to get revenge.

The evil pilot bails and then Jaws shoves Bond out without a parachute. In one of the coolest things Bond's ever done, he catches up to the pilot, fights the guy, then steals his parachute. It's more thrilling than the Spy parachute trick, but I give Spy the edge for leading into it with an awesome ski chase and a ski pole rocket.

Also, Moonraker loses points by having Jaws' parachute not open, then showing Jaws flapping his arms ridiculously as if he's trying to fly. The music turns goofy and Jaws crashes into a circus tent, but of course he'll be okay later on. Ludicrous.

Top 10 Cold Opens

1. The Spy Who Loved Me
2. Moonraker
3. Thunderball
4. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
5. Goldfinger
6. The Man with the Golden Gun
7. From Russia With Love
8. Diamonds Are Forever
9. You Only Live Twice
10. Live and Let Die

Movie Series Continuity



Again ripping off The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker opens the same way after the credits with agency leaders (M, Q, and the Minister of Defense this time instead of Gogol) looking very serious and waiting for their agent to arrive. This is the Minister of Defense's second appearance and it's not immediately clear why he's there. Bernard Lee (M) is getting older, but he's in the movie quite a bit and doesn't appear to be slowing down. He doesn't need the extra help running MI6, so I don't know what's up with the MoD's micromanaging. I'll see if I can figure this out in the next post.

Meanwhile, we still have lots of field action by M as he shows up in Venice with the MoD and then South America with Q and Moneypenny. This continues to make no sense to me, but it's a standard part of Bond films by now.

Bond continues to be an international celebrity even among those who aren't in the intelligence community. Drax knows who Bond is and what he does and tells him, "Your reputation precedes you."

Bond acts like a know it all about the way a space shuttle works, which is pretty lame. In 1979, everyone knew that the cool thing about space shuttles was their ability to be reused. Bond talks about it like he's just broken the DaVinci Code. He makes up for it later though when he's not only able to recognize a chemical formula from memory, but identify the specific orchid that produces it and discuss the history of the missionary who discovered it. Nicely done, you irritating bastard, you.

The crowd reactions to the surfacing Lotus were so "hilarious" in The Spy Who Loved Me that Moonraker makes sure to throw some in, too. When Bond's weirdo hovercraft gondola takes its lap around the Piazza San Marco, the same wine guy from Spy is there to look strangely at his bottle. And am I mistaken or is that the same dog in the crowd looking very "been there done that" this time? His nonchalance is more than made up for though by the single dumbest thing to happen in any Bond movie ever: the pigeon double-take.

Finally, Bond's hat rack trick makes a strange return when he tosses his gondolier hat onto the boat's fórcola. Too bad Moneypenny (or anyone else) isn't around to see it.

"Moonraker": The Comic Strip

With their adaptation of Moonraker, Henry Gammidge and John McLusky depart even further from the tone of Ian Fleming. Now Bond isn't just narrating in caption boxes, he's drawn talking directly to the reader. As I said when I wrote about the Live and Let Die adaptation, it's no good comparing the strip to Fleming's style. The author was absolutely right to be concerned that the comics would dumb down his stories and it's best that I just accept it.

It's still interesting though to see what changes Gammidge made to Fleming's plot, because we do get a couple in "Moonraker." The whole day-in-the-life-of-Bond opening is gone, so we don't get to meet Bond's secretary or even read mention of the spy's home life and personal habits. Instead, with no explanation as to why, Bond begins the story by relating the public history of Hugo Drax.

After that, Bond's first in-story appearance is sitting in M's office and being told that Drax cheats at cards. Readers of the novel understand why that's important, but the comic doesn't really say and the mission comes across as embarassingly petty, especially without the benefit of M's own involvement. There's no mention of personal favors and M isn't even revealed to be a member at Drax's club. He doesn't go to Blades with Bond, but sends the agent out to investigate on his own as if this were any other assignment.



Once the card game begins between Bond and Drax though, the rest of the story plays out like it does in the novel, though severely abridged. We never do get an explanation of why the Secret Service is involved in a murder investigation on British soil, and there's no mention of the mystery of Drax's mustachioed men.

McLusky has a lot of fun with Drax's appearance though, including his comical moustache. And he draws a gorgeous Gala Brand, though she's blonde for some reason. He's still working on those facial expressions and I've started to notice that his Bond has a perpetual smirk. I kind of like it, but it's not much like the super dark Bond of these early novels. He's more of a children's adventure hero, but that really fits the tone that Gammidge seems to be going for.

From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming

Major SPOILERS BELOW for the novel From Russia With Love.

I’m confused about how much time has passed between Moonraker and From Russia With Love. That’s a weird problem to have, I know, because it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme, but Fleming is so specific about it and his dates don’t match up. At the end of Moonraker, M says he’s sending Bond away for a month until the heat blows over, and Bond decides he’s going to France. Then, as Diamonds Are Forever opens, Bond says that he’s only been back from France for two weeks. But in From Russia With Love, the Soviets discuss Bond’s recent career and date Diamonds as “last year” and Moonraker as three years ago.

The obvious answer is that Fleming simply forgot that he’d placed Diamonds so close to Moonraker. He said at the beginning of Moonraker that typically Bond has only one or two big, dangerous cases a year – and of course the novels were being published once a year – so that’s probably what Fleming was thinking as he wrote Russia. That’s not very satisfying, so my own No-Prize theory is that the France trip mentioned in Diamonds isn’t actually the same as the one at the end of Moonraker. Fleming obviously intended them to be, but if we say they aren’t, then those adventures can be a year apart and we’re back on track again.

The timeline isn’t the only problem the Soviets cause in From Russia With Love. The biggest one sadly isn’t their plans for Bond, but how much of the novel they take over. Stephen King is famous for dedicating pages and pages of background to minor characters, but Fleming did it first. Every contributor to the Soviets’ plan gets at least a paragraph of personal history and most of them a page or two. Red Grant the assassin gets multiple chapters. If I was reading the series a book per year as they were released, this wouldn’t be that big a problem. I might still have been a little put out, but I could perhaps admire the risk Fleming took more than I do now. Marathoning a book a week, I want to keep moving and I had a hard time slogging through the first half of Russia before Bond shows up.

Moonraker by Ian Fleming, Chapters 13-25

It was the end of March when I covered the first half of Moonraker and it's ridiculous that it's taken me this long to follow up. I've come up with a plan though to keep me motivated: a deadline by which I need to have this project completed. It's over a year away, but it's still extremely ambitious and includes all the non-Fleming novels and even the Young James Bond series. I fear for my sanity.

We're at the end of Moonraker now, so SPOILERS BELOW.

In the last half of Live and Let Die, I talked a little about the idea of Bond as a "blunt instrument." That's what Judi Dench's M will call him and it refers to the movie Bond's technique of getting captured and shaking up the villain's operation from the inside. In Live and Let Die, Bond is captured, but it's not a crucial ingredient to his success the way it becomes in a lot of the movies. His mission's already going to succeed; his capture simply complicates the plot by questioning whether or not Bond will survive. The literary Bond isn't quite a blunt instrument at that point.

That starts to change though as Moonraker moves into its second half. Having looked around Drax's operation and not finding any immediate clues to the murder of the previous head of security, Bond decides to try a different approach. There are enough details of the case that make Bond suspicious, but he needs to be diplomatic in his investigation and not tick off Drax in case Drax is innocent. There are limits to what Bond can do and it's in Moonraker that we learn that if he has a license to kill, it's a limited one. As his suspicions about Drax grow, he thinks about his options and realizes that he can't just kill the man without risking hanging himself.

Going to bed on Tuesday night though, Bond decides not to be too diplomatic. "If his actions aroused suspicion he would not be dismayed," Fleming writes. "One of his objects was to attract into his orbit the same forces that had concerned himself with Tallon, for of one thing he felt reasonably certain, Major Tallon had not died because he loved Gala Brand." Bond is questioning the official motive for the murder and believes that if he can tick off the same people responsible for Tallon's death, then maybe they'll come for Bond, too. That's totally a blunt instrument approach.

He says it more explicitly later to Brand - the Scotland Yard officer working undercover at Drax's facility - after a dramatic attempt on their lives. She's nervous and uncertain, but Bond is pleased that his plan is working. "Can't you see what we've done this afternoon?" he asks her. "Just what had to be done. We've made the enemy show his hand. Now we've got to take the next step and find out who the enemy is and why he wanted us out of the way."

One final example is late in the novel when all masks are off. Drax is revealed to be the mastermind, not only behind Tallon's death, but of a larger conspiracy to destroy London with a nuclear warhead on the Moonraker missile. Bond and Brand have in turn blown their cover and are in danger of blowing the mission if Drax is given time to think about his next moves. So Bond intentionally goads Drax into a rage, even though it means Drax will take it out on Bond physically.

With every word Drax's face had become more contorted with rage, his eyes were red with it, the sweat of fury was dripping off his jowls on to his shirt, the lips were drawn back from the gaping teeth and a string of saliva had crept out of his mouth and was hanging down from his chin. Now, at the last private-school insult that must have awoken God knows what stinging memories, he leapt up from his chair and lunged round the desk at Bond, his hairy fists flailing.

Bond gritted his teeth and took it.

This is what makes Bond a great hero. I said at the end of Live and Let Die that he's an extremely dark, tortured character, but that that's what makes him so perfect for his job. He's willing to endure enormous punishment in defense of his country. I suspect we'll see this more and more as the series progresses and he realizes the effectiveness of the blunt instrument approach.

Because of Bond's change in tactics, Moonraker abandons the murder mystery plot that got it going. Bond doesn't know the details at first, but he's convinced that Tallon's murder was simply collateral damage in a larger plot involving the Moonraker missile. That becomes his focus and Brand becomes his partner in the investigation. And a remarkably capable partner she is, too.

When Brand supports Bond's suspicions to Drax of one of Drax's scientists, Bond reconsiders his childish reaction to her initial coldness towards him. He begins to think of her positively and professionally, noting at one point that she's "an extremely efficient policewoman. She knows how to kick, and where; she can break my arm probably more easily and quickly than I can break hers." He still totally wants to sleep with her, but unlike the way he was thinking the night they met, he realizes that's not her only value.

Her defenses towards him come down as well when he invites her to walk down to the beach and inspect the facility's defenses there. Fleming shows off his gift for prose as he paints a lovely picture of the scene from the cliff:

Between the sands of the coast, along the twelve-fathom channel of the Inner Leads, there were half a dozen ships beating up through the Downs, the thud of their engines coming clearly off the quiet sea [...] As far as the eye could reach the Eastern Approaches of England were dotted with traffic plying towards near or distant horizons, towards a home port, or towards the other side of the world. It was a panorama full of colour and excitement and romance and the two people on the edge of the cliff were silent as they stood for a time and watched it all.

The quietness and beauty of the experience eases the tensions between the two characters and from that moment on they're inseparable allies. Brand is no Bond Girl in the classic sense of the term. Even before this scene, Fleming has started writing sections of text from her point of view (bringing up the Hoagie Carmichael comparison again, by the way, in reference to Bond's bone structure). He shifts easily from her POV to Bond's and back again, writing Brand as a tough, resourceful woman who ultimately comes up with a plan that will save not only the day, but also her and Bond's lives. Moonraker is almost as much her story as it is Bond's.

