Review: Iron Sky

Director: Timo Vuorensola
Starring: Julia Dietze, Christopher Kirby, Götz Otto, Udo Kier, Peta Sergeant, Stephanie Paul

Note: This was intentionally written to emulate the reviewing style of funny podcasts such as We Hate Movies, How Did This Get Made, Yeah It's That Bad, Bad Movie Fiends, and The Flop House.

Jesus Christ. I think the club has a new member. Make room, Batman And Robin, Plan Nine From Outer Space, Gigli, Troll 2, Jack and Jill, Freddy Got Fingered, Battlefield Earth, Showgirls, The Room, and Birdemic. Iron Sky is the new kid in this town, and it's dressed as a goddamn Space Nazi.

I'm going to do my best to get through the plot holes pieces without dying from lack of oxygen to my brain. We open with two bad-CG astronauts joyfully frolicking around the surface of the Moon, who then find a massive unobtainium-mining base, cleverly hidden on the dark side. Space Nazis appear! and explode the shuttle, shoot one CG astronaut in the face and take the other prisoner. Sub-Moon-Furher Adler (Otto) explains to Moon-Fuhrer Kortzfleisch (Kier) that the unarmed captive "appears to be the leader of the shock troops" for reasons that are not shared with the audience. This first scene inside the moon base shows red as the only perceivable colour, a Schindler's List reference that has no business being there. 

They remove his helmet and see a black man, and all react to this as if he were a black tree frog. CG moonwalker #2 is introduced as James Washington (Kirby), but they mistakenly call him 'Washing' through the rest of the film, because Nazis are goofy.

Washing escapes and meets wowza interest Renate (Dietze), on her lunch break from her Nazis-were-super-peaceful-and-awesome schoolteacher job, and immediately loses half her clothes. Cut to a scene where they end up in an open airlock, huffing away like they just ran forty laps, and then he closes the door to outer space. The artificial air generation on this moon base is really something else, despite being made by computers the same size and age as Stonehenge. Then Washbin is of course recaptured, because he's the only non-Nazi on this moon base. And here's where things start to get a little crazy. 

The Moonazis decide they need to to 'aryanize' the poor bastard by looping old Hitler speeches at his ears, but oops it didn't work because they forgot to teach him German first. They also decide to turn his skin 'white', just because that's how people on the dark side of the moon are supposed to look dammit. And let me tell you, as far as black actors in white-face go, they fucking nailed it. 

One of these people is actually not a white aryan Nazi person...spooky.

Advert and Renault bring Washcloth back to Earth to act as an ambassador to the President, ignoring that it negates every reason for his re-pigmentation. They also need to steal some cell phones because their giant invade-the-shit-out-of-Earth mothership, idling on the moon where they have been mining unobtainium for decades, runs on Motorola batteries. 

The President, Sarah Palin's dumber, fruitier sister doing her worst George W. Bush impression, accepts Adblock's offer to help with her re-election campaign and overnight America is turned into a fascist Super-Neo-Naziocracy. Some more nonsensical things happen, and like the country, this is where the plot decides to call it a day and just start killing people. Moonazis explode comically, the mothership drops in and reminds America to wear a jacket, and the stupidest bait-and-switch character death in the history of film happens when Adler is tricked into saluting his hand straight into an empty light bulb socket, which electrocutes him. (/spoiler)

For the Michael Bay / satirical action crowd, there are a few silly, fun moments here, and even some impressive space-battle effects in the third act. But in the end, this movie knows it's crap and still thinks too highly of itself. Nothing in the plot makes an atom of sense, much of the CGI was made with crayons and an Etch-a-Sketch, and most of the jokes belong in a Leslie Nielsen flick. And like that unfortunate occurrence, for every thing I found that made me almost crack a smile, there was something else that made me groan like a herd of unimpressed cows.

Whatever drug is responsible for the insanely high 38% Rotten Tomatoes rating, keep it away from me. If you're really into the Transformers movies and not yet a teenager, go ahead and give this a try. But for us regular grey matter-having folk, this couldn't have been saved even by Moon-Winston Churchill.

Iron sky gets HALF A SWASTIKA CARVED INTO THE MOON OUT OF FIVE