Hacker Cinema
Moonraker
1979 · Film · 126 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
ActionAdventureThrillerScience Fiction
After Drax Industries' Moonraker space shuttle is hijacked, secret agent James Bond is assigned to investigate, traveling to California to meet the company's owner, the mysterious Hugo Drax. With the help of scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, Bond soon uncovers Drax's nefarious plans for humanity, all the while fending off an old nemesis, Jaws, and venturing to Venice, Rio, the Amazon...and even outer space.
4 positive3 negative1 mixed15 neutralfrom 23 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
23 comments on Hacker News
There's an argument that Earth, as a biodome completely isolated from outside with its own atmosphere, also isn't self sustaining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
Perhaps I just feel old.. but I really, really wish they'd go back to making Bond films like Moonraker, Diamonds are Forever, and the Man with the Golden Gun. No big explosions, just nice cars, suave hero, good stories, and all the spy gadgets and things many of us love.
Albert Broccoli had the formula right and IMHO we should go back.
As a thought experiment, I like to wonder what would be the maximal amount of damage to humanity an extremely wealthy person could do entirely legally.
Ian Fleming explored that idea rather effectively with Hugo Drax in the original Moonraker novel (which doesn't have much besides the name in common with the movie.)
The way things are playing out, Drax must have been Musk's childhood hero.
My take after reading those is that the films are generally better works, but the other thing that's worth remembering is that Eon was out of the business of "adapting" Fleming novels after _Live and Let Die_. The follow-up (_The Man With The Golden Gun_) shares a title with a novel, but little else, and after that the films are mostly just a pastiche of whatever's-hot-in-Hollywood (e.g., _Moonraker_ having a space battle) and story elements pulled from lesser Fleming works and short stories.
The exception obviously is the _Casino Royale_ with Daniel Craig, which most fans view as one of the best Bond films. I've forgotten the specifics, but that book was unavailable to Eon for decades due to some copyright and licensing shenanigans.
You know your movie quotes, my deepest respect, Sir :)
Moonraker :)
I've never really been a bond fan, but of course the craig era eschews much of the almost 100% of the camp of previous generations. Except (and you'll need to pardon me, i've seen each of these movies at most once and they don't really stick in my brain at all) maybe the villan who's face had been eaten by acid or something, it's not jawz or oddjob levels of camp but it's getting there.
Earlier bonds i've seen a few here and there but missed many. Like I've seen moonraker, but never thunderball, view to a kill but not goldeneye, octopussy but not never say never again. I couldn't tell you what any of the plots were (other than i'm pretty sure they go to a moon base in moonraker) or which villan goes with which film. Bond, to me, has always been kind of a mystery to me, how do these terrible films keep getting made?
I will also say that 'yes' to thor rangnarok, no to 'love and thunder' which i thought got mired in too many plots and had too many inappropriately timed jokes. Like do the Jane arc or do the Gor arc, but if you do either right they don't both fit in the film. So instead they opted to do a half assed version of each.
See also: Technothriller (1) which is on the edge between thriller and sci-fi - e.g. An action movie with a computer virus bouncing off satellites to hack a moon mission could have little or no "fictional science".
James Bond in "Moonraker" 1979 fits this category.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-thriller
Moonraker is one of the only movies to properly depict a Shuttle launch, and it came out before the Shuttle ever flew.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH3EsUTPihg
The article talks about Moonraker. It is imo the best Flemming Bond book, and in the running for the worst movie. The plot of the movie and book are not related.
If you want an idea of the plot of the book, you can watch "Die another day" which is the same. I wont spoil it, but read the book and watch the movie and you'll see what I mean.
I don't know how much Fleming's script differed from the book (and Die another day transposed the whole thing into a "modern" world with North Korea and the bad guy) but in a sense the Fleming book version had been made
I go for James Bond references, when I can. 'Moonraker' is always a great choice.
