Our ongoing series reviewing the greatest Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror movies. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
Directed By: Fritz Lang
Produced By: Erich Pommer
Written By: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang (Uncredited)
Starring: Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
Original Release: 1927
Reviewed By: John J. Joex
Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 Stars
Synopsis: In the world of the future, the wealthy and well-to-do live the life of luxury in the magnificent skyscraper city of Metropolis, while beneath the surface workers toil in misery to keep the city above running. Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the city’s leader Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel), is one of those who lives a life of leisure and recreation until he meets Maria (Brigitte Helm), one of the workers from below who shows him the children that live beneath the city and tells Freder these are his brothers. Freder is moved by Maria and decides to find out more about her and the world beneath the city that she inhabits. He ventures down there just as an accident results in the loss of life for several of the workers. He confronts his father who is enraged that Freder was allowed to go beneath the city. Frederson also finds out about a plan among the workers to unite and send a mediator to the city to petition for better working conditions and living arrangements. He turns to his former associate Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) who has successfully created a mechanical human (never referred to in the movie as a robot). Frederson, who wants to replace the workers with more of these machines, asks Rotwang to give his creation the likeness of Maria and to send it to the workers to incite them to violence so that he can call the authorities to deal with them. This plan gets out of control, though, as the machine-doppelganger stirs up a riot that leads the mob to destroy the machines below causing a breakdown in the city’s hydraulic system which threatens to flood the workers’ city and endangers the lives of their children.
Review/Commentary: Back in the silent era of film-making, Science Fiction films were a rarity and a blockbuster quality film in the genre was almost unheard of. Perhaps 1925’s Lost World might count in this category and maybe even 1924’s Aelita. But special effects at that time had not reached the level of technical sophistication anywhere near that needed to bring most Science Fiction concepts to the screen with any degree of credibility. However, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis delivered a game-changing film on both the technical and artistic levels and introduced cinema audiences to an unparalleled vision of a dystopic future that at the same time commented on contemporary society. The movie was the most expensive filmed at the time of its release, but Lang made good use of his budget in creating an expressionist film that used art deco and modernist stylings to bring to life the city of his film and to create an iconic realization of the future that still resonates eighty years after its release.
Lang’s futuristic dystopia is not so much a condemnation of technology out of control as a comment on how the industrial/technologically advanced world can lead to the dehumanization of the people tasked with keeping it running. And in this sense, the film is very much a comment on what the world at that time had seen with the rise of the industrial age in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Much of what we see played out in the bleak predictions of the film actually occurred in the industrial nations in the decades prior to the release of Metropolis. The increasing population of the world’s larger nations had flocked to the rising factories in search of work and found themselves dealing with squalid conditions in this age that had advanced beyond the simplicity of the agrarian days of the past. However, Metropolis does not deliver the simplistic pro-labor theme that we saw a few years prior in Aelita (which, being Russian made, gave us essentially a Communist propaganda film). Instead, we receive a more moderate message suggesting that mediation between the workers and management is the only way to truly solve the problem. Thus, the movie gives us Science Fiction at its best, using the fantastic settings expected from it to comment on and provide a mirror for the society it reflects.
Of course, coming from the silent era, this film is far distant in structure and sophistication from more recent films or even those from the last few decades. Silent films also often played up the melodrama, and we see plenty of that with Metropolis. It also has an operatic feel to it with its grand statements and sweeping musical score that accompanies it. And it gets a bit tedious at just under two hours (with thirty minutes restored to the ninety minute version available for decades after its release), but the original version (which has recently been uncovered) actually stretched to two and a half hours (you can sift through the many DVD releases to decide which version you want to watch). And it’s hard to overlook the camp elements that run throughout the film, which also showed up in most of the films of that time. But this is more a factor of our distance from that era than of any deficiencies with the film. I can definitely see the MST3K guys having a field day with this film and it would be a hoot to hear what they come up with. Still, you can watch Metropolis and appreciate it for its accomplishments and the story it succeeds in telling, even if it lacks much in the way of subtlety, though it does possess an elegance in film-making that has become all too rare these days. And the CGI-gorged audiences of today may not appreciate the special effects which now appear somewhat quaint, if not crude at times (and even have some retro, steam-punk overtones). But Lang’s film had no equals at its time and even few that could compete with it in scope and technical achievement until the 50’s or 60’s at least.
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