Watched The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker back to back.
So these are the same movie. Yes, Bond movies are basically the same routine over and over since Goldfinger, but here it's like they forgot their homework so they repurposed last week's essay with a couple of basic twists.
The villain from Spy wants to start a city underwater, the villain from Moonraker wants to start a city in space. Spy has Bond drive a car that can turn into a submarine, so Moonraker has Bond drive a boat that can turn into a car. In Spy Bond has to team up with a KGB spy who hates him (see title), in Moonraker it's a CIA agent who also hates him (Bond's "A woman scientist!?" feels weirdly sexist even for 1977). Hell, both movies open with the same stunt involving a timely deployed parachute. Both have the villain feeding a woman that betrayed him to his pets. Even the cast of secondary characters is made up mostly of holdovers from Spy Who Loved Me, on top of the usual M/Q/Moneypenny trifecta: the Ministry of Defense is back, as is M's Russian counterpart Gogol, and of course Jaws. Both are also directed by Lewis Gilbert, who pretty much stages the same third act climax in which Bond leads American troops in an assault on the bad guy's base.
Anyway, The Spy Who Loved Me is not only the clearly better movie but Moore's best Bond so far. Moonraker just goes all out on hackneyed comedy. It plays Bernstein's Romeo and Juliet when two characters suddenly, randomly fall in love. It plays the theme from Magnificent Seven when Bond briefly, randomly rides a horse. It plays circus music during its sillier moments, like when Bond drives a gondola down a crowded plaza in Venice and there's stock footage of dogs and pigeons doing double takes at the ridiculous sight. We're officially in Loony Tunes territory. Not to mention Jaws repeatedly embodying Wily E. Coyote in his attempts on Bond's life. And Q's scenes of violently testing equipment and debriefing James are starting to look like what goes on in the background of a Naked Guns movie.
The other thing is that Barbara Bach plays the more interesting of the two spy babes forced to collaborate with James. First of all you have the underlying tension that neither knows James killed her beau. Second, she's more antagonistic and competitive towards James and effectively one-ups him several times. She holds her own and really does feel like the movie's other protagonist instead of another Bond girl. They just make a more fun match. Lois Chiles also gets to kick ass and be more of an equal to James and unlike Bach she's spared the usual indignity of running around the collapsing facility in a bikini, but I didn't think her character was that unique or that she had much chemistry with Moore.
