Iron Sky: The Coming Race
Directed by: Timo Vuorensola[1]
Produced by: Tero Kaukomaa[1], Oliver Damian, Peter De Maegd
Screenplay by: Dalan Musson[1]
Story by: Johanna Sinisalo, Timo Vuorensola, Jarmo Puskala, Tero Kaukomaa, Samuli Torssonen
Starring: Lara Rossi, Vladimir Burlakov, Kit Dale, Julia Dietze, Stephanie Paul, Tom Green, Udo Kier
Imagine a world populated by Nazis, Republicans, and a race of reptilians who arrived in the age of the dinosaurs and have been secretly guiding the course of life on Earth for at least 75 million years.
The Reptilians, known as Vril, have been pants at guiding the Earth, as it has been an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland for nearly 30 years. The Nazis and Republicans have mellowed somewhat, or at least mellowed as much as any party can that has Sarah Palin as its leader.
The world(s) in question aren’t Earth, though: they are the far side of the Moon, where the big secret Nazi base is, and far below, in the hollow Earth.
Vril, Moon Nazis, Hollow Earth…yes, this movie gleefully embraces many varied conspiracy theories and runs with them. Paging Edward Bulwer-Lytton to the white courtesy phone!
It is the sequel to the low-budget but well-made cult classic, “The Iron Sky” which came out in 2012. The original won praise for its wild originality and sure-footed sense of humor.
Obviously the sequel can’t recapture the originality–sequels, by definition, cannot. And the plot, to be charitable, is rather thin on the ground. But the humor is there, and it is well-made, and it provides 92 minutes of utterly mad entertainment.
The Vril, for those of you who aren’t in the Chemtrails-and-Anti-Vaxxer crowd, are very nearly immortal, and have secretly provided the world with some of it’s most evil and destructive personages. Thus the Vril in the middle of the Earth include, along with Sarah Palin (downplayed in the sequel reflecting Palin’s own decline in politics), such memorable characters as Adolf Hitler (of course), Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-Un, Idi Amin, Margaret Thatcher, Pope Urban II, Caligula, Putin, Genghis Khan, Urho Kekkonen, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Most of them have no speaking roles and are essentially set decorations, but Putin and Steve Jobs are absolutely stellar parodies of their real-life counterparts. (Note to Jobs fans: What? Too soon? Aw. Too bad.)
It’s all very silly and very funny, and features some startlingly good special effects and genuinely hilarious dialog.
But for Science Fiction Movie fans, this is a thing of pure joy with its dozens and perhaps hundreds of shoutouts to other SF movies and TV shows, including the Trek Universe, many of the Star Wars movies, Babylon Five, Firefly, Farscape, and others. Example: the ship that crashes into the Moon base at the beginning of the movie is evidently the Millennium Falcon. But it has the engines from the Firefly strapped to it. I spotted several dozen, which means I missed 50 or 60 others.
It’s probably not to much of a spoiler to mention that at the very end of the movie we get a glimpse of what a hoped-for third installment might entail: Soviet Mars.
Crowd-funded, and now available outside of Finland, which didn’t like it.