There's an awesome scene after their mission has been discovered by Drax and they're hiding from him. As it looks like Drax is about to find them, Bond "felt that Gala was waiting for him to explain. To do something. To protect them." But that's Bond's own imagination at work. As he tries to give her some patronizing advice about remaining hidden, she whispers angrily to him to shut up. She still follows his advice though, because it's not his solution she objects to, but the way he delivers it. I got a real sense of equality and partnership in that scene, not so much from Bond, but from Fleming, which was a welcome change after Solitaire in Live and Let Die.

But if Brand is a vast improvement over Solitaire, Drax suffers in comparison to Mr. Big. Drax's offensive arrogance makes him an intriguing personality, but it also makes him careless. Big was a brilliant criminal who used his large organization to increase his own power and wealth. Drax is a blowhard with delusions of grandeur; in many ways the prototype for the over-the-top Bond villains of the movies. He's the first monologuer of the series (though he has a believable reason for doing it and plans to release his explanation to the press the following day anyway) and his scheme to nuke London creates much larger stakes than simply funding Soviet espionage. It's also his own hubris that causes his death when he could have simply and quietly escaped.

It's precisely Drax's overbearing pride though that make it so wonderful when Bond puts him in his place. In the first half of the book, Bond's victory over Drax at cards is so sweet because Drax is such an insufferable dick. And there's a great callback to that towards the end when Drax simply has to know how Bond could have possibly discovered the manner in which Drax had been cheating. Bond just shrugs and says, "My eyes."

But though Bond gets the best of Drax, one of the things I love most about Moonraker is that he never gets the best of Gala Brand. He may fantasize about going away with her after the case, but that's because he never stops to consider that she may have other plans. He ultimately learns that she's clearly attracted to him, but not so much that she's willing to put aside her own interests or previous commitments. If that does anything to forward Bond's character development in relation to women, Moonraker doesn't reveal it. The book simply ends with him and Brand going their separate ways. But I have to think that it's healthy for Bond to realize that - unlike Solitaire - all women can't be his prize for a job well done. Maybe in Diamonds Are Forever we'll see if that notion sticks.

Moonraker by Ian Fleming, Chapters 1-12

For better or worse, Moonraker is a lot different from the first two Bond novels. That's apparent not just from the first few chapters, but also from the way Fleming divides the story into three parts that cover a traditional work week. Part One is called "Monday," Part Two is "Tuesday, Wednesday," and Part Three is "Thursday, Friday."

The plot is more than just following Bond through a typical week, but you can't tell it from the first couple of chapters. Rather than repeating the cold open technique of the first two novels, Fleming begins Moonraker at the Secret Service shooting range where he reveals that Bond is the best shot in the organization. It's a cool, gadgety range with targets that use beams of light to shoot back at the firer, but Fleming is intentionally mundane in his description. This is routine activity for Bond on a Monday morning.

The first chapter continues the theme of routine. The name of the chapter is "Secret Paper-Work" and that pretty accurately describes the level of action. After the range, Bond heads up to the office he shares with the other two Double-O agents and a secretary named Loelia Ponsonby whom Bond insists on calling "Lil." Fleming explains that all of the Double-Os have hit on her at some point, but have also all been shot down.

It's interesting and cool that Fleming fleshes Ponsonby out more in a few paragraphs than he did Solitaire in all of Live and Let Die. I felt like I got to know her well and I like her dedication to her job despite the serious sexism she encounters there. Fleming doesn't pull any punches describing it either and he shows a lot more awareness that it's a problem than he did about racism or ageism in Live and Let Die. "It was true," he writes, "that an appointment in the Secret Service was a form of peonage. If you were a woman there wasn't much of you left for other relationships. It was easier for the men. They had an excuse for fragmentary affairs. For them marriage and children and a home were out of the question if they were to be of any use 'in the field' as it was cosily termed. But, for the women, an affair outside the Service automatically made you a 'security risk' and in the last analysis you had a choice of resignation from the Service and a normal life, or of perpetual concubinage to your King and Country."