Metropolis

There is something so incredibly fascinating about the whole of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This film had been on my radar for years - after all, it is one of the most influential films ever made and one that had gone through a long history of being cut down and pieced back together to a point where it is essentially almost complete; the reputation behind it daunted me. Therefore, tonight was the first time I ever saw this influential silent film - and what a weird time to see it. You see, at the time of this writing America is going through a crisis of worker versus wealthy. Those who are already wealthy are growing richer; the workers are struggling through their shifts to get by. The wealthy want to squeeze as much out of the workers in whatever way they can. Just earlier this week Disney, a major corporation, tried to convince a man that he could not sue over his wife’s wrongful death because he had subscribed to a free trial of Disney+ years prior. At the same time, other wealthy figures are allowing the use of artificial intelligence and bots to try to manipulate our society in more detrimental ways, to incite violence and to work against ourselves while they can sit back and watch, blissfully ignoring the fact that their wealth relies on us. Did Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou envision this future to actually happen when they wrote and made this film? I don’t think they did, but yet there is something to be said about how strikingly relevant it is even almost a hundred years later. What they did envision, however, were a lot of religious themes behind this. While I don’t think it was their intentions, I can’t help but see Freder seeing the horrors of the underground and workers die as akin to the Buddha in his youth as a prince stepping into the outside world and seeing suffering for the first time, and realizing how horrible that is. The statues of seven deadly sins, the biblical references to the Tower of Babel and the manipulative nature of Moloch and unholy witches led by the devil, the foreboding warnings of apocalypse - the robot is even called Hel, for God’s sake. This is very much influenced by Christianity, and that was not something I expected out of the forefather of sci-fi dystopian films. Thematically it does come out slightly naive - Frederson softens up rather quick for literally the highest businessman in the city - but I can’t fault it for wanting to suggest that there could be change with little-to-no bloodshed. It is, after all, the message of the movie that the heart is the mediator of the head and hands. To disqualify it for something that is inherently not hateful would be silly. On a visual level, though, this film is simply an epic. So many grand sets and extras and interiors are presented here that it simply makes sense to me that this would be one of the most expensive silent films of the time. Even when the film goes from 35mm scan to 16mm - a limitation of the resources at hand - I am stunned by the beauty and spectacle of what Lang envisioned here. Just the wrangling of all these extras alone is impressive in and of itself. Very few films, if any, that I have seen can come even close even in the modern day where we can conjure these things up in a supposedly easier way. The score here pairs very nicely as well; I gather it’s based on the original, but it’s so tied in to what happens in the picture that it really helps the two and a half hours glide by. Merely the fact that it was a worldwide effort to piece this back together to near completion is an achievement that should be praised, even if the film wound up being less than advertised. I can’t say that I’m disappointed, though, because I’m not. One of the few films that really live up to the reputation that precedes it. A must watch.