Review of Iron Sky (2012) by Justin A — 21 Jun 2014

*sigh*.

The problem with being a fan of b-movies is that there is this immediate assumption that you would just love a movie like Iron Sky. It's about Nazis on the moon, so I knew to expect something that wasn't going to take itself serious. It started off promising enough, the movie has a polished look, but I just did not expect so much heavy handed political "satire". This came out in 2012 and we're still getting Sarah Palin jokes? Really? I didn't even know she was still relevant. I simply did not know what this movie was trying to do. I had expected going in that it was just going to be a zany balls-to-the-wall movie where they just threw every crazy idea into a bunch of different action set pieces. Instead, there's just this sad attempt at trying to be funny. There was only one time that I laughed and I'm going to spoil it right now:

So the Nazis launch an invasion towards Earth. There's this council with all the different countries of the world accusing each other of having built these UFOs that are attacking. In the middle of these accusations, the representative of North Korea stands up and claims that they are North Korean spacecrafts that their leader had designed and built himself. The entire council then laughs at him and tells him to sit down. The only part where I actually laughed during the movie.

This is just one of those movies where I did not know what they were trying to accomplish. The charm of b-movies is that they're so different from what you normally see. This was the same kind of stuff we've been seeing for the past few years since Grindhouse came out almost a decade ago. I'd lump this in with Hobo with a Shotgun and Machete. They're movies that simply try too hard to appeal to a cult fan base and lose all that charm that should make movies like this special. There was no reason for this to be a political satire, and really, one where the jokes were unoriginal and dated before it was even made.