Review: IRON SKY: Tales from the Argy Bargy Bunker

Present day. A lunar module is gliding into land on the dusty sattelite's surface. Something about activity on the dark side of the moon. But all is not as it seems. Once landed the astronauts emerge from the module but not before two huge banners shuck out of their furls either side of the craft. YES WE CAN! yells each one.

Before the senior of the pair of moon explorers can get a few slow bounces in he ... explodes. Reverse shot. A world war two soldier in a coal scuttle helmet is aiming his space mauser at the remaining crewer. A slow crane shot lifts us over the ridge to reveal the biggest swastika in creation, Moon Base Nazi. That's where we're going.

Inside Swastika City it's all Metropolis and metal. Moon Fuerher, Udo Kier steps out of a 40s era car to inspect the prisoner who is obviously the vanguard of Earth's impending invasion. The coal-scuttled goons wrest the captive's helmet off and GASP, he's black. Some funny banter later, he escapes their clutches with a neato low G freefall.

Meanwhile we're in school and the little heiling kids tell us by Q&A how they all got there to their teacher, the honeystunner Renate Richter. Soon they are speaking English because and are briefly interrupted by Adler, young buck officer with designs on the big job and Renate's herz. Anyway, she's wanted for her English skills.

The Astronaut is captured, insisting that he knows nothing about any invasion, that he's just a model and got caught up in the President's election campaign. Ah .... Some technology jokes later and they're all on their way to Earth to meet the President of the United States of the Americas. The Astronaut is yet to find out but they have made some changes to his appearence. This is going to be fun.

And it is, consistently. A few sharp lines about US foreign policy from members of the Security Council aimed at a Pres who is basically Sarah Palin with a different name and a little (and really only a little) satire is thrown into the mix. The rest is the kind of action comedy in the trad of Ghostbusters or ... well Ghostbusters will do, if this flicker reminds me of anything it's that one.

Iron Sky is the low-end-market Prometheus. A growing fan base has been waiting for this film from the mid-2000s when it was just a poster. Then it was a teaser with some unexpectedly slick CGI. But mostly it was vapourware until this year. The Blair-Witchy campaign pushed the game changing production history forward, announcing a kind of Endseig for crowd funding. From a few bedrooms in Finland this became an International co-production with a lot of it shot up north in Queensland. So it was hotly anticipated.

It has divided its anticipators the same way that Prometheus has. But the fact is that it is more than just competently made. It uses a good contrast of scale to create a world where the big black cosmos really is waiting outside the rooms, offices and cars. The jokes work and the performances are appropriate to the material.

And it's fun.

What about the Moon Nazis being, you know, Nazis? This is kept soft with references to racism and some admitedly mild ridicule of the nazi racial ideal. It's pretending to be neither Holocaust nor Triumph of the Will. (Well do the nazis at least get their arses kicked? What do you bloody think?) What you do get is a series of pretty well-aimed digs at the current state of realpolitik and the perennial problem of spin: the sight of Sarah Palin Stand-in being cheered by a speech given her by a nazi apparatchick is funny and sobering in much the same way as the number 57 is used in The Manchurian Candidate (that's really worth discovering for yourself.)

For all my reservations I ended up enjoying Prometheus. I dug Iron Sky, though.

Review: PROMETHEUS: Big doin's in Toy Town

What are you DOING, Dave?

Here's my problem with Prometheus: a character I'll call Victor does something very nasty to another character I'll call Victim. Victim started out in the film as a confident and likeable figure but soon undercuts his own appeal, largely through his constant baiting of Victor. At the climax of their antipathy there is only one person who emotes for Victim and they are not sitting in the auditorium.

This lack of empathy between the screen and its audience isn't always a problem; an action movie really only needs a drop of this so that the stress of the action can reach out. It is a problem here because the film sets out to show big questions pursued by small people. This isn't irony. They're serious. But put it all together and you get a quest for meaning carried out by spoiled brats.

My lack of religion does not prevent me from comprehending religious feeling in characters. I don't need to believe in demons to enjoy The Exorcist. When Michael Fassbender's character David is verbally separated from the rest of the team on the good spaceship Prometheus on the grounds that he does not have a soul he is visibly affected. The others note the difference, too. That's all fine for the narrative if it's used to make something. The most it amounts to at the end is a question of a single character's state of belief. The answer given is unsurprising and by that stage all but irrelevant to the promise of a new quest. It's not as though the religion is affirmed nor even seriously questioned. It's just there as it would be in a Mormon cooking program.

The reason I'm going on about this rather than talking about the plot or the performances is that I don't think either of those elements are given much weight against the confused scioreligion rendered so half-arsed by the always impressive action sequences and great CGI.  Michael Fassbender continues to demonstrate why he is on our big screens so much of late. Noomi Rapace is as good here as she was in the Dragon Tattoo films, if less interesting. Charlize Theron impresses in a tighly drawn and thankless role. Everyone else is all but monster fodder. Some early attempts at imputing life into them are good but dispensed with early and summarily. Game over. Well, that's what it feels like.

I'm not really a fanboy of anything anymore. I haven't needed to replace that with some blustery old notion of qualitah cinema, either. But watching the splendid blu-ray of Alien just after seeing this at the cinema brought something forward: after seeing Alien for the first time in 1980 I had a dark and stressful nightmare which included my guarding of a haunted house whose windows opened up like the alien's mouths; after seeing Prometheus I went and had a drink with my cinecompanion, chatted a little about the movie and moved on to other conversation.

This is Ridley Scott's world and he can do what he likes with it. He's planning a number of sequels to close the gap between this and Alien (oh, one thing: why does this story, set decades before Alien, feature superior technology?) which will either fulfil the promise made at the end of Prometheus (and render Alien nonsensical) or will fail at its quest and render itself pointless. I find this idea interesting while I type this sentence but probably won't as I start my next one.

Again, that's my beef with this piece: great action with beautifully imagined new toys and ingrained with a big question but I just couldn't care less about it.