Went to see Iron Sky the other day. It’s a movie I’ve been waiting some time to see, and it didn’t disappoint. Though I can see why it wouldn’t work for some people.
It’s advertised on their website as a “dark science fiction comedy”, and it is, though the dark part comes in at some very odd points.
Basically the ideas is Nazis went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and now they’re back!
Iron Sky is a Finland - German - Australian co-production. In the history of cinema that combination of countries is not historically one that you see paired together.
At the start of the movie it’s evident that they went around to a lot of different funding bodies to get funding for this movie. Screen Queensland being one of them, but there were at least 6 different bodies/companies/people with logos at the start of the movie.
The movie was made on a budget of €7,500,000. 7.5 million Euros that’s $9.68 AUD, $9.56 USD and £5.05 GBP. In comparison a Michael Bay big explosions with lots of CGI film like Transformers cost $150 million USD. The movie based on a boardgame Battleship cost $209 million USD. A lower budget science fiction film like Serenity was $39 million USD, and finally a movie which shares similar production techniques (use of virtual sets and CGI) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow cost $70 million USD.
It wasn’t just various funding bodies putting in money, this movie was also crowd funded to the tune of approximately €900,000, which makes this movie one of a handful of “crowdsourced” feature films.
Spoilers ahead now as I’m going to talk about the movie’s guts a bit.
I’ve read some reviews that say they don’t think this is a comedy / don’t think it’s funny.
I thought it was humorous and funny in places. I’m not really a big comedy movie sort of person, but I do like comedy and if the comedy’s really funny I’ll laugh out loud and occasionally snort because I’m laughing so hard (one comedian I think Adam Hills...or maybe Wil Anderson said that if you’re laughing that hard it means they’re really doing their job to make you laugh so much you have no dignity and snort...or something, I don’t really care, everyone laughs differently).
Maybe a crowd dynamic would have made me laugh more, you get cues from a crowd when to laugh. Did I forget to mention I saw it in a cinema with no one else in there with me, I had a whole cinema to myself. And yet Hoyts still gave me an allocated seat.
I have seen Star Wreck: In the Pirkining the previous work that many of the guys (the Finnish contingent) worked on prior to this film. The humour that is in that film is present in Iron Sky. The thing is it’s not American humour, it’s not British humour and it’s not Australian humour, nor is it German humour (probably) It’s Finnish humour. Not that I claim to be any expert on Finnish humour (nor German humour). I guess I recognise the similarities between Star Wreck and Iron Sky in how the comedy is working.
It’s quite odd, the humour is sometimes not really there. But sometimes is. It’s a biting, mocking humour against the United States, but there’s something else to it.
Broadly Iron Sky is set in the United States, on the moon and in space.
The President of the United States is played by Stephanie Paul playing a Sarah Palin-esque sort of President.
If this were a US-produced and written movie this aspect might exist, but it would have been played a lot more for its comedic and mocking style. But instead Paul drifts between playing it straight and playing it for comedy. It’s an odd mix of styles in a movie which is sort of comedy and sort of something else and sort of drifts between the two.
It’s comedy, but almost played straight most of the time but then occasionally it’s actual comedy.
The CGI in Star Wreck was amazing (Star Wreck pitted Star Trek-esque ships against Babylon 5-esque ships or actual Star Trek and Babylon 5 ships against one another depending on whether you’re watching the Imperial Edition or the original edition) and on this it’s no less amazing. There’s an excellent textual quality to all the CGI models used, all of the Nazis ships have a gritty iron sort of texture to them, they look rough and wrought.
There are also, as there was in Star Wreck a large amount of virtual sets or chroma-keyed sets, also known as blue/green screen sets. This is what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow also used to create all of their world in the move. But in Iron Sky there’s also a fair amount of physical sets as well, with everything coming together seamlessly.
The actual use of virtual sets are only really noticeable on occasion and it’s usually because it’s taking up so much of the screen and moving that you notice it’s not real because of all the movement...meaning it has to be not real. Also some scenes where there is a real set that the actors are standing on and then the scenery around them is all CGI then it becomes somewhat noticeable. But it doesn’t detract from the movie, it just means that on occasion some of the backgrounds and other sets have a different textual quality to others.
