When ranking my screening list by a measure of cultural significance, “Metropolis” stands at the top. Released in 1927, this German expressionist, silent film is considered to be the world’s first science fiction movie. It is also the only film to be inscribed on UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Register”, up there with other German entries such as the Guttenburg Bible and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9! At 2 ½ hours (I didn’t know silent films ran that long), the film is sprawling, stylized, and ambitious. It’s also a bit heavy, dreary, and excessive. I liked it though.
“Metropolis” depicts city in which wealthy business tycoons work and play in towering buildings while a lower class of poor machinists work underground, fueling and operating the machines that make everything run. Freder, the son of the city master, is oblivious to this world until he follows the beautiful Maria to the lower levels. He is shocked and appalled at the conditions of the workers and sees Maria preach of a time when the working and ruling classes may unite. Freder’s father, afraid of this message, commissions a first-of-its-kind robot with Maria’s likeness to diffuse tensions but the robot provokes rebellion. The rebellion backfires and it’s up to Freder to forge a path to peace and union between the classes.
I need to start by acknowledging that “Metropolis” is an achievement. Its message is ambitious and, though a bit on the nose, the imagery evoked by the film remains relevant these 92 years later. For a silent film, it was fascinating to watch multiple plot lines and characters threaded together in such a coherent way. The music was intense and spectacular, the special effects remain watchable, and many sequences were gripping. The whole film feels like an experiment that *mostly* pays off.
Recognizing this, though the film captured my interest, it tended to lose me for whole moments at a time. The film was simply too long and could have benefited from more purposeful editing. Incidentally, it has been cut down a lot over the years to address this complaint but the modern, 148 minute rerelease I screened was too much. Furthermore, the film’s biblical symbolism hits you over the head a bit and the overall message lacks the nuance that its runtime could have afforded it. Ultimately, in the hands of modern talent, I think the story of “Metropolis” would be better served as an 8 to 9 minute Pixar short than a 2 ½ hour story.