/ 13 July 2012

The other movie of the week: Iron Sky

Nefarious plans afoot: Julia Dietze and Otto Götz in Iron Sky
Nefarious plans afoot: Julia Dietze and Otto Götz in Iron Sky

Now it has been given an extended release at the Labia, and will hopefully come to Jo’burg’s Bioscope sometime soon. It’s directed by Finn Timo Vuorensola, known for the ultra-low-budget spoof series Star Wreck, which was pretty much funded by friends and put together on Vuorensola’s laptop. See it on an internet portal near you.

Iron Sky posits the discovery of a Nazi mini-city on the dark side of the moon. It’s been there since 1945, and the Nazis are almost ready for a renewed assault on Earth. They just needed one little thing, and now they’ve got it … On Earth, meanwhile, an American president alarmingly like Sarah Palin is trying to throw together a re-election campaign.

But it’s pointless to try to synopsize the plot of Iron Sky, so let’s just say it’s a huge amount of fun — if you have a taste for a science-fiction action send-up, of which there really isn’t enough.

Iron Sky has a charmingly B-grade attitude to the plot and its holes, either slamming things together with gay abandon or simply taking things for granted and moving on to the next hilarious sequence. It has a deliciously mordant sense of humour, especially when it comes to geopolitics. And it does the action and the CGI imaginatively too.

European cinema has long defined itself against the American juggernaut, sometimes refusing, sometimes embracing. Or both — think Jean-Luc Godard’s play with “Bogie” in À Bout de Souffle. It’s great to see, in Iron Sky, what you could call a non-American sensibility committing a wholesale pillage of American movie tropes. Anyway, you gotta love anything with Udo Kier in it, and here (giggle) he’s the Führer.