How do you recycle a story that is itself the hero's journey RECYCLED IN SPACE?
Well for a start you don't give him a journey, by which I mean a "character arc." They tried that once and it got the audience all Lazenbothered. So instead it's more of the same but bigger and flashier and more expensive. It's the Star Wars prequels/toy adverts thirty years early. There's no Jar Jar Binks in this one, thank Christ, although there is a double-taking pigeon, which some philistines seem to think is just as bad.
'tisn't, really. a) it's far more in keeping with the "tone" of the film; a double-taking pigeon belongs in a film where a man has stolen a space shuttle back from the US government in order to complement his own fleet so that he can go up to his space station - invisible, somehow - and rain gaseous death down on us Earthlings and the hero drives a motorized gondola in the course of stopping him and Does Violence with a man with metal teeth and forgets he's wearing a wrist-gun during these fights (...gasp, pause for breath) in a way that cartoon rabbit does NOT belong in a film about taxes and politics and the start of a journey that transforms an eight-year-old kid into Cyborg Space Hitler. If anything's out of place in Moonraker, it's the bit with the dogs. More on that later. And, b) it takes up about 2 seconds, if that, of screentime and is thus considerably easier for amateur angry nerds to edit out than Jar Jar Binks is in The Phantom Menace. The effect is totally rubbish, I'll give you that, and given what happened next I'm not convinced John Glen should have gotten to helm five (a record) Bond films on the basis of having rendered that, but those are other rants. This is Moonraker, as the credits have gotten done telling us. Ian Fleming's Moonraker, appar', but Captain America 2 retained more elements of the novel than this did. No wonder this is the last "Ian Fleming's (Title)" until Casino Royale's adaptation/expansion rolls around.
Oh, while we're on the titles: "Moonraker" as sung by Shirley Bassey is gorgeous and beautiful and poetic and in no way deserving of being attached to this rot.
Is it rot because it ripped off Star Wars/previous Bonds? Nah. Ian Fleming wasn't a paragon of originality - stole a quote from Jack London for Bond's epitaph, the cad - and the Bonds are all by and large products of their times. I "quite" like For Your Eyes Only, and I tend not to think that the film's "goodness" - not greatness - is ruined by having the Iron Lady mistake a parrot for Britain's top sexist pig of a "secret" agent. It was 1979. Everybody was cashing in on Star Wars, George Lucas most of all.
But it is a very silly film.
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