Iron Sky

Computer-generated special effects worthy of the big screen have progressed to the point that exploding planets and space invasion holocausts are now pretty much available to anyone.  Computer geeks producing homages to Star Wars are now capable of making low-budget films that have better CGI than the the effects in the big buck Hollywood films that they ape.  It's a paradox:  a low budget knock-off of Star Wars looks better than the original.  The bizarre Australian-German- Finnish production Iron Sky (2012) illustrates this proposition.  The film's premise is ridiculous and, apparently, intended to be comical:  in 1945, the Nazis fled to the dark side of the moon, erected a space-metropolis based, it seems, on some of Albert Speer's grandiose plans for the Tausendjahre-Reich in Berlin, and, when an American space probe inadvertently discovers them in 2018, the Moon-Nazis decide to invade the Earth.  The Moon-Nazis wear elaborate black leather, have Wehrmacht helmets and SS regalia and traipse around the moon in Darth Vader masks.  Their leader is played by Udo Kier, the most depraved-looking actor in the world -- although, the poor fellow is elderly now and has lost  some of his decadent panache.  Iron Sky is an oddity -- it has impressive special effects, vast armadas of space vessels including silvery Zeppelins clashing in outer space, huge explosions, and spectacular vistas on the moon (the footage of the Nazi's mines and industries on the moon is better than anything in 2001 A Space Odyssey)  This state-of-art wham-bam stuff illustrates a story that is completely puerile, a thin tissue of gags that aren't really funny:  the Americans are led by President Sarah Palin, an athletic idiot with lots of guns and the nations of the world are all inept and self-aggrandizing when dealing with the threat of an invasion by Space-Nazis.  There is an unfunny subplot involving a Black astronaut who is albinized -- that is, turned white -- by a Nazi scientist wearing an Albert Einstein fright wig.  The women prance around in bondage costumes, but there's no sex, just lots of explosions and bombings from outer space, the so-called Meteor Blitz Krieg raining destruction down on the earth.  More than half of the movie is shot in German, probably one reason why the picture was a hard-sell in the US -- I'd never heard of the movie before I saw it at the Afton Film Festival on November 1, 2014.  A lot of the film is designed like a computer game and the visuals have the same murky blue-screen appearance, although, I would hasten to note, they are as good as the visuals in most big Hollywood blockbusters -- that is to say, not that great.  The soundtrack features variations on themes by Wagner and it is appropriately pretentious -- the Siegfried theme and the Ride of the Valkyries blasted from outer space.  I counted one good idea and one half-way funny joke.  A German school teacher thinks that Nazism represents peace and love; she shows her class a severely edited version of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator for the proposition that National Socialism is benign -- it's a clever idea and also an example of why the film seems to me to have been unmarketable:  who, in the film's target audience, would know anything about Chaplin's anti-Hitler comedy?  The joke is this:  when the Space-Nazis unleash their Goetterdaemmerung death satellite the nations of earth respond by attacking with their own satellites all armed with nuclear missiles and death rays.  The leader of the UN says something on this order:  Fortunately, everyone violated our rules and put nukes on their so-called communications and weather satellites.  Is there anyone here who didn't secretly arm their space stations?  The sole delegate raising his hand is a sheepish and abashed representative of Finland.  The movie is way too long and its clever ideas are too slender to support all of the explosions and battle scenes -- it's joyless in a sort of Teutonically diagrammatic manner.  (At the Afton Film Festival, we saw the great, mournful Western by Sam Peckinpah Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia -- as an example of how far special effects have developed since that film was made in 1974, I observe that Peckinpah's cameraman shoots all the night scenes day-for-night and so the film has the look of an old episode of Gunsmoke.  But this shows the ultimate insignificance of special effects -- despite the flawed visuals, Peckinpah's film is a nihilistic tragedy that ranks among the best films of its kind ever made.)