Sometimes I'm constrained to a specific starting letter, so I've had to stretch it at times, like when I needed an 'S-' word... ended up going with 'Sinatra' since Nancy Sinatra performed 'You Only Live Twice' for that movie
Um... Who would be the villain? What's his evil plan? My comment was analogous to "If COVID gets really bad, then Elan's Eatery has more outdoor seating and a better location for curb-side pickup than any other restaurant in town."
(Yes, I know that "Moonraker" was an extremely profitable Bond film. No matter how idiotic the [cough][gag]science in it was, Hugo Drax was trying to wipe out most of humanity.)
That's more excuse than argument, to me.
I think that's basically an admission to packaging and marketing a new franchise under the Bond brand.
Anyway, all the Bond movies were campy or felt B-movie-ish to some extent. Each actor did it in a different way, but they all did it. And don't forget that Moonraker exists. Which I love, but come on.
The self-parody wasn't always explicit or obvious, but it was always blatantly there. Running on alligators, breaking the 4th wall, an eyebrow wax as a (racist by today's standards) disguise.
It was always there.
To nitpick, that list has at least three British films pop up in the latter half of the 20th century (Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever and Moonraker). Relaxing to "non-Anglosphere" is still very notable though.
Why would faking it with a soundstage and some actors in a room, and some small models, cost so much more? A big budget Hollywood film like James Bond Moonraker (1979) was 1/1000th the cost of the Apollo program, and with no famous actors/actresses, simpler script, TV quality, surely a fake would be cheaper than that?
If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pockets it lined.
> zero gravity laser battles
Oddly when I first saw the movie version of Moonraker that scene shattered my suspension of disbelief.
Up until that film most Bond gadgets had been reasonably believeable as achievable by a sufficiently funded organisation. But suddenly secret fleets of Shuttles, space stations and laser-equipped Space Marines? Nope.
My dad took me to see most of the Bond movies in the late 70s/early 80s (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only) and these were some of the fondest memories I have of growing up and spending time with him.
There was just something about Roger Moore as Bond. He managed to hit the perfect blend of suave and exciting, with just the right amount of irreverence and camp.
It's subjective, but since Sean Connery starred in many other high profile movies and thus diluted his image a bit, Roger Moore's may be the one true James Bond. His James Bond movies were epic, e.g. Moonraker (launching several Space Shuttles at once anyone?).
As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would not have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.
We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.
For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.
That would be the "most popular" films of 1979, as rated in recent years.
Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office:
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_us&title_type=feature&year=1979,1979
Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.
The problem is not prior art, but the descriptive or generic nature of the term.
Just because there's a software company selling music or even a music label with trademarks on 'Apple' doesn't mean I cannot call a song about apples 'Apple Song'. See the case cited in section b of [1] as to why 'space marine' might not be the best choice if you want to put a trademark on a book's title.
'Prior art' is helpful insofar as it establishes the nature of the term in question. The term 'space marine' is not as widely used as I initially believed (eg it's neither used in Starship Troopers nor Aliens, and might not be in Starcraft - did not verify with the game itself and online sources are ambiguous).
However, it can still be found in a lot of places:
Misfit by Heinlein, Grayson Space Marine Corps in David Weber's Honorverse, Doomguy and the Quake marines, the Star Blazers TV series, Death of the Daleks, the movie 'Space Marines' from 1997, Colonel Scott of the US Space Marines from Moonraker, to name the ones I could come up with.
[1] http://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/titles.html
There were Space Marines in the 007 movie Moonraker.
Bond film tech is supposed to be slightly better than what we have. In the 1963 "From Russia with Love", Bond had a car phone. In Moonraker, Drax has a hidden space station. In "Die Another Day", the fight scene use robots with lasers that are powerful enough to sear steel and drill a hole through a head - in a fraction of a second.
I'm with Double0Seven in saying that the the server uses fan-less machines.
I really enjoyed the music and atmosphere. It really made you feel like you were in a James Bond movie. I also enjoyed all the shout-outs to the old movies too - stuff like the Moonraker level.