Space Nazi Trailers Draw Crowd Funding for Iron Sky Movie
wired.com
wired.com
What is it? Nazis make for good cinema!
It makes sense, really. A bunch of guys running around in the 20th century, with mechanized warfare and a world view that would've fit in perfectly well in Genghis Khan's time. It's as if a writer for a video game made them up and they escaped through a time portal into the 1st half of the 20th century.
Why do I even bother with posts like this? Automatic Godwin's!
(Standard Godwin's Disclaimers: Nazis were real and as evil as you can get. The Holocaust actually happened.)
Spielberg promised not to use Nazis as a trope after Schilder's list, and the last Indy movies suffered for it. Using commies as the enemy seems so dated and Jingoistic, even though the conflict was more recent.
They were into the occult and old Nordic/Germanic mythology. They were developing and had bonafide super-science weapons: jets, ICBMs, and stealth aircraft while some of their opponents early in the war were still using cavalry charges. There was real-life superscience intrigue involving highly gifted super-geniuses. This intrigue involved nuclear weapons. They were urgently bent on world domination -- not as an eventual goal or as a someday-daydream wish, but as an urgent we-need-to-do-this-ASAP real-world project.
They also seem to be securely in the top 5% of everyone fictional or real as far of level of atrocities goes.
They just flat-out make really cool villains.
Curious turn of phrase, considering that one of the most enduring legacies of the Nazis is their sense of taste. The Nazis had a very Platonic idea of the purpose of art and everything that they touched was imbued with their aesthetic. From the parades, to the propaganda leaflets, there was a uniform sense of purpose and higher meaning.
Hitler himself began as a starving artist and when he took over he made everything his. He was, arguably, the most successful art-critic of the 20th century.
So, yeah, the Nazis are very distinct.
Not as interesting.
I don't really see anything so special about the nazis vis-a-vis any of five other modern totalitarian regimes. The imperial Japanese make absolutely fantastic subject matter, too, but after the war propaganda nobody bothered.
I'm looking forward to this one.
For a vague, SPOILER-ish description (the book's cover often gives it away anyhow): A group of teens build a moon rocket, but someone (wonder who?) is there to meet them.
On the story itself, it's almost too naive to be believed, but I hope it makes for a good movie.
Heinlein's later novels are much better but often repeat themselves and he became obsessed with his "World as Myth" idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_as_Myth)
I wish they made a "Glory Road" movie... sounds like good material there :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Road)
Galileo? "I'm sorry kids, but your breathable atmosphere is in a another castle."