10 / 10
Metropolis invented what science fiction looks like. The towers, the walkways between them, the machine that becomes a god, the robot with a woman’s face: all of it starts here, in 1927, and everything from Blade Runner to Star Wars has been borrowing since.
Fritz Lang directed it from a script by Thea von Harbou. It’s a 10.
The Premise
The city is divided. The rich live above in gardens and towers. The workers live below, running machines in ten-hour shifts to keep the city alive. Freder, the son of the city’s master, follows a woman named Maria into the depths and sees what keeps his life running. Maria preaches patience to the workers. Freder’s father hires an inventor to build a robot in her image and use it to push them into a riot he can crush.
The Scale
It was the most expensive German film ever made and it nearly ruined the studio. The city is built from models, mirror tricks and thousands of extras, and the machine rooms, the Tower of Babel sequence and the flooding of the underground city still look enormous. Nothing in it is cheap.
The Maschinenmensch
Brigitte Helm plays both Maria and the robot, and she is extraordinary in both. The transformation scene, with rings of light rising up the metal body, has been copied for a century, and the false Maria’s dance is genuinely unnerving. Helm was eighteen and the suit nearly crippled her.
The Restoration
For eighty years only cut versions existed. In 2008 a near-complete print turned up in a museum in Buenos Aires, scratched and worn, and the 2010 restoration put back about half an hour: whole subplots, the man tracking Freder, the inventor’s motive. If you watched Metropolis years ago and found it disjointed, watch the restored version.
The Politics
The famous line is that the mediator between head and hands must be the heart, and the ending, with the boss and the foreman shaking hands, is sentimental and has been argued about ever since. Lang later disowned it. The film’s power is in what it shows, a city eating people, and not in the resolution it offers.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Metropolis sets its argument in architecture. The audience understands the class structure before a title card explains it, because the film puts one group above and one below.
Design your world so its structure carries the argument. Then you don’t have to state it.
Does Metropolis still hold up?
Yes. It’s a 10. Watch the 2010 restored version with the Huppertz score, accept that silent acting is a different register, and look at how much of the last century of film is sitting in it.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists