10 / 10
Official trailer
Two Cities
Metropolis is a city of the future, built in two layers. Up top, among soaring skyscrapers, bridges and aeroplanes, the rich enjoy stadiums, nightclubs and a pleasure garden full of peacocks. Deep below ground, the workers shuffle in grey uniforms, heads bowed, in shifts that never end, tending the giant machines that keep the upper city running.
Freder, the son of the city’s master, Joh Fredersen, is playing in the pleasure garden when Maria, a young woman from the workers’ city, leads a group of ragged children in to see how the rich live. Freder is smitten. He follows her down into the depths and sees, for the first time, the world his father built on the backs of the workers.
Fritz Lang directed it for UFA, Germany’s great studio, and it was the most expensive film ever made in Europe at the time. It took well over a year to shoot, used thousands of extras and almost bankrupted the studio, and you can see every mark of that ambition on screen.
This is the film I’d hand anybody who thinks silent cinema is homework. The story is corny and the politics are soft in the head, and neither one costs it a point with me, because Lang built a city on screen that still makes modern blockbusters look timid. Whenever the camera pulls back over those towers I can feel the size of what he was attempting, and that ambition is why I rate it a 10.
Moloch
The film’s first great set piece comes when Freder watches a machine overheat and explode, killing workers. In a feverish vision, the machine turns into Moloch, an ancient god with a gaping mouth, and the workers are marched up its steps and fed into the fire.
Silent cinema has no more powerful image, and it sums up Lang’s city in one shot. The machines don’t serve people. People serve the machines, and they’re consumed by them. Nearly a century later, it still looks like a nightmare about industry.
Moloch is where the film has me for good. The shift from an industrial accident to a god with a furnace for a mouth happens in seconds, with no title card to explain it, and I think it’s the boldest cut Lang makes in the whole picture.
For Writers
The Moloch vision turns an industrial accident into an ancient god devouring workers. One image delivers the film’s argument about machines and people.
A single, bold image can carry a theme more powerfully than any dialogue. Lang doesn’t tell the audience the machines consume the workers. He shows them walking, row after row, into the mouth of a god.
Metaphor works best when it’s physical and specific, something the reader can see, hear and almost touch. If your story has a big idea, look for the one image that makes it visible, and give it a scene of its own. A reader may forget an argument. They won’t forget workers walking into the mouth of a god.
The Robot
Its most famous creation is the Maschinenmensch, the machine-human built by the mad inventor Rotwang. At Fredersen’s request, Rotwang gives the robot Maria’s face and sends it into the workers’ city to stir them up to violence, so Fredersen will have an excuse to crush them. The transformation scene, with rings of light rising and falling around the metal figure as it takes on Maria’s features, is a landmark in film history, and the robot’s gleaming, Art Deco body inspired everything from C-3PO in Star Wars to countless album covers and fashion shoots.
Brigitte Helm plays both the saintly Maria and her wicked robot double, and she’s electrifying in the second role: jerky, leering, seductive and wild, dancing half-naked for the rich men of the upper city and whipping the workers into a frenzy. It’s a performance with no modern equivalent, and it still unsettles.
Helm’s robot is the performance I’d point to whenever someone says silent acting is all eyebrows and fainting. That leering, twitching dance is creepy, sexy and funny at once, and the saintly Maria bores me a little by comparison. The machine is the one I’d watch all day.
For Writers
The robot takes Maria’s face and becomes her evil twin. The same actress plays saint and sinner, and the contrast drives the plot.
A double, a character’s dark reflection, is one of the oldest devices in storytelling, and it still works. It lets you show two sides of a person, or an idea, in direct conflict, and it creates instant confusion and danger for everyone around them.
Helm’s two performances are so different that the audience never confuses them, even though the characters on screen do. That gap between what the reader knows and what the characters believe is where the double does its damage, and it’s why the device has lasted for centuries.
Rotwang
Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Rotwang, the inventor, and he’s the ancestor of every mad scientist that followed. He lives in a crooked old house squeezed between the skyscrapers, covered in pentagrams, and he has a black-gloved mechanical hand where his real one used to be. He’s gifted, bitter and obsessed.
His grudge against Fredersen is personal. They both loved the same woman, Hel, who married Fredersen and died giving birth to Freder, and Rotwang has never recovered. The robot was built to bring her back. When Fredersen orders him to give it Maria’s face, Rotwang agrees, but he has his own plans for revenge. The chase across the cathedral roof at the climax, as Freder battles Rotwang high above the crowd, is a thrilling finale, and it set the template for countless rooftop showdowns to come.
Weimar Germany
Metropolis was made in the Weimar Republic, a period of economic chaos, political violence and wild artistic ferment in Germany. The fears it shows, of mass unemployment, worker revolt, machines replacing people and a ruling class that doesn’t care, were very real to its audience.
That context explains a lot about the film’s anxious, feverish energy. It’s a nightmare of modern life dreamed by a country that had just lost a war, watched its currency collapse and was about to lose its democracy. The naive ending feels like a wish that somebody, somehow, would make it all right.
The Look
Metropolis looks like nothing before it. The city, built from giant sets, models and trick photography, is a jungle of towers, bridges, highways and aeroplanes, a vision of the future so influential that it still shapes how films imagine cities. Blade Runner, Batman and a dozen other films owe it a visible debt.
Cameraman Eugen Schüfftan used mirrors to combine actors with miniature sets, a technique now named after him, and the effects still impress, nearly a century on. The crowd scenes, with hundreds of workers moving in geometric formations, look like choreography, and they’re awe-inspiring.
The crowd choreography is the thing I’d rescue from a fire. Lang moves hundreds of workers in blocks like parts of an engine, and I can’t think of another director who made a mass of people look this much like a machine.
The Flood
When the robot incites the workers to destroy the machines, they riot and smash the heart machine, not realizing that its destruction will flood the underground city, where their own children have been left behind. Maria and Freder race to save the children as water pours through the streets.
The flood sequence is spectacular, with thousands of children swarming toward the actors, and it was brutally hard to make. The extras were real children, and they spent days in cold water on Lang’s sets. Lang was notoriously demanding, and the sequence shows it.
The Heart
The opening and closing titles spell out the film’s message: the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart. Freder, the heart, will reconcile his father, the head, with the workers, the hands, and everybody will live in harmony.
It’s naive, to put it kindly. H.G. Wells called the film silly, and he had a point. The ending, with the master and the foreman shaking hands, pretends that class conflict can be solved with a nice gesture. It’s also a little sinister. The film, written by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, was later admired by the Nazis, and von Harbou joined the party, while Lang left Germany.
The politics don’t hold up, and the handshake ending makes me wince. The images are what matter to me, and they’re strong enough that the slogan barely dents the film.
For Writers
As for the moral, that the heart must mediate between the head and the hands, it’s spelled out in title cards and resolved with a handshake. It’s the weakest part of the film.
Stating a story’s theme outright, especially as a tidy slogan, tends to make it feel naive. Readers want to discover meaning through events, and a message delivered too neatly can undermine everything the story has shown. Lang’s images say far more about class and industry than his closing handshake. Trust your scenes to carry the meaning, and resist the urge to sum it up in a sentence at the end. The slogan is the part of Metropolis people laugh at today.
The Lost Footage
Metropolis was cut drastically after its premiere, trimmed by a quarter or more for international release, and the missing footage was believed lost for decades. Generations of viewers saw only butchered versions, with confusing gaps in the story.
Then, in 2008, a copy of a longer version was discovered in a film museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was in poor condition, scratched and damaged, but it contained most of the missing scenes. A restoration released in 2010 added about twenty-five minutes back, and for the first time in over eighty years, audiences could see something close to Lang’s original.
Film history has few better stories of loss and recovery. The restored version is the one to watch. The recovered scenes are visibly scratched, and the damage has become part of the film’s history.
The Moroder Version
In 1984, the music producer Giorgio Moroder released his own version, shortened, tinted in color and set to an eighties pop soundtrack featuring Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant. Purists hated it. It introduced the film to a new generation of viewers, and it’s become a cult object in its own right.
It’s worth seeing as a curiosity. For the real thing, go with the 2010 restoration and Gottfried Huppertz’s original orchestral score.
Too Long, Too Much
The restored version runs about 150 minutes, and the acting, in the silent style, is broad and theatrical to modern eyes. Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder, in particular, flings himself about like a man possessed. The story is simple and sentimental, and its message is embarrassingly naive.
None of that dims the spectacle for me. The acting would get laughed off a modern set and the message belongs on a greeting card, and I’d still put Metropolis on any list of films a science fiction fan needs to see at least once.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Metropolis builds its world through images of overwhelming scale: towers, machines, crowds and floods. The story is simple, and the spectacle makes it mythic.
When your story’s plot is simple, the world around it can compensate. Vivid, specific settings can give a simple tale the power of a myth. Invest in the physical world of your story. Make its places large, strange and memorable, and let the characters’ simple struggles play out against them.
The City That Built Science Fiction
Metropolis gets a 10 from me, and its flaws don’t move that number an inch.
It’s naive, overlong and acted at full volume, and I can’t name another silent film with images this staggering or a robot this iconic. The politics are silly, the vision shaped a century of science fiction, and the vision is what I’m scoring. Watch the 2010 restoration.
