A poster for
Vengeance Never Sleeps (1997), the 20th film in the James Bond franchise.
For 15 years, the United Kingdom has greatly benefitted from the innovative Moonraker program, a satellite-based defense system proposed by billionaire Hugo Drax (Christopher Lee) during the height of the Cold War to deter Soviet forces from attacking NATO. However, with the Cold War having ended, the reasons for Moonraker's continuous presence have come under question in recent years.
M (Judi Dench) asks agent 007, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan), to join her at her club, having just invited Drax and his wife Chelsea (Sharon Stone) over to play bridge. They hope to discuss the continued reasons for Moonraker's existence, with Hugo publicly claiming that it will help in case of another superpower threatening Western dominance. In the midst of the game, Bond notices that Hugo is winning an odd amount of money, and suspects that he is cheating. However, he's confused; why would Hugo, a national hero, be cheating?
Drax has a mysterious background: as a British soldier in World War II, he was working in France when the British facility he was employed at was blown up by a bomb planted within. He would suffer amnesia, but after recovering, he would make investments that helped to grow him into the industrialist he is today. His ideas for the Moonraker program have stretched as far back as the 1960s, but they would only come through in the 1980s, when the British government accepted his request and began the project.
A Ministry of Supply officer is mysteriously killed at one of Drax's buildings dotted throughout the United Kingdom, and Bond is sent to investigate, while also replacing the officer. Suspiciously, much of the people working on the project are German. While at the building, Bond meets Gala Brand (Rachel Weisz), a Special Branch officer undercover as Drax's personal assistant. Bond investigates further and surmises that the officer was killed for seeing a submarine off the coast.
Drax's henchman Krebs (Michael Lonsdale) is caught snooping through Bond's room, and Bond and Brand are nearly killed by an avalanche while at the White Cliffs of Dover. This heightens their suspicion, and Chelsea's suspicion; for a while, she has been mistrustful of Hugo's plans with the Moonraker system. Brand goes with Drax to London, where she watches as the Moonraker satellites have their orbits shifted, and compares the new trajectory to a notebook Drax had laid on a table earlier. Krebs captures her, and places her in a remote building in London: the guidance control for the Moonraker satellites. Bond chases her, but he is also captured by Drax.
Drax, who reveals his real name as Hugo von der Drache, isn't actually British — he's German, and has all this time secretly been allegiant to the destroyed Nazi government. During WW2, he was part of the Werwolf guerrilla force, and had planted a bomb to destroy the British facility, but had been caught in the explosion himself. Angered at his homeland's loss to the Allied governments, he plans to use the Moonraker system to destroy cities in Europe and North America, while he temporarily goes into orbit to ride out the ensuing chaos.
Brand and Bond are placed in a spot where Drax's rocket will incinerate them, but they manage to escape, convincing Chelsea to join their side. They collaborate together to alter as much of the Moonraker satellites as possible so that they fire at each other, destroying themselves in the process. Drax's space capsule, mistaken as a fellow satellite, is targeted by the other satellites and destroyed. The film ends with Bond and Brand sharing a romantic moment in Paris, before Brand reveals that she's engaged to a fellow Special Branch officer.