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I managed to get in on the Colorado Springs showing of “Iron Sky” last night.
I won’t say it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it certainly had a lot going for it.
First off, the bad:
The dialogue was a little klunky through most of the movie, but once you allow for it it’s only jarring in a couple of places. It’s probably attributable to it being written and produced by ESL speakers, but it was a little irritating in hindsight since it would have been a trivial thing to fix: just hire an aspiring American screenwriter for a couple of days to polish the dialogue. (An American rather than a Brit, because the idiom/usage should reflect the Earth-side part of the story taking place in the U.S..)
The screenplay was a bit inconsistent in its recurring gags and themes, for example the “Heil Kortzfleisch” bit and Washington being a racial token rather than an actual astronaut. Indeed, Washington’s whole situation was ripe with un-PC comedic potential that they seemed just a little hesitant to exploit in the way Blazing Saddles did (they appeared to be setting up an “oh they didn’t just go there” racial gag in the airlock scene, but…then…they didn’t go there). The “woman scorned” bit was completely hamfisted – it would have been far more effective to have had a few vague cues as to her motivations in leading the assault, and then follow up with the “did he suffer?” line structured in a way to turn the whole sequence on its head as the vengeance of a jilted lover rather than the defense of Earth.
The acting was similarly inconsistent in places. This seemed to be a function of editing, however, as the actors involved did a decent job elsewhere.
In one of the later scenes the albino makeup is poorly done, in that you can plainly see it is just makeup – the earlier shots are actually pretty convincing in that regard.
Now, the good:
Overall it was good, silly fun. With a little polish on the jokes and dialogue, it could have been a Holy Grail-level classic. Just the premise of the film is brilliantly absurd, which even the characters on several occasions acknowledge (see trailer above).
The special effects, sets, etc. were pretty impressive for such a low-budget film. They may have created a new sub-genre of Steampunk with the depictions of “advanced” Moon-Nazi technology – it was thoroughly retro, but in a clearly 1940s way rather than an 1890s way. Ditto the color grading – it was a nice touch how the backgrounds and background action in many of the lunar scenes were nearly monochromatic, like Nazi-era films and photos, as if things faded back into the 1940s as you moved away from the camera.
While the effects of low gravity are otherwise set aside, the scenes of Washington’s escape attempt use the Moon’s gravity as a subtle sight-gag. Imagine a fleeing Jason Bourne leaping from one roof down to the next…but taking six times as long to get there…bellowing in terror all the way.
While some of the humor came up short as noted above, there were a number of gags that were either subtly done (the Great Dictator references), unapologetically unsubtle (the Downfall bit), or just pitch-perfect (the Beetle sight gag and the use of classic Meier/Shaver UFO designs).
The quantity and distribution of allusions was well-done. If you were paying attention, there were quite a few references besides those to The Great Dictator and Downfall,and they were fit in in unobtrusive ways (that is, they fit the flow of the story and weren’t clumsily thrown in to get a laugh). In particular, Dr. Strangelovemakes quite a few appearances.
Renate Richter’s cluelessness about the actual nature of Naziism is exploited pretty well as a running gag. And when she figures things out, she is simply furious about it and takes action – she doesn’t turn into a moralizing, self-righteous, preachy Jane Fonda caricature who delivers long moral-relativist soliloquies on manufactured consent and the basis of all power structures in exploitative lies.
The guy who plays Klaus Adler was an excellent casting choice. On the one hand, he has the same exaggeratedly chiseled features of the Ideal Aryan Übermensch one finds in Nazi propaganda posters, and on the other, his snarling grimace when angry is utterly creepy and the kind of thing you’d find in graphic-novel illustrations of Nazi villains.
The parody of American politics is not totally spot-on, but it gets pretty close to capturing the venality, stupidity, and mendacity of the people involved. The satire of Sarah Palin seems confined to simply physical and cultural resemblances, and so isn’t gratuitously vicious and mean-spirited like a Hollywood production would have made it, and this is true of the political theme generally even though it’s clear the politicians are meant to be left-stereotypes of Republicans. Indeed, the real mockery concerning President Wagner and others is directed at general stereotypes of politicians: short-sightedness, mindless personal ambition, obsession with re-election, lack of principles, win-at-all-costs ethics, lack of loyalty to others, grandiosity, opportunism, and a woeful lack of knowledge about vital issues.It doesn’t come across as hackneyed Republican-bashing (like, say, Newsroom).
While the music was a little jarring in one or two places, in many scenes it was amusing to pick up on a particular melody in the background and only a moment later recognize it as some bombastic Wagner piece.
The ending sequence is totally unexpected – it can be read as a little preachy, but I give the producers props for making it a commentary on humanity in general and not (say) a cheap shot at Americans, or the West, or capitalism, or some other threadbare Approved Target of Hate which a Hollywood production would have used.
So again, not the greatest film of all time, but definitely worth seeing.
I’m not saying you have to. I’m just saying, you know, it would be nice, if you’ve read In the Shadow of Ares, to go post a (hopefully glowing) review on the Amazon page.
Consider it your good deed for the day. It’ll make you feel good about yourself. And who doesn’t want another reason to feel good about themselves?
I suppose it makes an appearance via the reference under the Design Reference Architecture, but it’s a little surprising that it didn’t get an entry of its own as an example of a stripped-down, minimalist mission.
I haven’t seen it on the lfs.org website yet, but word is that In the Shadow of Ares did not win this year’s Prometheus Award.
But that’s okay. I didn’t really expect to win given who we were up against, and I’m thrilled that we were among the finalists – I never expected to get that far when we were nominated.
I finished The Day of the Triffids on the flight to Krakow on Sunday, and I have to say that Wyndham managed to keep up the quality right until the end. The twist involving Josella should have been pretty obvious, in hindsight, but surprised me anyway given Bill’s fixation with finding the group from the university – it was a wholly effective bit of misdirection.
The ending was a bit of a let-down, in the sense that it just…ends. There’s no big set piece or climax to the story, the characters just ride off into the sunset. I was hoping to find that they’d developed a method of destroying the triffids, or that they’d discovered the truth about the plants’ ability to communicate and (apparently) reason, or the resolution of some of the many mysteries left unresolved. However, given that the story is presented as Bill’s in medias res memoir of the events of the disaster and it’s immediate aftermath, I suppose final answers weren’t to be expected in the time period covered by the story.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
I found the response of the victims of the “meteor shower” to be both disgusting and interesting — most people just gave up and gave in, but as Bill himself sort-of observes at one point, this is a curiously British failing. They kept expecting “in Micawberesque fashion” that Americans would come and save the day again (remember this was written when WWII was still fresh in every adult’s mind), which encouraged in many of the blinded a mindset of dependence-bred passivity strongly reminiscent of people who ignored evacuation orders during Katrina on the assumption that “the government” would take care of them.
One glaring omission from his disaster scenario involved radio. Unless the “meteor shower” (in scare-quotes because there was substantial doubt as to the true nature of that event) somehow disrupted the ionosphere for 7-8 years or fried communications systems altogether (while leaving other electrical systems intact), there’s no reason why the protagonists shouldn’t have been in radio communications with others or have had some news of outside areas via those able to use radio communications (such as perhaps the university group in London). The story presumably takes place in the late 1950s or early 1960s, so radio communications would have been both pervasive and accessible even to laymen, and it was shown in the story that electrical power was available to the protagonists even 6 years into the disaster (in the form of electrified fences to keep the triffids out of their compounds). Bill mentions early on (within a day or two of the “meteor shower”) that radio and television frequencies are silent, but it’s hard to believe that that would have continued indefinitely in real life.
Wyndham handles the descent of London pretty well, I think. The decay is somewhat accelerated, given what we’ve seen with (say) areas like Detroit undergoing “re-wilding” through a couple decades (rather than years) of neglect, but one can pass that off as artistic license. The initial aftermath, with the confusion, chaos turning to tyranny, and finally epidemics of lethal sanitation-related disease, seems all too plausible (again, look at New Orleans after Katrina, and imagine how that situation would have played out without any outside assistance riding to the rescue, however belatedly).
He also handles Bill’s sense of isolation and loneliness well. It’s one thing to be off doing your own thing under normal conditions, but quite another when you don’t know whether you’ll ever see another living human being again. His relief at rescuing Susan is well done in this context.
Susan herself is rather amusingly handled. Given what Britain has become since the book was written, the image of a nine-year-old girl deftly handling a firearm and wreaking ruthless vengeance on the killer plants that wiped out her family is delightful.
All together, the book is a bit dated (given that it’s 50-odd years old, that’s to be expected), but is still a wholly worthwhile read as a post-apocalypse novel. No zombies, no preachy anti-human moralizing, no cliched premise – the book focuses more on the protagonists’ response to the events than the gee-whizzery of the disaster or the ensuing threats themselves.
Returning from a meeting in Cleveland on Thursday, I started reading John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (yes, the source material for the movie).
I’m about halfway through it, and it is so far a pretty decent post-apocalypse novel – one with a very different premise from your usual nuclear holocausts or zombie free-for-alls. The premise of the book differs slightly from that of the film (such as I remember, having seen it almost thirty years ago now – yikes), in that the titular vegetation apparently originated from a Soviet biological engineering experiment gone awry and not from seeds which fell to Earth. The meteor shower which blinded most of humanity left people at the mercy of the triffids, and didn’t in fact (at least as has been revealed thus far) “activate” or “awaken” the plants and send them on a mindless genocidal feeding frenzy.
While some of the events and characters’ actions are a bit twee, a lot of what they do makes sense in the context of a sudden, universal calamity of unknown origin. Wyndham spends a bit of time reflecting (through narration or dialogue) about the fragility of civilization, the tendency of civilizations to collapse, and the wryness of it collapsing in the wholly unexpected way it does rather than through nuclear holocaust or one of the other methods people had been fretting about up until the meteor shower. It’s the kind of intelligence one typically doesn’t find in books like (say) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
It’s also vastly superior in writing style to the other Wyndham work I read recently, The Midwich Cuckoos (the source material for Village of the Damned). That book was truly awful, filled with tedious asides and pointlessly overwrought descriptions of the bucolic scenery, as much a tour guidebook and ethnographic study of a small English country town as it was a science fiction/horror story. In the end, Wyndham’s treatment of the idea fell short of whatever potential it had — the movies are actually much creepier and better realized (even the Kirstie Alley/Christopher Reeve version). In contrast, Triffids is much more tightly written, shows a little more grittiness, and is far, far less twee, approaching at times a similar feel to Heinlein’s Puppet Masters.
I don’t really think this means much with regards to any competition between China and the US in space, but it’s an interesting historical event nonetheless: China’s first woman in space arrives home
This is amusing:
China’s space programme is several decades behind that of the US and Russia – which launched manned space stations in 1973 and 1971, respectively – but Beijing’s determination to boost its programme comes as the US is cutting back its investments in space. The US retired its space shuttle fleet last year.
China, by contrast, has invested about $6bn in space programmes since 1992 to catch up with its counterparts, raising eyebrows in military circles in Washington.
So, they’ve spent in the past twenty years about what NASA spends on human spaceflight in a year or so. It would seem they’re getting more for their money.
And note that FT appears to suffer from the premise that the only space program is a government space program – I guess after reading that the US (i.e.: NASA) is cutting space investment and has retired its spacecraft fleet we are supposed to infer that the US is retreating from manned space. Umm…no, not so much.