Beneath An Iron Sky

My liking for shit movies is becoming legendary. And I mean 'legendary' in its sense of 'well-known', like  how a musician becomes 'legendary' if they're still around for long enough, not because they're actually any good. Anyway, my friend Nick said "hey, you should see Iron Sky, that's probably up your street". So I looked into it, and FUCK ME, IT'S A FILM ABOUT NAZIS FROM THE MOON.

Not even Rebekah Brooks could fuck this up.

Yeah, there was no way I was going to miss this.


Now, as it happened it was originally scheduled for a one-day-only release in the UK (since changed; cunning/cynical marketing? Genuine bending to fan pressure? Don't know, not that bothered), and on that day I was off work. So to the cinema I went!


I had a few reservations. This was a largely fan-funded movie. Did that mean it was going to have wobbly sets, a poor-quality script, appalling acting and generally look like a made-for-the-Syfy-channel monster movie? Or was I not going to be that lucky (I love those movies)? I also had reservations about the portrayal of Nazis (always a difficult line to walk, I feel).


I needn't have worried. Except that the sets didn't wobble, the actors could (largely) act and the script was, in general, hilarious.


The broad plot is that a future American President - it's Sarah Palin. It's obviously Sarah Palin. She looks like Sarah Palin, she sounds like Sarah Palin (or at least, says the right things, I've no idea if the accent is right), they never call her anything except 'Madam President' and she's as dumb as Sarah Palin - desperately wants to get re-elected and so decides to send a black man to the moon (slogan: "Black To The Moon? Yes She Can!").

See?

However, the US are also looking for an energy source called Helium 3 there, and the cover for that to the UN is that this is just a blatant re-election publicity stunt by the President. Just that alone made me love this movie. However, there are NAZIS ON THE MOON and they capture the black male model sent there, thinking he's the head of a coming invasion of Earth shocktroops. Cue the predictable shock and confusion of the Nazis as they find a man who's black.


It should be awful. It should be cringe-worthy. But, and believe me my Political Correctness antennae never come out of overdrive, it's not. The Nazis are generally portrayed as sadistic, Aryan-supremacist fucktards, yet ridiculous enough for the film to make a continual and deserved mockery of them. However, there is a notable exception.

Anyone else getting a flashback to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?

Julia Dietze plays Renate Richter, a 'teacher' who believes in the Party line and that the National Socialist Party genuinely is the party of love and compassion that will heal the Earth. Of course, that's not exactly true, given that her psychotic fiance wants to destroy it. But there are also depictions of the general soldiers and citizens of the Nazi moonbase who are just going about their day to day lives and aren't really doing or planning anything evil ("Do you suppose the Fuhrer has saurkraut three times a week as well?"). Yes, Dietze's character and characterisation is almost unbelievably naive (I loved her reference to 'The Great Dictator' as "one of the world's most famous short films", as she's only seen an edited-down version that portrays Hitler in a positive light), but it works in the context of the film. And yes, Götz Otto's Klaus Adler is ridiculous, but you can imagine that a Nazi officer from a Nazi moonbase that's been Nazo for seventy years would be like that.

There is one character that seemed a little clumsy; the advertising mogul/chief aide who advises the President, played by Peta Sergeant. Her lines are overblown and her performance is anything from subtle - not that this is a movie that's made for subtlety, but there's being unsubtle and then there's being Joey Barton. However, it's forgivable for when the character is upgraded to a General with an accompanying hilarious outfit.

I genuinely don't want to give too much away about the movie, because it's an unpredictable beast; it's certainly not just the stupid comedy I was expecting. There is a lot of comedy in it - the cinema was laughing uproariously at points - that sometimes stops just short of being too near-the-knuckle, but there's a lot more than that. It's a clever comedy, ludicrous a claim as that may seem about a film that has Space Nazis as its main selling point. Also, with its multi-national origins that don't include Britain or America, it's interesting to see how the world is portrayed. The depiction of Palin is absolutely merciless, and America's foreign policy in general doesn't come out much better either ("The United States has no military interest in the moon" says the Defence Secretary to the United Nations; "What about natural resources interest? We know you sometimes get confused about the two!" retorts a Middle-Eastern man). Which is not to say that other countries get off either, as North Korea gets roundly mocked as well, while Britain is reduced to one man in a tweed jacket and a satellite with the Union Jack on (not that we're not used to that from American cinema too).

All through the movie, I was thinking "this is actually pretty good! Good in a real way, not good in a few cheap laughs way". And then I got to the end. And the end, I must admit, kind of blew me away. In a sort of 'the poppies ending to Blackadder Goes Forth' way.

Go and see this movie. I think it will be worth your while. Unless you're a Republican American, I guess.