Language is something I have to mention, it was glorious to have the Nazis all speak German. There were no people speaking English with faux-German accents, everyone who spoke German spoke German and then there were subtitles on screen. It just added that extra reality to this film. I think if they were speaking English with German accents it might have pushed the comedy in this over into farce or silly comedy.
Julia Dietze who plays Renate Richter in the film has said in an interview this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Germans. I also think this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Americans. For the quirky humour and for the fact that one of the main characters James Washington, who’s a black guy, he spends around 3/4 of the film in white face. Yep. The Nazis make a black guy white, it’s extremely weird. It’s made quite weird in the way the Nazis even the sympathetic one Renate Richter who just say; ‘yep okay that’s good we made you white, you should be happy’. And all of this is played straight, it’s comedic but in a dark comedy sort of way.
There are a lot of epic space battles in this movie. There is even an Australian space ship! Which I’m happy about.
Big epic space ship battles are not something that’s turned up in movies a lot of late, mostly because there haven’t been a lot of big science fiction films Star Trek the 2009 reboot movie had a few. But not too many have had small ships against big ships and little ships against medium sized ships.
It’s more been the realms of TV shows; like Battlestar Galactica and various Stargate series; SG1, Atlantis and Universe.
Costumes wise hats off to Peta Sergeant for being able to wear confidently the different costumes of her character Vivian Wagner, and also to the costume designer Jake Collier for creating them. These costumes veer occasionally into camp, but she’s got the sort of style that would make Servalan (from Blake’s 7) envious. It’s even lampshaded more than once.
Speaking of lampshading and troping, there are several throughout the film and you can go to the TV Tropes page to browse through them. But the reference that particularly caught my eye in the movie was there was a Downfall reference in the movie, for a few moments I couldn’t work out where I’d seen the scene before, and it was only as it played out, the editing matches the Downfall parody videos exactly.
Now to the dark part of the film which ends on a pretty dark end. There’s explosions and everything like that. But at the end, with the Nazis (on the moon) having been bombed into oblivion, the Earth’s greatest powers (in Earth and in space) turn on one another to try and grab the Helium-3 resources on the moon. This doesn’t end in a humorous way, it’s a very sombre and again odd way to end the film, yet it’s weirdly fitting.
It’s advertised on their website as a “dark science fiction comedy”, and it is, though the dark part comes in at some very odd points.
Basically the ideas is Nazis went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and now they’re back!
Iron Sky is a Finland - German - Australian co-production. In the history of cinema that combination of countries is not historically one that you see paired together.
At the start of the movie it’s evident that they went around to a lot of different funding bodies to get funding for this movie. Screen Queensland being one of them, but there were at least 6 different bodies/companies/people with logos at the start of the movie.
The movie was made on a budget of €7,500,000. 7.5 million Euros that’s $9.68 AUD, $9.56 USD and £5.05 GBP. In comparison a Michael Bay big explosions with lots of CGI film like Transformers cost $150 million USD. The movie based on a boardgame Battleship cost $209 million USD. A lower budget science fiction film like Serenity was $39 million USD, and finally a movie which shares similar production techniques (use of virtual sets and CGI) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow cost $70 million USD.
It wasn’t just various funding bodies putting in money, this movie was also crowd funded to the tune of approximately €900,000, which makes this movie one of a handful of “crowdsourced” feature films.
Spoilers ahead now as I’m going to talk about the movie’s guts a bit.
I’ve read some reviews that say they don’t think this is a comedy / don’t think it’s funny.
I thought it was humorous and funny in places. I’m not really a big comedy movie sort of person, but I do like comedy and if the comedy’s really funny I’ll laugh out loud and occasionally snort because I’m laughing so hard (one comedian I think Adam Hills...or maybe Wil Anderson said that if you’re laughing that hard it means they’re really doing their job to make you laugh so much you have no dignity and snort...or something, I don’t really care, everyone laughs differently).
Maybe a crowd dynamic would have made me laugh more, you get cues from a crowd when to laugh. Did I forget to mention I saw it in a cinema with no one else in there with me, I had a whole cinema to myself. And yet Hoyts still gave me an allocated seat.
