[ljacone]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Switchblade

I don't think The Living Daylights is that great of a film overall. There are bits that worked and bits that didn't. It was a good start for a new direction in the franchise, though.

The uneven nature of The Living Daylights owes something to it's origins as well. The script was already mostly written when A View To A Kill was released; the tone was much in line with that film as being a light adventure movie. When Dalton came on board, Cubby Broccoli ordered the script changed around to be a little more "hard boiled." Hence we get some serious with our silly in The Living Daylights.

Quote:

Personally, I think Die Another Day and Moonraker are the worst films in the series. Moonraker I dislike slightly less because it was an amusingly naked cash grab thrown together at the last minute to draw in the Star Wars audience. I find that kind of hilarious. Die Another Day, though, is just godawful on every level and the reliance on CGI effects is a slap in the face to a franchise that had always been devoted to using practical effects, no matter how crazy shit got.

While I do not disagree with you regarding Moonraker being a naked cash grab, I will point out that it was not really "thrown together at the last minute." The intention was to do For Your Eyes Only after The Spy Who Loved Me, but remember that at that point, the Bond film cycle was every 2 years. Star Wars and TSWLM came out the same summer (1977); pre-prod was just getting underway on what would become Moonraker when Star Wars hit the big time. So the decision to change from FYEO to Moonraker came fairly early in the development cycle.

Moonraker had a very expensive and involved production; one thing you can say about it is that the money they spent is up there on the screen, between the special effects, the locales, the stunts, etc. I can even accept the third act where they are on the space station -- it's all the jokes and gags in the first 2/3rds of it which derail the movie, in my estimation. As I mentioned in another post, I just finished Christopher Wood's novelization of his script (titled "James Bond And Moonraker"), and it excises nearly all of the humor, making for a much better adventure. The gondola chase is more in live with what we would have expected, for instance; and we never see Jaws at all in the pre-credit sequence.

Oddly enough, there is one major setpiece in the novelization which is not in the script. In the movie, Moonraker 5 has a laser (or "laser torch" as they are referred to in the script and novelization) on it; in the novelization, both Moonraker 5 and the station itself are armed with them. There is a subplot about a Soviet satellite which comes close to the Drax station and is lasered before the Marines arrive. Following that, Bond has to (wait for it) EVA out of the station to get up to the gunner's tower to stop them from lasering the American shuttle. I can buy it on the printed page but for the movie that was probably best left unfilmed!

Remember also that Moonraker was a success -- it was the highest grossing of the classic Bond films, and if you correct for inflation it's like 4th all time in the series. But the expense of Moonraker coupled with middling reviews were what lead to the scaled down, lower budget FYEO, which is often cited as a favorite even among Connery purists.