Metropolis

Metropolis_360P

source: Metropolis

Metropolis

I first saw this in the early 90s. Revisited the 148 mins restored version recently. The special effects, set designs, the futuristic cityscape with the skyscrapers, the aerial roads, the catacombs, the cathedral, Rotwang's house, the long stairs, the rooftops, the scary demonic statues, etc. Man, this movie still amazes me and i am in awe of this movie. Indeed it is the granddaddy n mother of all science fiction movies. The chase n fight on the roof of the cathedral, i can just imagine the tension it must have created on audiences' minds 94 years back. The hallucination scene where the machine is the temple of Moloch and the workers are being fed to it, creepy enuff. The false Maria as the * of Babylon, riding on the back of a many-headed dragon is wonderfully done.

For its time, this movie has stunning visuals, kind of Kubrick-esqe in appearance, especially the opening scenes of workers going and coming from work. It's very strange, with the group leaving walking with their heads down like zombies. The set designs in here are also something that might draw your attention. This really has a futuristic look. I thought the visuals were fascinating. This was "German expressionist" filmwork at its height, I would think. Director Fritz Lang went on to become a very famous man in his profession. This wasn't his first effort but, I think this might have been the film that put him "on the map," so to speak. Several years later, he gained a lot more fame with "M." At any rate, with the photography, sets and overall Flash Gordon-type sci-fi look, this must have been a real eye-opener to movies viewers 80 years ago. I still think they look very cool today. The music was also very dramatic, at least in this restored 5.1 surround sound restoration DVD, put out by Klino. Obviously, the eye makeup on men and the exaggerated motions by actors in silent films look a little hokey but I was mesmerized by Brigitte Helm, who plays "Maria" and her evil clone. She is something else! I also appreciated Klino's explanation of lost footage and how they did the best they could do to still make the story flow together. They did an outstanding job. I wouldn't attempt to watch this on anything less than this DVD, which looks pretty darn good. This is a "worker" story about a man wanting to trade his comfortable life to join the oppressed workers, who do their thing beneath the earth in "Metropolis." Workers are seen as nothing but replaceable robots. If someone gets hurt, they get carted away and replaced immediately but some other zombie-like human. Of course, people being mistreated can only take it for so long before rebellion. That's history, from the days of the Jewish slaves in Egypt to today, so that's part of this story, too. I won't say more to ruin it. I don't want to mislead people on one major point: today's audiences watching this. Few people in 2008 watch silent movies. To ask them to sit through two hours of a silent film is, obviously, asking a lot. I had to break this up into several viewings, myself, but that's okay. I still enjoyed it.....but it a silent movie this long is not easy to sit through. You have to be a student of film, or a big film buff, to watch this....but those people will be rewarded. Over 250 reviews in here show you this film has enough to offer, or at least take a look. Now that this restored version is available, check it out!

Fritz Lang's groundbreaking landmark remains one of the biggest mysteries in the world of cinema. How can a movie that'll soon turn 80 years old still look so disturbingly futuristic?? The screenplay by Thea Von Harbou is still very haunting and courageously assails social issues that are of all ages. The world has been divided into two main categories: thinkers & workers! If you belong to the first category, you can lead a life of luxury above ground but if you're a worker, your life isn't worth a penny, and you're doomed to perilous labor underground. The further expansions and intrigues in the screenplay are too astonishing to spoil, so I strongly advise that you check out the film yourself. It's essential viewing, anyway! "Metropolis" is a very demanding film-experience and definitely not always entertaining. But, as it is often the case with silent-cinema classics, the respect and admiration you'll develop during watching it will widely excel the enjoyment-aspect. Fritz' brutal visual style still looks innovative and few directors since were able to re-create a similarly nightmarish composition of horizontal and vertical lines. Many supposedly 'restored' versions have been released over the years (in 1984 and 2002, for example) but the 1926-version is still the finest in my opinion, even though that one already isn't as detailed and punctual as Lang intended it. "Metropolis" perhaps is THE most important and influential movie ever made. "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Star Wars" and "Blade Runner" owe their existence (or at least their power) to it.

Spoilers herein. Definitions about what this is and is not. And a statement about what it defined. I do not consider this science fiction. SciFi is a subset of a genre based on the creation of a coherent alternative world. In the case of SciFi, the framework is science, or in lesser efforts sometimes technology. The idea works because it can depend on the mind's extrapolation according to the rules of the world set up according to by now well defined conventions. That way, the viewer or reader can enter an alternative world (not just a story) and `understand' it. Understand the story in the context of a world that differs. Metropolis is expressionism, something that depends on THIS world as its basis. The images are dreams, always tied to our reality. That means that everything seen here is an abstraction of our reality, which is completely opposite to the SciFi dynamic. In SciFi, we take a few familiar things into a different world. This is anti SciFi. There is no science here, just a golem. There is no alternative world, just an abstraction of our world. That abstraction is great in one respect, as I'll say below. But it is abstraction, not extrapolation. Symbolic art, not science fiction. It is also not purely cinematic either. In my book, for something to be valued cinema, it has to use a visual vocabulary that exploits dynamic narrative -- which is to say it has to be more than a filmed play or an illustrated text. The narrative has to be placed in the vision. What we have here is a heavyhanded symbolic text of a morality play that is illustrated by a genius who somehow convinced financiers to give him sufficient resources. And I do mean genius, but as a designer of images, not cinema. What's really interesting is that many of these images are so original, so powerful that they have been adopted and used by many who followed. And some of those who followed really were cinematically grounded: Kubrick, Scott, Greenaway, even Kurosawa. The point is that Lang is no Eisenstein but a source for Eisensteins. But he is a visual genius, no doubt. See this for its historical import in the development of visual grammars as well (if you are interested) as a factor in shaping (or reflecting if you wish) the Nazi horror. I love it when films are self-referential in a straightforward way. Lang himself was much like Fredersen, and the heavihanded way he threw the story around (not to mention the cast and crew) is much like the totalitarian manner of the city. That heartlessness, of which much is made in the story, is apparent in the film's stance, even central. That's because abstraction of this sort is by definition intellectually unemotional. The Madacy DVD has horrible transfer.

Metropolis is surely one of the greatest films ever made. Its scope, its reach, its magnitude and its message are truly incredible even by today's standards of film-making. Seen in context of its premier in 1927, Metropolis is a giant of filmdom and film history. Lots of people always ask what makes a movie great, and in particular, Metropolis. A great film is one that stirs the imagination, leaves the viewer with images that will last perhaps forever, forces contemplation of issues dealing with the very essence of life, and achieves a kind of immortality. Metropolis is a film that succeeds with each of these criteria. Metropolis is a film that hailed in a new era of making films with it futuristic settings, halluciatory scenes, and its breadth of spirit and sheer scope, most clearly exhibited by its cast of epic proportions. There are images that blind the viewer with genius such as the beginning scene of the changing of the workers or the creation of the robot Maria. Metropolis challenges its viewers to think about their relationship with society both as a whole and with each individual, as well as contemplate the rationale of divisions amongst peoples and groups. Lastly, Metropolis has stood the test of time. It is a landmark film and an ignitor for the evolution of the science fiction/fantasy film genre. The story itself is simple,a Biblical allegory, about how people with a vision should share that vision in order to make it happen. The film is anything but simple. It is immense, and a rich legacy that director Fritz Lang has left us.

"There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator." This is the predominant theme of "Metropolis", and director Fritz Lang finds numerous ways to say and visualize his message during the course of the film. The movie relies on repeated visual imagery to make it's point, and does so effectively even if tedious at times. Particularly effective is the representation of the worker society as an almost single living unit, moving trance like to their appointed time and task. The use of a "ten hour" clock in the workers' chamber constantly draws our attention, as does the hangdog posture of the individual slaves who grind out their workday as if in a daze. Amid this rabble, worker Maria (Brigitte Helm) is the inspirational voice of the workers, offering hope for a brighter future by a mediator yet to appear. However the Master of Metropolis John Frederson (Alfred Abel) sees in her a way to quell the underlying frustration of the workers, commissioning his scientist Rotwang to create a robot Maria to plant discord among the workers. Rotwang's laboratory would have done Frankenstein proud, and the creation of the robot is a marvel of cinematic imagery. The robot Maria's "belly dance" transforms into a scene of such raw energy and sexual awareness that it awakens the statues of the Seven Deadly Sins, one of the master strokes of this expressionist film. So much imagery in fact is layered into "Metropolis" that it's safe to say that repeat viewings will lead to even more interpretations of it's vision, and not simply for it's denunciation of a class society. Both timely and timeless, the film captures a dynamism that inspires passion even after nearly eighty years following it's original release.

Who ever heard of an epic science fiction film? Especially in the 1920s? Sure, some science fiction movies are huge today, such as George Lucas' latest goofy Star Wars movie, but in 1926, Fritz Lang came out with a brilliant film about what the future would be like if people went on living the way they were living back then. And sure enough, we went right ahead living the way we were living, the population got bigger and more crowded, and now modern society is not a whole lot different from what was presented in Metropolis. The story is about a young rich kid without a care in the world who becomes concerned about the way that society (Metropolis) was run by his father, John Frederson, the master of Metropolis. He lives in a ‘Pleasure Garden' high above the level of the workers', and he worries about what would happen if the huge number of workers were to turn against his father, given the terrible conditions under which they live and work. Some of the best scenes in the film take place in the underground mines, showing the workers portrayed as little more than components on a gigantic, sinister looking machine. The scene where the machine overheated even contained some impressive stunts, as well as interesting cinematography as the machine transforms into a giant devil-looking monster. After countless workers are consumed by it (no wonder this was Hitler's favorite film), they are immediately replaced by other workers, who go right to the same spots that the previous men left and resume their robotic movements. If some of these scenes, men can be seen being carried away on stretchers after having been injured, and the rest of the workers keep right on working, hardly even noticing. The way that the workers are portrayed as lifeless machines is one of the more potent elements of this film, as well as the most revealing about the directors intentions. When his son complains about the tragic things that go on in the mines, Frederson replies that such accidents are unavoidable, but his son still insists that they deserve credit for building the city. This is the kind of content that foreshadows some serious mutiny, and at the same time it shows what may very well happen when large groups of people feel mistreated. `Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups' is a saying that doesn't necessarily only apply to stupid people, as Metropolis suggests. Fritz Lang brilliantly portrays this very complex story with extremely limited dialogue, and the result is still compelling today. The special effects in this film are decades ahead of its time – it even resembles The Fifth Element in many ways (except that the two films can hardly be compared) – and the acting and especially the elaborately created sets are stunning to say the least. An excellent film, Metropolis is one of the few that should never be forgotten.