The Basic Plot in the Form of a Haiku:

                    Bond is back again;
                    Saving the world from evil
                    and shagging the babes.

My Basic Ramblings: Yes, it's another one o'them Roger Moore-as-James Bond movies.  I always find it difficult to believe that Roger Moore is
older than Sean Connery. Ah well.

Moore, as everyone knows, was the third man to play 007; he followed Sean "I Am Bond, Dammit" and George "My Fifteen Minutes of Fame
Ended in 1968" Lazenby. Following Moore are, of course, Timothy "Mr. Crankypants" Dalton and Pierce "Damn NBC.  Damn
Them To Hell" Brosnan.

Is this a Bond Movie?  Let's check the Ten Commandments of A Bond Movie:

1. A Bond Movie will begin with a fantastic stunt. Space shuttle gets hijacked off the back of a plane, burning the plane into a crisp.
2. A Bond Movie will have a title sequence featuring naked ladies in silhouette dancing to a funky song. The song's also sung by Shirley "GOLDFING-AH" Bassey, so double points here.
3. A Bond Movie will feature a villain with a cool last name.  "Drax" is pretty cool. It's a better villain name than "Freemesser", anyway.  Drax probably doesn't get asked to spell his name repeatedly when he orders a pizza.
4. A Bond Movie will feature a villain who has a far-fetched plan to rule the world, or at least improve his position in it. Drax decides he's going to send a bunch of Beautiful People into space, poison the world with orchid extract, and then bring said Beautiful People back to Earth to repopulate it. That's pretty close to a textbook definition of "far-fetched".
5. A Bond Movie's villain is unfailingly polite; they call 007 "Mr. Bond", or, if they're really evil, "James". Not "Jim" or "Jimmy" or "Loser Agent Boy." Why is this?
6. A Bond Movie will feature a woman who sleeps with Bond within five minutes, provides valuable information, and is killed.  The helicopter pilot does the deed and gets offed by a buncha dogs.
7. A Bond Movie will feature a woman whose name is a double entendre. She will dislike Bond at first but will be sucking face with him by the end of the movie. Dr. Holly Goodhead begins disliking the rogueish agent but is engaged in zero-gravity sex by the time the flick's over.
8. A Bond Movie will feature cool gadgets from Q, who implores Bond not to destroy them. The gadgets are, of course, always destroyed.  A wrist-gun that shoots darts, and a boat with a detachable hang-glider. (The boat goes over a waterfall.)
9. A Bond Movie will be shot in exotic locales. Brazil, Italy, England, California, space. You won't see a Bond Movie's climactic scene being filmed in Rochester, New York.
10. A Bond Movie's villain, when given opportunities to kill Bond, will not simply pull out a gun and shoot the guy; he will create elaborate traps out of which Bond can escape. While Bond is in said trap, he will explain his entire evil elaborate plan. Bond is trapped in a centrifuge machine gone haywire (he escapes by the wrist-gun); he's attacked by Jaws atop a cable car (he slides to safety by a chain); he's attacked by a big python (wrist-gun again). NOTE: There is a scene where they come real close to just shooting him. Drax invites Bond to try geese shooting; there are snipers in the trees, guns aimed.  Bond misses the goose but hits the sniper.

So, going by the Ten Commandments of a Bond Film, Moonraker definitely qualifies. (At some point, I will have to read the original novels upon which these flicks are based.  I think I read somewhere that the original Moonraker was a bomb poised over London.)

My biggest concern with this film is the scene where Bond and Goodhead are in the radar-jamming section of Drax's big honkin' space station
(because the space station is supposely invisible from Earth, even though someone with a halfway decent telescope could look in the sky and see it). Goodhead quickly dispatches with some bad guys, and Bond is curious as to where she picked up her skills. He asks if it was from the CIA, she responds, "No, Vassar."

Now, I went to Vassar, and not once in my four years there did I even come close to learning how to beat the crap out of someone. I suppose I
could bore someone to death by discussing Tristram Shandy, or I could feed them some salmonella-tainted food from the Dining Center, but
beyond that I wouldn't be much help.  The school must've been different back in the 70's.  Either that or the "Beating Up Thugs" courses were in a part of the Course Catalog in which I never looked, like "Chemistry" or "Women's Studies".

So there's lotsa chase scenes (you know that any time a movie introduces a museum filled with fragile items, like, say, glass, it's history), lotsa fight scenes (the laser-filled fight in space reminded me of the harpoon-filled fight underwater in Thunderball, except the latter wasn't nearly as cheesy), lotsa nail-biting last minute escapes.

What else can you say? It's a Bond movie. Probably one of the lamer ones, due to the space angle, but the Bond people were just trying to jump on the Star Wars bandwagon.

Note: Don't confuse this movie with The Moonraker, a 1957 film which, according to Leonard Maltin, is a "well-mounted costumer set in 1650s England, involving followers of Charles Stuart." Hm... a Bond movie set in 1650's England would be cool.....