Fritz Lang’s sci-fi behemoth about lowly worker bees vs. frosty upper management in a sparkling, futuristic, flying-car uber-city. The working class live and labor underground—doing all the work that keeps the city powered and the surrounding waters from flooding—while the aristocrats frolic in art deco luxury above. The son of the city’s most powerful man becomes radicalized after he wanders underground and witnesses the misery. Meanwhile, his father worries about secret meetings among the workers in which the angelic peasant Maria (Brigitte Helm) tells Bible stories and talks of a better life for the working class through peaceful means. Now, Maria’s kind of a dunce and has NO plan of action other than to wait for a qualified “mediator”, a sort of Messiah figure, but the elite consider her a threat anyway. So they kidnap her and send out a robot lookalike that’s programmed to muck up her work. Everyone’s problem: The scientist who created the robot (the scientist played by creepy old Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Lang’s Dr. Mabuse) has some diabolical plans of his own.
It’s an exciting movie, fast-paced and packed with the glitzy visuals of what was then the most expensive film yet produced in Europe (its inflation-adjusted budget is the equivalent to about $200 million today). With its intended music—a charging score written by Gottfried Huppertz for a full orchestra—it has the same kinetic grandiosity of a Steven Spielberg summer release scored by John Williams. Furthermore, its easily the most influential dystopian vision ever put on celluloid. You can’t watch Blade Runner or Brazil and not get reminders of Metropolis.
However, its message of passive political action and its pessimism over technological advancement were and are controversial. Critics at the time were divided and H.G. Wells penned a famously venomous review that cited the film’s logical failings and outdated themes. In his later years, director Fritz Lang himself said that the film was naive and that he no longer liked it.
The Nazis LOVED it, though. Hitler himself was a fan and thought Lang had the perfect eye to make films for the party. Nobody even cared that he was half-Jewish. According to unverified rumor, in 1933 Joseph Goebbels offered Lang a position heading UFA (despite Goebbels recently banning the then-new Dr. Mabuse sequel). Lang fled the country after that and went on to a long career making American films, but Metropolis writer (and Lang’s then-wife) Thea von Harbou stayed as a full-fledged member of the Nazi party.