Iron Sky

Many thanks must go to Dane101 for starting a Tugg campaign to bring Iron Sky to Madison a couple weeks back. The movie features Nazis on the moon and I was looking forward to seeing it as I'd heard about it several months ago and, well, how can you not like Nazis on the moon?

The year is 2018 and a Sarah Palin-like frau is President of the United States. As a gimmick in her bid to be re-elected for a second term, she revives the Apollo program and returns Mankind to the moon. In this case, it's a two-man capsule not at all different the ones we used back in the 1960s. Our first astronaut is using some metal detector kind of gizmo when he comes to a ridge overlooking a crater. He stares down in amazement as nestled inside it is a factory of some sort. Soon German soldiers converge on the landing site and kill him. Our second astronaut stumbles out of the lunar lander. This is James Washington. He's not really an astronaut at all but rather he is an actor. However, being black, his appearance on the moon makes for good copy. Washington is captured by the Germans.

You see, the Nazis fled Earth as Berlin fell. They built a moonbase (shaped like a swastika, naturally) and have been mining helium-3 and biding their time in anticipation of invading the Earth. The big problem is that their doomsday weapon, the Götterdämmerung, is not ready yet. It's a massive flying saucer with firepower aplenty – something akin to an interstellar Bismarck. However, the demented Doktor Richter is able to utilize Washington's smartphone to power the behemoth. Luckily for Earth, the phone runs out of power and so the Nazis send Klaus Adler down to the planet to seek out another device.

Hilarity ensues.

The trailer makes Iron Sky out to be like a Roland Emmerich production – a fairly serious invasion story punctuated with humorous dialogue - and so I was a bit surprised that it leaned towards Airplane. It wasn't all-out slapstick but it was much more of a comedy than the trailer made it out to be. There were a lot of pokes at the German proclivity for big, box-like engineering feats and their reactions to the 21st century technology they encounter. For instance, Washington tells Richter that his smartphone is a computer and the doctor laughs before pointing to a vacuum tube monstrosity which takes up a goodly sized chunk of his lab saying, "Nein, this is a computer." The movie also mines Nazi reactions to Washington's skin color for laughs as well as the Palin character.

Both Götz Otto as Adler and Udo Kier as der Führer chew the scenery with glee. The lovely Julia Dietze plays Renate, a schoolteacher who naively believes all the Nazi propaganda while Peta Sergeant is the President's campaign manager. To get an idea of how far the film tilts towards the Zucker brothers consider that Renate gets sucked out of an airlock and hangs on for dear life with her blouse open and her skirt by her ankles. And Sergeant does what may be the first Downfall parody on the big screen.

The comedy here worked a great deal of the time but much of it was completely predictable, didn't have good timing, or otherwise fell flat. So did too much of the dialogue as well. There are a couple WTF moments when the movie's tone does a 180 and becomes deadly serious, especially the ending. These instances don't ruin the movie by any means but they are jarring when you've been watching a Sarah Palin character acting like an idiot while spaceships shaped like zeppelins and Panzer class flying saucers do battle in our atmosphere.

Overall Iron Sky was amusing and gets extra credit for good CGI on a shoestring budget but its hit or miss jokes keep it from being in the same class as Airplane or Top Secret.