Iron Sky (2012)
Dir: Timo Vuorensola
“In 1945 The Nazis Went To The Moon. In 2018 They Are Coming Back”
As a tagline and pitch for a film, that is pure genius! Sadly, that’s where the genius ends.
I don’t really need to describe the storyline much more than that one line, it’s summed up so well, with the idea being that Hitler built a moon base and though he lost in the 2nd World War, the base survived and has been growing, developing, and preparing. In 2018 an American mission lands on the dark side of the Moon accidentally discovering the Nazis there, kick starting their plan to re-invade Earth.
The concept is brilliantly nuts, but almost everything about the execution of it wastes the great idea, making it even lower than B-movie standard. There are many elements in the storyline meant to be satirical, or just funny, yet the humour at best doesn’t translate well thus falling flat, and at worse is stupid or offensive. For example there’s a side-plot in which one of the U.S. astronauts is black, and ends up ‘whitened’ by Nazi scientists! If it was the other way round there would be no question of the inappropriateness of it, however this is meant to be taken as funny and a key plot point.
It’s such a shame that this was made as it was. I had heard rumours of the project years ago, with apparently excellent test footage being shopped around Cannes and other film festivals to drum up support and funding. If they had made it entirely in a foreign language, ideally German considering the context, and done things in a low-budget but much less tongue-in-cheek way, it would have been ripe for picking up by an American studio for an ultimately bigger-budget and quality casted ‘American-language’ remake! Really that would have been preferable to this, which is a disappointing mess.
NeverKissedAGirl.com 