Iron Sky - We Come in Peace

There are actually people who are convinced that the Nazis once escaped to the moon and set up a base on its dark side, from which they are planning a new world order. Filmmaker Timo Vuorensola has taken this absurd theory as the basis for his first feature film and crafted a biting satire out of it that, despite a relatively low budget, boasts some surprisingly good special effects.

Iron Sky begins in 2018: during a lunar mission, inexperienced astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby) discovers a hidden space station that has been built on the dark side of the moon by the Nazis. You see, just before the end of World War II, a group of Nazis managed to escape from Earth using secret Reich flying discs. They then spent the years on the moon preparing to finally take over the world at some point. Now that they have been discovered, they see their time has come. But before humanity is to be enslaved with the help of the secret weapon Götterdämmerung, power-obsessed intelligence chief Klaus Adler (Götz Otto) travels to Earth with his fiancée, schoolteacher Renate Adler (Julia Dietze), where contact is to be made with the President of the United States (Stephanie Paul) with the help of Washington. While the president hopes that the sudden appearance of the Nazis will guarantee her re-election - after all, a wartime president has still been re-elected - Adler is sure that he will now succeed in becoming autocrat over the people. But he has made the calculation without the subhuman Washington and his influence on Renate.

After his no-budget film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning has been viewed over 8 million times on the Internet, Timo Vuorensola was able to realize his first feature film with the help of film funding and a large-scale crowd funding campaign. Filming took place in Frankfurt, which was convincingly transformed into New York with the help of computer effects, and in Australia, where numerous interior shots were shot. Using a mixture of built sets and computer effects, the result was a respectable piece of science fiction satire that boasts many great ideas.

The humor may not always work. Some moments seem a bit awkwardly staged, and many a gag is just too flat to elicit even a weary smile. Other ideas on the other hand are full of bite, absurdity and originality and with their bitterly satirical character they almost make you stop laughing. It's especially worth paying attention to the smaller details, where a lot of the best gags are hidden. For while many of the film's satirical aspects are not exactly subtly conveyed (as exemplified by the American president's resemblance to Sarah Palin), the true genius of Iron Sky actually lies more in the small details.

Sure, the mix of clever satire and wacky sci-fi comedy doesn't always work, some of the actors act a little too over-the-top, and the decision to dub the film in its entirety for release in Germany rather than leaving it in the much more effective bilingual version also robs the film of some of its great potential. But despite some justified criticisms, what Vuorensola has put together here for a mini-budget is, on balance, absolutely successful. And with a delightfully over-the-top Udo Kier, as always, and the perfectly cast leads Götz Otto and Julia Dietze, the film is just that much more fun. Iron Sky may not be great cinema art and may not be able to fully exploit the potential of its wonderful initial idea. For an enjoyable evening at the cinema with amazing cleverness the film offers enough material

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp