Drax explains that he stole back the loaned Shuttle because another in his fleet had developed a fault during assembly. Captured by Jaws, Bond is taken to Drax and witnesses four Moonrakers lifting off. Bond travels the Amazon River and comes under attack from Drax's forces, before eventually locating his base. Drax's forces capture Goodhead, but Bond escapes he learns that the toxin comes from a rare orchid indigenous to the Amazon jungle. After Jaws' cable car crashes, he is rescued from the rubble by Dolly, a young woman, and the two fall in love. 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.īond survives attacks by Jaws, whom Drax previously hired as Chang's replacement, during Rio Carnival and on the Sugarloaf Cable Car. Rejoining Goodhead, he deduces that she is a CIA agent spying on Drax and sleeps with her. 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. 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. Then he is chased through the canals by Drax's henchmen. 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 vicious pet dogs in the woods during the pheasant-hunting party the next day.īond again encounters Goodhead in Venice and observes her snooping around a door near the glass factory. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut, and survives an assassination attempt while inside a centrifuge chamber. He survives by stealing a parachute from the pilot, while Jaws lands on a trapeze net within a circus tent.Īt the Drax Industries spaceplane-manufacturing complex in California, Bond meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and his henchman Chang. 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). M, head of MI6, assigns James Bond, Agent 007, to investigate. The carrier is destroyed but no wreckage of the Shuttle is found.
However, the film's visuals were praised, with Derek Meddings being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and it eventually became the highest-grossing film of the series at the time with $210,300,000 worldwide, a record that stood until 1995's GoldenEye.Ī Drax Industries Space Shuttle, Moonraker - on loan to the United Kingdom - is hijacked in midair while on a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Moonraker had a high production cost of $34 million, more than twice as much as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and it received mixed reviews. The soundstages of Pinewood Studios in England, traditionally used for the series, were only used by the special effects team. Budgetary issues led to the film being shot primarily in France other locations included Italy, Brazil, Guatemala and the United States. The film's producers had originally intended to make For Your Eyes Only, but chose Moonraker owing to the rise of the science fiction genre in the wake of the Star Wars phenomenon. The story was intended by author Ian Fleming to become a film even before he completed the novel in 1954 he based it on a screenplay manuscript he had devised earlier. Holly Goodhead, Bond follows the trail from California to Venice, Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon rainforest, and finally into outer space to prevent a plot to wipe out the world population and to recreate humanity with a master race. Bond investigates the theft of a Space Shuttle, leading him to Hugo Drax, the owner of the Shuttle's manufacturing firm. The third and final film in the series to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, it co-stars Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Cléry, and Richard Kiel. Moonraker is a 1979 spy-fi film and the eleventh in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, and the fourth to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond.