Iron Sky Review

WARNING:SPOILERS

Iron Sky is a really easy movie to get right. Space Nazis. How do you mess that up? Just Nazis on the moon and invade Earth. Seriously, how hard is that to make entertaining? I mean its a movie about Space Nazis so we're not exactly expecting something on Schindler's List level of intelligence, but we're expecting an awesome alien invasion movie...were the aliens are Nazis.

First, Plot: its 2018 and two American astronauts go to the moon, one gets killed by Nazis who escaped to the moon after WW2 and the other, a black man, gets captured by the Nazis for studied. Some other stuff happens that I'll touch on later and the Nazis invade, then get beaten back, then destroyed, end of movie. Simple enough right? Standard alien invasion movie really, just with Nazi's instead of martians. How can that be difficult to get right?

You wanna know how you mess it up? How bout instead of tackling the subject with any sort of sincerity or seriousness you make it a stupid quasi comedy and have political undertones that are so ham-fisted and annoying that it makes Avatar look subtle.

This movie tries to be funny, it tries really, really hard to be funny, but its not. I suppose humor is a subjective thing, but...its not funny, its stupid. They try to make some sort of clever balance of serious and funny, but it fails. It fails so hard. Its not like Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz (or anything Edgar Wright makes really) where yes its really funny, but you can take it seriously when it asks you to because its very well written and the characters are likeable and the humor is clever. Its just so stupid and the humor is so obvious and painfully unfunny that when the serious parts come you don't take them serious, the horrible attempts at humor takes you completely out of the movie.

If they had made this movie as a straight forward invasion movie and left out the awful, painful, forced attempts at humor maybe it could have been salvageable or at the very least worth watching. But it does have one more huge glaring problem.

I understand that some film makers feel the need to put political undertones in their movie, I don't mind as long as its subtle or clever and doesn't take away from the story, characters, or entertainment value of the movie. But this movie is so obvious and in your face about what its trying to tell you about the American political system that its insulting to my intelligence. There's not even an attempt at subtlety, they come right out and say it; Americans (or at the very least Republicans) are Nazis. Seriously, that's actually pretty much the whole message of the movie. Look, I understand that not everyone likes America, I get it and I respect those people's opinions because everyone deserves to have an opinion. But when you can't think of any intelligent way to attack America or the American political besides "They're all Nazis" that's when I don't respect your opinion. If you can't even put your thoughts about the American political system in more words than "Sarah Palin sure is dumb" or "Nazis" then well, your not very smart and maybe you shouldn't make trying to make fun of the American political system the WHOLE theme of your movie. Also Sarah Palin jokes aren't clever or funny anymore, they wore out around ohhhh I don't know when the Republicans lost the presidantial race in 2008 and she faded into the background and ceased to matter?

Besides those two giant flaws, this movies ok. Emphasis on ok. The actings...decent, better than the average low budget film, but still...just ok really nothing special. The writing is..well not that good really, but other than the aforementioned problems its adequate, it would have made a decent sci-fi invasion script, again without the two huge problems mentioned before. The directing is alright I guess, nothing special. Really, the only thing worth mentioning is the effects. Which are actually really good. A few here and there and kinda bad and obviously fake, but for the most part they're pretty excellent all around the board. For instance Space Nazi Blimps. Yes, it sounds stupid, but its awesome.

Over all this movie was hugely disappointing. I guess I don't really hate it, I just really really don't really like it very much. It had an insanely interesting and promising premise (Space Nazis for god sake) and just completely wastes it. If the film makers would have made any attempt to take the subject seriously and maybe, maybe used it to make some kind of commentary on humanity as a whole and how we need to better ourselves in the way we treat each other, then maybe it would have worked. But instead they decided to make horrible attempts at humor, incredibly forced romances (forgot to mention that part, trust me its terrible) like Anakin and Padme bad, and the horribly ham fisted and insulting political themes and completely ruin what could of been, at the very least, a fun and interesting invasion movies about freaking SPACE NAZIS.