'Iron Sky'

Retro Punk?

I've wanted to see this film since the rumours and then news circulated that a bunch of Finnish film makers were crowd-sourcing to make an indie movie about Nazis on the moon, coming back to invade Earth in flying saucers. After all, the prevailing mythology to do with flying saucers is that they're not aliens at all, but Nazis flying around from their base in Antarctica.

Amazingly enough the film got made and did the circuit, and now it's available to watch on Fetch TV so I took advantage of that for a viewing and a chuckle.

What's Good About It
It's an indie sci-fi flick. Any time one of those gets made, you celebrate, regardless of quality. The production design is pretty good, an gives you a sense of what 1940 German military design might look like if extrapolated out 70years in isolation. It's got gobs and gobs of cheesy special effects. Some better than others.

What's Bad About It

Quite a bit. The writing is too loose. The black comedy isn't consistent in tone. Some times the gags are just slapstick Sometimes it's bad political satire of something that's already well in our rear vision mirrors. Bagging out Sarah Palin might have been relevant in 2008-2010, but in this year where there's another election, it's just ancient history. And none of those gags were remotely funny.

The directing is sloppy the editing is loose, the music is all over the shop in style with no consistent mimesis and the pacing overall is just too inconsistent to be enjoyable. The Nazi Bell UFO mythos got completely thrown out of the window for exposition, so there really was no explanation about how the Nazis got to the dark side of the Moon.

Maybe they proceeded with all that stuff being presumed knowledge, in which case they were overestimating their audience; and if they just dropped it for the sake of convenience, then they made their film less comprehensible than it needed to be.

What's Interesting About It

The Nazi Bell UFO story is exactly why you would connect the Nazis to flying saucers. Whether you believe it or not, the meme is out there. It certainly deserves better treatment and investigation than what this film gave it.

In fact what's remarkable about this film is how uninteresting and un-insightful it is, given the interesting and fascinating premise where the Germans had cracked some kind of alternative physics that allows for flying saucer technology.

If you really want to get a good grounding in the notion, here's a cool interview with one Dr. Joseph P. Farrell. It's a lot more interesting than this film.