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Iron Sky: The Coming Race
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| Year: |
2019
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Director: |
Timo Vuorensola
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| Stars: |
Lara Rossi, Vladimir Burlakov, Kit Dale, Tom Green, Julia Dietze, Edward Judge, Martin Swabey, Emily Atack, Udo Kier, John Flanders, Stephanie Paul, James Quinn, Jukka Hilden, Lloyd Li, Amanda Wolzak, Antoine Plaisant, Anabel Lopez, Kari Ketonen
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Action, Science Fiction, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
In the year 2018, all life on Planet Earth was wiped out by a nuclear conflagration, leaving the remnants of human race what was stranded on the dark side of the Moon, where a group of Nazis who had escaped World War II had established a space base. But there are problems: the supplies are running low for the Moonbase citizens, so what they don't need is more mouths to feed, which is what they get when a spaceship from Earth incredibly shows up and lands in their docking bay. Here one of the leaders of the Moon people, Obi (Lara Rossi), who is the daughter of the founders who kicked out the Nazis all those years ago, meets the survivors and asks them what they want...
The answer is surprising, or maybe not because if you had seen the cult favourite original, then it could be that nothing could surprise you about this franchise. It took a range of modern urban myths, conspiracy theories and digs at the society of the twenty-tens in a science fiction flavour and presented them as an unexpectedly goodhearted dash through what in other hands could have been a litany of bad taste and tone-deaf satire. But that had been released at the beginning of the decade, when those subjects seemed a lot funnier than they were at the end of the decade; put simply, conspiracy theories were no longer funny anymore, not when they got people murdered.
You could say the Nazis got plenty of people murdered too, and that hadn't changed from 1945 to 2012, but there had also been a history of that movement being used as a punchline or a cartoonish villain in pop culture, which while that did not do down their crimes against humanity, was very much in the cause of using humour to lampoon and belittle a movement that had no sense of humour whatsoever. So while Iron Sky's sequel had Adolf Hitler riding a tyrannosaurus rex and proclaiming, "Sieg heil, motherfuckers!", which you would have quite some difficulty taking at all seriously, the reason that the far right had not gone away was thanks to their bad attitude.
To put it almost facetiously. Therefore as fascism was on the rise once again across the globe, it was not quite as easy to laugh along with Iron Sky: The Coming Race with its jokey trappings taken from totalitarian and oppressive regimes. Now, it remained a goofy item of deliberate trash, and as those went it was head and shoulders above anything lazily thrown together on insultingly low imagination that clogged up genre television channels or DVD bargain bins (or cheapo streaming purchases, to drag them into the twenty-first century). There were references that showed director Timo Vuorensola had done his homework, such as the hollow Earth theory and even the presence of Vril, the sci-fi concept that inspired a certain meaty drink, but Sarah Palin, necessarily carried over from the first instalment, was yesterday's news.
The storyline had it that the leaders of twentieth century Earth were actually reptilian aliens (chalk up another conspiracy theory you could read about on the internet's back alley walls), but their Vril source of power could save the Moon folk, so it had to be retrieved. Throw in a Steve Jobs cult led by comedian Tom Green playing it very straightfaced, and a dinosaur chariot chase, and the sight of Margaret Thatcher, the Pope and Osama Bin Laden crushed alive under a huge fireball, and this was eventful if nothing else. The effects were very good indeed, and the plotting was on the acceptable side of ludicrous, plus it was nice to see Udo Kier back in a dual role, it was just that by the time this was released, belatedly thanks to legal issues with an FX team that the Iron Sky producers won, it seemed the party was over, or at least coming to an end. Not that this stopped them concocting a second sequel, and there were some solid laughs here as well as notes of sincerity that were just as bizarre as those jokes. Music by Laibach (their lyrics in the end song are particularly cherishable) and Tuomas Kantelinen.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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