Reich For The Stars [Review: Iron Sky]

Vivian Wagner: “They’re Nazis… from the moon.”
President: ”They’re the only guys we ever managed to beat in a fair fight.”

A U.S. space mission, funded as part of a presidential re-election campaign, uncovers a terrible secret – a Nazi stronghold on the dark side of the moon. Black astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirkby) is captured and interrogated, and SS captain Adler (Götz Otto) is dispatched on a mission to Earth in search of technology, accompanied by naïve Nazi schoolteacher Renate (Julia Dietze). When the inevitable space Zeppelin invasion follows, our last line of defence turns out to be President Sarah Palin (Stephanie Paul - good but not quite Tina Fey), and the illegally-armed space battleship George W. Bush, captained by the President's advisor Vivian Wagner (Peta Sargent.)

It appears that the Nazis are up to many of their old tricks – eugenics, indoctrination and propaganda, torture, building doomsday devices, subjugating women, internal power struggles, and “curing” Washington's blackness, although there’s no mention of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.

Iron Sky (2012) does not exactly glorify the Nazis – rather they’re the pantomime villains we supposedly love to hate, just as they were in the Indiana Jones films. However the point of the film seems to be that modern day politics might be just as bad – for example in one scene Palin and Wagner are persuaded to adopt Nazi propaganda for a successful campaign speech.

Iron Sky is a low-budget melodrama that should be viewed through thick sense-of-humour glasses. There’s a lot of fun to be had if you go in with fair expectations – expect a bit of hit and miss when it comes to effects, acting, script, and be prepared to laugh at the right places and occasionally the wrong places. This is also not the first time we've seen space Nazis - obviously Star Wars is full of thinly veiled Nazi-like characters, and I am also reminded of Mel Brooks' History Of The World Part I, and a particular sketch at the end of the film (if you've seen it you'll know the one I mean) in which, in the space of about a minute Brooks manages to be more tasteless, more daring and funnier than this whole film.

I Have Had It With These Motherf****** Dinosaurs On This Motherf****** Spaceship! [Review: Dinosaurs On A Spaceship]

Thpoiler Alert.

This week the Doctor rounds up a posse made up of Queen Nefertiti, Amy and Rory, Rory's Dad and an Edwardian game hunter, brings them aboard a spaceship populated by dinosaurs and heading straight for Earth, hoping to divert it before the Indian Space Agency blows it sky high and makes dinosaurs extinct.

Riann Steele as Queen Nefertiti

This episode is light and frothy: I'd go further and say the comedy seems to be the main point, since the plot is so simple. There's Matt Smith's clowning, Rory's Dad who turns out to be a little eccentric, plus some very funny moments with the two throwaway historical figures (surely spin-off material?) a tame stegosaurus, Robert Webb and David Mitchell in fine form as two bickering robots, and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Iron Sky. It's all very entertaining - perhaps a bit too entertaining, almost like watching Red Dwarf or a sketch show rather than a drama. There's not much substance, and I feel I'm still waiting for the Moffatt scriptwriting genius of yore to kick in.