Iron Sky

Stephanie Paul as the President of the United States in Iron Sky, © Blind Spot Pictures Oy, 2012

*½

Remember me? The moon spook you turned into a snowflake?

The one saving grace of this super depressing parody of a Nazi invasion of Sarah Palin’s–Stephanie Paul–America is Julia Dietze as one of my guilty pleasures. That guilty pleasure first reared its head in the form of Alison Doody’s Dr. Elsa Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Alison Doody as Dr. Elsa Schneider in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Smart, sexy women who dress as Nazis, but have a redeemable quality that some might call “are not trying to kill all the Jews.” In this far lesser movie the sexy, innocent “Nazi” is named Renate Richter.

Renate Richter (Julia Dietze) teaching her class in Iron Sky.

Like Schneider she optimistically supports Nazism because she only sees a part of it. To be fair, Dr. Schneider just wanted to find the Holy Grail and saw the Nazis are her ticket to it, but she was still a Nazi. Anyways, as a moon nazi—yes, in this movie there are Nazis on the dark side of the moon—born long after World Word II Renate has no contact with “history” apart from the party line told by Nazi propaganda. So she, as a school teacher, is unfamiliar with violence. In keeping with the reality of this film, while in New York City she stumbles across a theater showing black & white hits and sees The Great Dictator, but now realizes that Charlie Chaplin was mocking Hitler, not lauding him.

And to be clear, one good actress a good film does not make. A further clarification, the “moon spook” line I quoted above, that involves whiteface. At least it was not blackface, I guess…