Nazis on the moon! What could be more brilliantly bonkers than the lunatic premise of satirical sci-fi action comedy Iron Sky?
Sadly, having kept movie geeks atwitter during the six years his film was in production, Finnish director Timo Vuorensola fails to make the most of his conceit.
The set-up is inspired, all the same. In 1945 fleeing Nazis escaped from Germany in a flying saucer and set up a colony on the dark side of the moon. There they’ve lain hidden, until in 2018 a US spacecraft gets sent to the moon by (gulp!) President Sarah Palin and uncovers the Nazis’ base, shaped like a swastika, of course. In short order, the Nazis capture one of the astronauts and use the computing power in his mobile phone to send a craft to Earth as a prelude to launching a full-scale attack.
And it’s here that things really get crazy. The astronaut, who’s black, gets turned into an albino and falls for a naïve Nazi Fräulein, while her evil fiancé hooks up with the US president's cynical campaign manager and teaches her the propaganda value of Nazi chic.
Made for a fraction of the budgets commanded by Hollywood blockbusters, Iron Sky certainly looks impressive. The Nazis’ lunar base is spectacular and so is their zeppelin-like space battleship, the Götterdämmerung. But the story is all over the place, the performances are over the top and the scattershot gags miss the target almost as often as they hit home. Destined to be a future cult film, nevertheless.
On cinema release from Wednesday 23rd May. And available on Blu-ray, DVD and on demand from Monday 28th May.
