Let’s talk about Finland. A land blessed with so much beautiful taiga, where the real home of Santa Claus is, where Spetsnaz fear to tread—and, it appears, not without its own cadres of hardcore geeks. What happens when you give them a great big crowdfunding cash influx? Well, they make a film about moon Nazis in flying saucers, because why wouldn’t they! Let’s see how the result turned out, hopefully faster than you can say vastatykistömaalinosoitustutkakalustojärjestelmäinsinöörierikoisupseeri, with Iron Sky.
This bizarre project started off as the brainchild of Timo Vuorensola, who previously made the parody fan film ‘Star Wreck’, filled with untranslatable Finnish puns and some very impressive CGI for something literally made in a bedroom. This led him to managing to get a trailer spot at the 2008 Cannes film festival, of all places, where he began getting financial support and open contribution from online filmmakers. In many ways that’s what gives Iron Sky some significance, as part of the early vanguard of crowdfunded projects that are dime a dozen now, be they niche documentaries or guys doing death metal covers of Macarena or whatever. Of course, there’s a double-edged sword to all of this—sure, we have the weird and wonderful that may never have got off the ground afterwards, but next to traditional producing, there’s also far greater delay, and, well, somewhat more scattershot results.
Either way the trailers were well received, with digital production values easily rivalling a lot of Hollywood output at the time, and they even managed to get everyone’s favorite Slovenian industrial band Laibach on board for the score (that’s a band that makes others look like rank amateurs in terms of edginess—but at the same time, it’s one that I suggest you at least give a look up on even if it’s not your music, just for being surprisingly interesting). Many folks were expecting something like Mars Attacks with more Schutzstaffel skewering, or some Wolfenstein-like romp channelling some Dead Kennedys spirit. And, for better or worse, it…wasn’t quite like that.
The film starts with a setup based on old conspiracy theories about Nazi experiments in Antarctica, which like most such conspiracy theories sound like the dutiful and careful transcriptions of an MDMA-addled derelict’s ravings (that the History Channel will then spend millions making programming out of). Turns out a group of WW2 Germans stumbled on the secret to antigravity, which they use to establish a lunar colony to launch an eventual counterattack. And so, cut to the far off future of 2018, when a US mission returns to the moon, only to blunder right into this new civilization of national socialists. Perhaps wisely, Vuorensola and co took a black comedy approach to this, between impotent Moon Fuhrers played by everyone’s favorite rasping Teuton, Udo Kier, and some attempted satirical jabs at Sarah Palin. Which we’ll get to in a second.
But first, what the film does get right, as you may expect, is the production design. The VFX artists, considering the budget, really got things right, with immense machinery that looks like a brutal nightmare of diesel engine parts, with plenty of attention to detail. It all really comes together at the end, between ascending doomsday warships and orbital bombardments, and given that this was still made over a decade ago now, I have to give them props on that.
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| Someone, somewhere, will be seriously arguing that the only thing this got wrong was that real Moon Nazis are actually funded by the cyborg love child of Charlemagne and Bryan Adams. |
Everything else is more hit and miss. We have a comedy script written by folks whose main forte was Star Trek parodying, trying to take on such concepts like US politics and the follies of Nazism. And it doesn’t really work supremely well. There’s a couple moments that made me chuckle, like when the moon Nazis refuse to accept that an iPod could possibly match their giant tape banks, or Udo Kier desperately trying to get any sort of respect. I also liked a moment where a heavily edited version of The Great Dictator is used to instead venerate Hitler as kind and loving, which is about as genuinely clever as the flick gets.
Then there’s the moment when they, erm, essentially literally whitewash an African-American astronaut to ‘make him Aryan’ for some reason…which I think is meant to be an effort at commentary on inane Nazi racial thinking, but it’s done with practically zero payoff and feels more a teensy bit awkward than anything. This is before we get to the middle act of the movie, wherein lead Julia Dietze, as a naive Hitlerjugend teacher, and ther psychotic SS boyfriend Gotz Otto end up running the campaign of President Not-Sarah Palin. Because this is the level of satire we're stuck with.
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| I also had the same reaction to seeing Uwe Boll in my rear view mirror. |
Now. Palin jokes were old hat by 2010, let alone when this thing was released. But, needless to say, I will give the film this much—that the idea of literal Nazism factoring into American politics proved uncomfortably prescient, and even though the film’s efforts aren’t really work super great on any comedic level, I will at least grant the credit of vindication on that level.
And, at least, once the film finally gets to what we paid money for at the very end, with all-out war between Earth and the Lunar Reich, we at last see what the filmmakers are good at. Every country in the world pulls a space borne battleship out of thin air (except Finland, because of course), chunks get blown out of the moon itself, and we get a taste of the insanity the trailers promised! It doesn’t last long enough, however, and the film ends with something that feels like it’s trying to be the deleted ending to Doctor Strangelove. And while both dealt with weird shit on the moon, I’m not going to pretend this comes within even the same continent as Kubrick.
Overall, Iron Sky is something I’d say is at best worth watching if you skip to about fifteen minutes of it—but at the same time, it was at least proof of concept for all manner of projects that, for better or worse, could be sourced straight from fans and watchers than the mechanisms of production houses. And, while it was quite an undertaking for a project back then, the interesting thing is that technological advances are making such things easier than ever. New Unreal CG engines look like they have all manner of potential for aspiring filmmakers—even if it’s using it to add atmosphere to a set, or even going all out with scifi extravaganzas of their own. All manner of indie webseries done in this way have already been proliferating in the last few years, and it looks like it only gets more interesting from here.
And while Vuorensola’s career spluttered out, between a Hollow Earth-themed Iron Sky sequel that made nearly zero splash and then eventual bankruptcy, this work of his at least shows that if you could make an effort at this sort of craziness a decade ago, imagine what can be done now, with new tools and lessons that have been learned. I’m certainly all for the next generation to let their imaginations run free with what’s coming their way—maybe this time, we’ll have demented tales of Stalinists on Saturn, or more shocking yet, an actual decent Creed album discovered in some dark corner of the solar system...
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