RIP Michael Lonsdale

[silverscreenselect]

Actor best known for playing the villain in one of the worst James Bond movies, Moonraker. He also played one of the police on the trail of the Jackal in the considerably better Day of the Jackal.

Age 87.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/entertai ... index.html

[SpacemanSpiff]

I agree with you on this not being one of the better Bond movies, and not just because of the casting.

The source novel, the third of Ian Fleming's books (1955), was dated long before this movie came along. They also jumped the gun with the movie titles -- For Your Eyes Only was projected to be the next one, but Star Wars happened, so they grabbed whatever sci-fi motif they could. The slapped together plot showed as such.

And don't get me started on the bad space and orbital mechanics issues, but that's common in a lot of movies.

However, Drax did have a couple of good zingers, including a line I use often in a varied form -- "At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery."

[Buffacuse]

Lonsdale's performance in Moonraker, where he portrayed raw, unapologetic, unexplained evil, was possibly the only bright spot in what was one of the three worst Bond movies. (Moonraker, The World is Not Enough,* and of course, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.)

I almost walked out of Moonraker after about the 10th example of something so completely implausible that the movie became even more of a cartoonish joke than normal, a few examples:

-- Transporting a fully-fueled space shuttle across the Atlantic on a 747;

-- Multiple space launches from the Amazon to build a space station, none of which were detected by US or Russian satellites or seen by anyone;

-- A space station the size of a small city no one knew was there;

-- Jaws falling out of a plane and surviving the fall by landing on a circus tent.

*Single worst casting decision in Bond history: Denise Richards as,wait for it, a nuclear physicist. Seriously.

[SpacemanSpiff]

*Single worst casting decision in Bond history: Denise Richards as,wait for it, a nuclear physicist. Seriously.

I would argue with that and say that Telly Sevalas' casting as Blofeld would be the worst. At least they could have given him diction lessons so he sounded more European rather than Brooklynese.

[silverscreenselect]

I almost walked out of Moonraker after about the 10th example of something so completely implausible that the movie became even more of a cartoonish joke than normal:

What bothered me more than anything was that the plot was virtually the same as the previous film, with the same mad master plan of the villain (destroy all life on earth except for his chosen people underwater in one movie and in outer space in the other)

After the bad critical reception for Moonraker, the producers went back to the drawing board and deliberately scaled back the scope of the plots. The villains were no longer trying to rule or destroy the world but, rather, accomplish "normal" villainy. In the next film, For Your Eyes Only, Bond had to recover a lost decoding device before the bad guys did. That's actually a storyline within the realm of possibility, and the villain was more down to earth (although still a nasty guy) as well.