Warning. Spoilers abound.

I finally got around to watching Iron Sky. I can see why it got mixed reviews when it came out. There were bits of a good movie hidden in here. The idea that we might go back to the moon, even if it were just a publicity stunt—specially if it were merely a publicity stunt—was gratifying. It’s about time we started going into space for trivial reasons!

The discovery that, in our hour of need, the United States had secretly built a maneuverable military spaceship capable of going to the moon on a whim, disguising it as a satellite? That was thrilling. And when it turned out no nation had given up on the dream of space flight, that was inspiring.¹ When I saw that ragtag satellite fleet take on Nazi warships in outer space, I about jumped out of my seat. I didn’t even care that it was a deus ex machina. It was just too cool.

Unfortunately, that’s not what Iron Sky was about. Iron Sky was an anti-war film; even that wasn’t its problem, however. The fatal flaw of Iron Sky is that, ultimately, it was specifically an anti-World War II film. There was no reason to go to war against Germany. Hitler was just a joke.

Literally, when the kind Nazi schoolteacher who believes that Naziism is about helping the less fortunate changes her mind, it isn’t because she accidentally runs across a Holocaust museum on Earth. It’s because she runs across a Charlie Chaplin film on Earth, and learns that Nazis are lower-class.

An alien watching this film would have to seriously question who the villains were. No mention of the holocaust or genocide, and if we hadn’t invaded the moon, the Nazis wouldn’t have invaded us. And when they did attack us, and attempted to rain down meteors on the Earth to destroy whole cities?

The movie had it as a given that it was wrong to bomb the Nazi moon city to stop them from destroying Earth cities—which ultimately means it was wrong to bomb Nazi Germany’s cities and Japan’s cities in World War II to stop them.

The fatal flaw in Iron Sky is that it was, ultimately, an Axis apologetic. Sure, there were evil Nazis on the moon. But we were just as bad, and had no right to defend ourselves after landing on the moon and building evil warships.

There were other good parts, too, such as the Downfall parody parody. Unfortunately, the good parts of Iron Sky were outnumbered by the huh? and wtf? parts.