Timo Vuorensola has done it to him. Perhaps reading the name of this Finnish director and music video maker doesn't light up a light yet, but then you don't belong to the extensive internet fan club that has been tracking the genesis of the potential cult hit for several years now Iron Sky following closely. The world premiere at the Berlin festival is now the culmination of all efforts which, Vuorensola informed the premiere audience made up largely of those fans, had started with an idea born six years ago in a Finnish sauna. An idea so goofy that it could not go unrealised. A film about Nazis on the moon.
Iron Sky is in fact based on the little-known fact that in 1945, a group of Nazis managed to escape to the back of the moon. Out of sight of the Earth's inhabitants, they established a colony there and worked on the Fourth Reich all the while. In 2018, we see in Iron Sky, that time is almost upon us. The giant battleship Götterdämmerung, still designed by filmmaker Fritz Lang in the 1930s, is almost ready to take off. If only the Nazi scholars had a faster computer. Now, that is entirely unintentionally provided for when an American astronaut lands on the moon as an election stunt for America's first female president ('Yes, she can!') and falls into the hands of those Nazis. Big consternation there, by the way, when they rip off the hapless one's space helmet and the intruder turns out to be black.
What follows is a barely-repeatable sequence of hysterical entanglements that culminate in chaotic space battles that are not for Star Wars underperform. Designed by Vuorensola with bravura and enthusiasm in the best B-movie tradition, this vehicle is packed with delightful finds and jokes and exuberant computer design. The Nazis' space vehicles roar like motorbikes, their spacesuits still have the old-fashioned Nazi helmets, and when some soldiers from the invasion army study a terrestrial porn magazine, they conclude that the little hair the girls have sometimes looks exactly like the moustache of the great predecessor. "That does excite me," one of them observes. Incidentally, the Americans and the United Nations are also targets of Vuorensola's raunchy jokes.
We dare to predict right now that audiences will not often have as much fun during this Berlinale as they did at Iron Sky. Timo Vuorensola, along with much of his cast and crew, accepted effusive applause after the first performance. Perhaps best of all, this out-of-control bad boy adventure cost just €7 million - five per cent of what an American studio spends for something comparable. Internet fans raised over a million of this through crowdfunding. Honour relatively modest contribution perhaps, but invaluable promotionally.
Leo Bankersen
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