I have seen Star Wreck: In the Pirkining the previous work that many of the guys (the Finnish contingent) worked on prior to this film. The humour that is in that film is present in Iron Sky. The thing is it’s not American humour, it’s not British humour and it’s not Australian humour, nor is it German humour (probably) It’s Finnish humour. Not that I claim to be any expert on Finnish humour (nor German humour). I guess I recognise the similarities between Star Wreck and Iron Sky in how the comedy is working.
It’s quite odd, the humour is sometimes not really there. But sometimes is. It’s a biting, mocking humour against the United States, but there’s something else to it.
Broadly Iron Sky is set in the United States, on the moon and in space.
The President of the United States is played by Stephanie Paul playing a Sarah Palin-esque sort of President.
If this were a US-produced and written movie this aspect might exist, but it would have been played a lot more for its comedic and mocking style. But instead Paul drifts between playing it straight and playing it for comedy. It’s an odd mix of styles in a movie which is sort of comedy and sort of something else and sort of drifts between the two.
It’s comedy, but almost played straight most of the time but then occasionally it’s actual comedy.
The CGI in Star Wreck was amazing (Star Wreck pitted Star Trek-esque ships against Babylon 5-esque ships or actual Star Trek and Babylon 5 ships against one another depending on whether you’re watching the Imperial Edition or the original edition) and on this it’s no less amazing. There’s an excellent textual quality to all the CGI models used, all of the Nazis ships have a gritty iron sort of texture to them, they look rough and wrought.
There are also, as there was in Star Wreck a large amount of virtual sets or chroma-keyed sets, also known as blue/green screen sets. This is what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow also used to create all of their world in the move. But in Iron Sky there’s also a fair amount of physical sets as well, with everything coming together seamlessly.
The actual use of virtual sets are only really noticeable on occasion and it’s usually because it’s taking up so much of the screen and moving that you notice it’s not real because of all the movement...meaning it has to be not real. Also some scenes where there is a real set that the actors are standing on and then the scenery around them is all CGI then it becomes somewhat noticeable. But it doesn’t detract from the movie, it just means that on occasion some of the backgrounds and other sets have a different textual quality to others.
Language is something I have to mention, it was glorious to have the Nazis all speak German. There were no people speaking English with faux-German accents, everyone who spoke German spoke German and then there were subtitles on screen. It just added that extra reality to this film. I think if they were speaking English with German accents it might have pushed the comedy in this over into farce or silly comedy.
Julia Dietze who plays Renate Richter in the film has said in an interview this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Germans. I also think this is a movie that couldn’t have been made by Americans. For the quirky humour and for the fact that one of the main characters James Washington, who’s a black guy, he spends around 3/4 of the film in white face. Yep. The Nazis make a black guy white, it’s extremely weird. It’s made quite weird in the way the Nazis even the sympathetic one Renate Richter who just say; ‘yep okay that’s good we made you white, you should be happy’. And all of this is played straight, it’s comedic but in a dark comedy sort of way.
There are a lot of epic space battles in this movie. There is even an Australian space ship! Which I’m happy about.
Big epic space ship battles are not something that’s turned up in movies a lot of late, mostly because there haven’t been a lot of big science fiction films Star Trek the 2009 reboot movie had a few. But not too many have had small ships against big ships and little ships against medium sized ships.
It’s more been the realms of TV shows; like Battlestar Galactica and various Stargate series; SG1, Atlantis and Universe.
Costumes wise hats off to Peta Sergeant for being able to wear confidently the different costumes of her character Vivian Wagner, and also to the costume designer Jake Collier for creating them. These costumes veer occasionally into camp, but she’s got the sort of style that would make Servalan (from Blake’s 7) envious. It’s even lampshaded more than once.
Speaking of lampshading and troping, there are several throughout the film and you can go to the TV Tropes page to browse through them. But the reference that particularly caught my eye in the movie was there was a Downfall reference in the movie, for a few moments I couldn’t work out where I’d seen the scene before, and it was only as it played out, the editing matches the Downfall parody videos exactly.
Now to the dark part of the film which ends on a pretty dark end. There’s explosions and everything like that. But at the end, with the Nazis (on the moon) having been bombed into oblivion, the Earth’s greatest powers (in Earth and in space) turn on one another to try and grab the Helium-3 resources on the moon. This doesn’t end in a humorous way, it’s a very sombre and again odd way to end the film, yet it’s weirdly fitting.