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Is Moonraker the worst 007 film ever made or an unheralded masterpiece? Geoffrey Macnab looks at the pros and cons – with a little help from Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary
It’s the James Bond movie in which Roger Moore’s 007 has sex in zero gravity, in outer space, while the Queen watches back home via a satellite transmission.
“My God, what is Bond doing?” M splutters.
“I think he is attempting re-entry, sir,” a distracted Q volunteers.
Over the past 43 years, no one has paid too much attention to Moonraker (1979), a “spy-fi” adventure that did excellent box office at the time without making much impact on critics. With its smutty puns and tongue-in-cheek humour, it didn’t look as if it was intended to be taken seriously. The general consensus is that it is better than the final Moore films (Octopussy, A View to a Kill), but no masterpiece.
Now, though, Moonraker is being thoroughly re-examined. It has been the subject of prolonged and very intense debate on The Video Archives, the new podcast launched earlier this summer by filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction co-writer and fellow film nerd, Roger Avary.
“Is Moonraker one of the best Bond films of all times or is it the absolute, bottom-of-the-barrel worst?” the podcast asks.
This doesn’t exactly seem like a burning question for our times but once Tarantino and Avary crank into gear, their discussion is both illuminating and very funny.
Tarantino isn’t a fan. The motormouthed US director may have a reputation for watching almost every film ever made in the days when he worked as a video store clerk, but somehow Moonraker passed him by in 1979. Having finally caught up with it recently, he is underwhelmed. “To me, the whole thing is, not whimsical, it’s cynical. The whole movie... is cynically ripping off Stars Wars in this cash-grab kind of way... to me, it’s base,” Tarantino fulminates.
Initially, Avary hadn’t liked Moonraker either. “For years, it was the worst James Bond movie to me,” he says, remembering his reaction after seeing the film the first time around. Then, though, came the moment of revelation, after he watched it again through his daughter’s online film club. “It was like I had...