Metropolis

I was just lucky enough to see Metropolis on the big screen, in a huge auditorium (and one fashioned as an old-school movie house) with a live musical accompaniment, in this case a synth player instead of an orchestra.  The experience was phenomenal.  The avant-garde synth score that accompanied the film made the world of Metropolis feel so much colder and more unsettling than it did on first viewing.  Beneath the gorgeous art deco buildings and miniature planes flying across the sets, there’s a looming undercurrent of corruption and inhumanity, here personified by Joh Fredersen, which the new score captures brilliantly.  Seeing the film for the first time with a big symphonic score is like Star Wars, in line with the childlike wonder of sci-fi; seeing it with a synth score is more in line with the fears of AI spread in 2001 and The Terminator.  The scene where Fredersen kidnaps Maria to create the decoy robot already felt right out of a horror film due to the expressionistic lighting and sense of dread, but the new score takes that to a whole new level.  For the 2 1/2-hour runtime, I never felt the runtime at any point. When I was younger, I loved Metropolis for the incredible special effects and classic sci-fi imagery, along with the epic spectacle of the story, but seeing it on the big screen gave me a new appreciation for the film.  I got to see props and concept art for the film at the Berlin Film Museum for a class trip a couple weeks ago, so maybe that also helped me appreciate the craftsmanship behind Metropolis even more.  Plus, it’s refreshing to see a much better risky sci-fi epic whose title starts with an M and ends with -opolis for a change.  Either way, Metropolis is a classic that still holds up, almost a century after its release.