Moonraker

**Moonraker** is a 1979 film starring Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel and Corinne Cléry, directed by Lewis Gilbert, written by Christopher Wood and produced by Albert R. Broccoli.

The film was a financial success as it generated a profit of $37 million.

## Plot

A Drax Industries Moonraker (a VTHL spaceplane based on the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter) on loan to the United Kingdom is hijacked in midair while on a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, which is destroyed, but no wreckage of the Shuttle is found. M, head of MI6, assigns James Bond, Agent 007, to investigate. En route to England, Bond is attacked and pushed out of an airplane by the mercenary assassin Jaws (whom he previously met in The Spy Who Loved Me). He survives by stealing a parachute from the pilot, whilst Jaws lands on a trapeze net within a circus tent.

At the Drax Industries spaceplane-manufacturing complex in California, Bond meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and his henchman Chang. Bond also meets Dr. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut, and survives an assassination attempt while inside a centrifuge chamber. Drax's personal pilot, Corinne Dufour, sleeps with Bond and then helps Bond find blueprints for a glass vial made in Venice; Drax discovers her involvement and has her killed by his pet dogs.

Bond again encounters Goodhead in Venice and observes her snooping around a door near the glass factory. Then he is chased through the canals by Drax's henchmen. He returns to the factory at night to investigate, and discovers a secret biological laboratory, and learns that the glass vials are to hold a nerve gas deadly to humans, but harmless to plants and animals. Chang attacks Bond, but Bond hurls him through the stained glass clockface of the Saint Mark's clocktower, killing him; during the fight, Bond finds evidence that Drax is moving his operation to Rio de Janeiro. Rejoining Goodhead, he deduces that she is a CIA agent spying on Drax and sleeps with her. Bond has saved one of the vials he found earlier, as the only evidence of the now-empty laboratory; he gives it to M for analysis, who permits him to go to Rio de Janeiro under the pretense of being on leave.

Bond survives attacks by Jaws, whom Drax previously hired as Chang's replacement, during Rio Carnival and on the Sugarloaf Cable Car. After Jaws' cable car crashes, he is rescued from the rubble by Dolly, a young woman, and the two fall in love. Drax's forces capture Goodhead, but Bond escapes; he learns that the toxin comes from a rare orchid indigenous to the Amazon jungle. Bond travels the Amazon River and comes under attack from Drax's forces, before eventually locating his base. Captured by Jaws, Bond is taken to Drax and witnesses four Moonrakers lifting off. Drax explains that he stole back the loaned Shuttle because another in his fleet had developed a fault during assembly. Bond and Goodhead are encaged by Jaws in a meeting room under the launch platform, and narrowly escape being burned alive by the exhausts of Moonraker 5, which is carrying Drax, and pose as pilots on Moonraker 6. The shuttles dock with a huge, city-like space station, hidden from radar by a cloaking device.

Bond and Goodhead disable the radar jamming cloaking device; the United States sends a platoon of Marines aboard another shuttle to intercept the now-visible space station. Jaws captures Bond and Goodhead, to whom Drax reveals his plan to destroy human life by launching 50 globes that would dispense the nerve gas into Earth's atmosphere. Drax had transported several dozen genetically perfect young men and women of varying races to the space station in the shuttles. They would live there until Earth was safe again for human life; their descendants would be the seed for a "new master race". Bond persuades Jaws to switch his allegiance by getting Drax to admit that anyone not measuring up to his physical standards, including him and Dolly, would be exterminated. Jaws attacks Drax's guards, and a laser battle ensues between Drax's forces and Bond, Jaws, and the Marines (attacking on MMUs). Drax's forces are defeated as the station is destroyed, while Bond shoots and ejects Drax into space. Bond and Goodhead use Drax's laser-armed Moonraker 5 to destroy the three launched globes and return to Earth. It is revealed that Jaws and Dolly, who ejected themselves in one of Drax's escape pods, after toasting with a bottle of champagne, are being recovered by the Marines. Bond's superiors get a video feed of Moonraker 5 and are bemused to see Bond and Goodhead making love in zero gravity.