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British agent James Bond is assigned by his chief "M" to investigate the disappearance of a U.S.-British "Moonraker" space shuttle during a test flight. Billionaire Hugo Drax, ostensibly a philanthropic backer of space research but actually - it transpires - a megalomaniac bound on world domination, attempts unsuccessfully to dispose of Bond, but later sadistically kills Corinne (who has helped Bond with information). An address in Drax's California laboratory leads Bond to Venice, where he re-encounters Drax's assistant. Holly Goodhead, who is in fact a CIA agent; he survives the lethal attentions of Drax's minion Chang, and is then pursued to Rio on the track of a further clue by hit-man "Jaws". The latter fails to kill Bond and Holly (who has arrived independently in Rio) on board a cable car, and Bond is then sent by "M" to the upper Amazon, where he is captured by Drax's female troops. Drax then discloses his scheme to wipe out life on earth with space bombs containing a deadly poison, and to re-colonise the world with a 'pure' race which he will breed aboard his space station. Bond and Holly escape and stow away on a flight to the space station, where they succeed - with the help of "Jaws", who has been converted to the side of virtue after falling in love - in foiling Drax and saving mankind.

If the preceding Bond opus, The Spy Who Loved Me, rather resembled a conglomerate remake of the series to date, the latest instalment looks like nothing so much as a remake of The Spy Who Loved Me. In fact, the kind of double vision which has increasingly fogged the Bond pictures, as they have sought to parody an already parodic model, here becomes virtually complete. The notion of Bond as indestructible cartoon-man is overtly stated in a pre-credit sequence in which he is pushed out of an aircraft and steals another man's parachute after a mid-air struggle. Appropriately enough, this episode bears no relation to the ensuing plot, just as the gamut of tried-and-true situations that follow are no more logically connected than the movie's picture-postcard itinerary from California to Venice and from Rio to Outer Space. The set-pieces themselves, however, are scarcely inventive enough to extend the formula: the Venetian canal chase in which Bond converts his gondola into a hovercraft simply re-emphasises his invulnerability, and the Rio cable-car episode underlines the arbitrariness of the plot. If it is unsporting to ask why the villains should try to liquidate Bond in such a definitively public fashion, or why he would make himself such an obvious target, literal-minded objections about how Drax can have constructed a space-launch headquarters in the depths of the Amazon jungle must occur to even the most benevolent spectator (especially since the shift to the Brazilian interior produces nothing more surprising in the way of spectacle than a second waterborne chase).

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