In an alternate continuum, neither Sean Connery's Diamonds are Forever or Roger Moore's ever got made. The movie projects were in effect switched, with Moonraker starring Connery in 1972 and Diamonds starring Moore in 1979.
The 1972 Moonraker was Connery's final (official, canonical) bow as Bond. The script was based upon ambitious plans for space exploration and, considering its time, came to be regarded as a bittersweet farewell to the Age of Apollo. Yet it held fairly close to Fleming's original novel, with Patrick McGoohan in the role of Hugo Drax, a British nobleman who had in fact begun life as a Nazi. The scriptwriters expanded upon his biography to make him one of Otto Skorzeny's Werewolf commandos, now allegedly giving Great Britain a nuclear ICBM capability while in fact serving the Midgard Imperium, a global sort of Fourth Reich preparing itself to inherit whatever world would be left over from a Soviet-American World War Three. Drax plans to seize the Moon outright, both in the name of the Imperium and to exploit his formula for creating a new kind of steel from out of those elements more common on the Moon, thereby achieving both limitless wealth and high standing in a new world. In a plot twist that today might seem quaint or irrelevant, he seeks to nuke the United Nations Building.
All of this left Moore a Diamonds are Forever script within lying somewhere between The Man With the Golden Gun and Strategic Defense Initiative fantasizing. The titular diamonds were to be used for a power beam shot from a satellite harvesting solar energy, but by movie's end Moore's Bond decides that in the real world such a power source is too easily weaponized and he allows it to blow up. Critics took it as a rehash of the solar theme from Golden Gun, as well as a prelude to the "detente" moral to For Your Eyes Only, but Moore had his fun.
News of a particularly big and classy final appearance of Connery as Bond excited actresses more than usual. Raquel Welch played NASA scientist Skye Henlein. Catherine Deneuve played a United Nations agent. Sophia Loren got to camp it up as a prized Soviet rocket scientist obviously getting great Freudian subliminal (i.e., phallic) satisfaction from the sheer size and power of her towering upthrust rockets. Daliah Lavi reconsidered ending her film career long enough to appear as a helpful Israeli agent, and Martine Beswick gamely made her third big Bong girl appearance. Bizarrely enough, one movie managed to abound with both beauty and plot. |