20130824: Action Review--Iron Sky

Iron Sky

1. Feature length film, 92 minutes, rated R, 2012, Action, Comedy, SciFi.
2. IMDB: 6.0/10.0 from 58,185 users.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 36% but 'no consensus yet'; 38% liked it from 8,225 audience inputs.
4. Directed by Timo Vuorensola, screenplay by Michael Kalesniko.
5. Starring Julia Dietze as Renate Richter, Christopher Kirby as the male model James Washington, Udo Kier as Wolfgang Kortzfleisch, Peta Sergent as Vivian Wagner, Götz Otto as Klaus Adler, Stephanie Paul as the president of the USA.
6. Bumbling American astronauts discover extensive Nazi settlements and fabrication on the dark side of the Moon.  That is quite a beginning.  Mentioned in passing was the search for Helium-3.
7. The year is 2018.  The woman American president has sent a crew to the Moon as a publicity stunt to shore up her flagging re-election hopes.  The black 'astronaut' James Washington was a central part of the stunt, meant to increase the president's PC ratings.
8. The Nazis decide it's time to return to the Earth for reconnaissance, then to invade and conquer.  Loved the Nazis using flying saucers coming from the Moon.
9. There are clever moments showing the Nazi recon party interacting with American pot growers, street gangs, marketing executives, and the representatives of the president.
10. The marketing director even gets the president to adopt a Nazi campaign.  Listening to the president talking about 'one truth' and the New World Order (Nazi style) did not seem all that far-fetched.
11. Soon enough, the Nazis on the Moon are ready to invade.  The American president takes this as an opportunity to become a 'wartime president' so that she will be re-elected.
12. The space war was quite impressive from the special effects side, though I thought the massive space battleship Götterdämmerung might have done more damage before it was destroyed (from having an iPad ripped out of its control network).
13. After the Nazis are defeated, the American president makes a grab for the Helium-3 reserves on the Moon found by the Nazis.  (Why? asks the president.  Reply from Secretary of Defence: Because we'd be energy independent for a thousand years.)  The space battle resumes then, with the powers from the Earth destroying each other, and the UN representatives beating the nonsense out of each other.
14. Four stars of five.

Cinematography: 10/10 The film is just beautiful.

Sound: 9/10 Fine, start to finish. There was too much sound in space, though.

Acting: 10/10 Actors followed direction and the screenplay as far as I could see.  Udo Kier was fine as the aging Nazi leader; so was Christopher Kirby whose character accomplishes so much more than anyone expected from him.  I liked Peta Sergent's portrayal of the marketing executive who serves as one of the president's chief advisers, and does a fair 'woman scorned' segment.  Götz Otto does a fine turn as the slimy bastard who delivers a coup against the Führer and directs the failed attack on Earth.

Screenplay: 8/10   This is billed as a comedy, but I did not laugh once.  Otherwise, I loved it for what it had to say about America and the world powers.

Special Effects: 10/10 Quite good, especially compared to most SciFi films of the last ten or twenty years.  I'm not talking about District 9 or Elysium or Oblivion, but the run-of-the-mill SciFi film, which looks horrible.  The art and effects on this film are first rate, from the World War II/steam punk Nazi technology to the complex space-going warships of the modern Earth fleets.  In terms of total visual effect, this is one of the best looking films I've ever seen.

Considering the budget estimate I saw (7.5 million euros), the effects were even more impressive.  Hollywood just cannot do anything nearly as good as this for that amount of money.

Fire in space?  Well, no.  Still, the bad visuals are about 20 seconds, versus most of the film, which looks fine.