Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019)

Directed by: Timo Vuorensola | 93 minutes | action, adventure, science fiction, comedy | Actors: Lara Rossi, Vladimir Burlakov, Kit Dale, Julia Dietze, Stephanie Paul, Tom Green, Udo Kier, John Flanders, James Quinn, Emily Atack, Martin Swabey, Pierce Nathan-Calvin Baechler, Christoph Drobig, Edward Judge, Kari Berg

What really happened to Adolf Hitler in World War II? And have our government leaders secretly all been unaware of extraterrestrial life for a long time, but is that still being kept quiet from the common people? It seems that the authors of Iron Sky and its sequel Iron Sky: The Coming Race are either ties to or at least inspired by conspiracy theorists, as one fantastic premise after another be fired at you in this wacky science fiction adventure comedy.

A few decades after the events of ‘Iron Sky’ (2012), the situation is as follows: Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war and a few hundred survivors have taken refuge on the moon, the dark side of the moon that is. They live in the former base where the Nazis stayed in the first part. Paradise is anything but, as becomes clear when a spaceship with refugees suddenly arrives on the moon, led by the Russian pilot Sasha (Vladimir Burlakov). The leader, the apparently critically ill Renate Richter (Julia Dietze) – mother of the main character Obi (Lara Rossi) – refuses the help-hungry former Earthlings access to the moon base, but daughter Obi puts a stop to it. When Obi learns that their old enemy Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier) is less dead than she thought, she desperately needs the help of Sasha and his spaceship. Kortzfleisch gives her a kind of elixir, which makes her mother better in one fell swoop, and which could save the rest of the population. For this she has to go to the center of the earth. And what they find there will surprise you…!

‘Iron Sky: The Coming Race’ is a mishmash of absurd, sometimes well-functioning ideas and bad parodies of phenomena that are long gone. For example, on the moon base there is a cult group calling themselves Jobsisms, a parody of the worship of Apple products, here elevated to religion. Not for a moment is this funny. A tribute or parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper introduces the viewer to a whole host of celebrities, chosen completely at random: from Margaret Thatcher to Caligula, from Mark Zuckerberg to the Sarah Palin-esque president of the US . Ha ha, but not really.

To a certain extent ‘Iron Sky: The Coming Race’ is entertaining, but actually the film tries too hard to achieve the cult status that the first part has. It all looks very neat, especially considering the budget that was available – but it’s certainly not enough to make the film a must.