30. Metropolis (1927)

Directed By Fritz Lang

Synopsis

I am frankly tired of writing these synopsis, I should really start just copy/pasting them of the net. I spend half the fucking post describing a film that honestly some one has described better than me. So I'll change the format to the following: Describe the film in the space of a paragraph. Here we go, if you need more info there's Wikipedia, AllMovies.com and IMDB who do it very well.

Future. Big City. Class segregation. Metropolis' Boss' son "slums it". Mad Scientist, makes robot. Robot looks like worker's leader who son of big cheese loves. Robot create big mess by dancing naked in clubs. Worker revolt, big boom on machines. Big Bad Flood. Problem solved, robot burned at stake. Workers solve problem with employer/slaver. A triumph of Status Quo, but not the band.

Review

This is one of the best films ever made if you hate acting or plots. The acting is crap, mainly Freder Frederson's (Big Cheese's Kid) acting which is appaling. The plot is also a bit terrible, supposedly supporting a kind of "Christian Socialism" but in the end supporting the idea of upholding the status quo.

With that out of the way, what a great film it is! The sceneries and special effects are above and beyond anything done at the time, the imagery is extremely powerful, the camera setups are astonishing and there's a lady dancing with only panties and shiny nipple covers. Some of the imagery works extremely well, like the vision of the workers being eaten by a machine which has transformed into Moloch the ancient god as if they were sacrifices for the rich people who benefit from their work in the city of Metropolis above.

Another astonishing thing is just how influential this film is visually. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Fifth Element, the city images and even Milla Jovovich's clothing in that film derive clearly from Metropolis. But that is not the only place, the cities in films like the new Star Wars films where the "Jedi Council" looks suspiciously like the New Babel tower from Lang's film. So if you ever though, "Wow, what a cool art deco look they gave to this city", be it Gotham or whatever this is where it came from. And that is where this film really shines.

Essential viewing, no matter how shit the plot and some of the acting is. Buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

Cool film, shit film.

From Wiki:

This film has influenced many science fiction movies to the present day, including Blade Runner, Dark City, Brazil, the Star Wars series, and The Matrix. The "Tower of Babel" structure is a key element in several films; in turn, Metropolis's tower appears to derive from Hans Poelzig's stocky, polygonal, modernistic water tower built in Posen (Poznań) in 1911. But the earliest films to be influenced were Just Imagine of 1930, which also featured a city with much air transport among and between skyscrapers connected by bridges, and Vultan's city in the first Flash Gordon serial of 1936, which had a sweatshop controlled by an operator who moved the needle of a huge dial while standing up.

* Rotwang, the film's mad scientist, has lost his right hand and has replaced it with a black prosthesis. In the film Dr. Strangelove, directed by Stanley Kubrick and first released on January 29, 1964, the German mad scientist Dr. Strangelove wears a black glove on his right hand, which he cannot consciously control. This is considered to be a tribute to the earlier film.

* A similar theme shows up in George Lucas' famous Star Wars films, in which the heroes, Anakin Skywalker and later his son Luke Skywalker, lose their right hands in combat and each has it replaced with a prosthesis, wearing a black glove over the robotic hand. The city-planet Coruscant looks like a more complex Metropolis. According to the Star Wars documentary Empire of Dreams, C-3PO was modeled after the Maria robot.

* Yet another example of the missing right hand archetype is Philip K. Dick's masterpiece, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. An important element of the story is that Palmer Eldritch, the antagonist, possesses a robotic right arm, as well as artificial eyes, and a deformed jaw.

* A poster of the original movie shows up in the movie Hackers.

* Many of the scenes involving Rotwang seem to echo (or prophesy; it is not entirely clear) the many film adaptations of Mary Shelley's science-ficton novel Frankenstein, particularly the part where the Machine-Man is created.

* The ending of the film likewise is a piece of much imitated classic cinema. The climactic struggle between Rotwang and Freder over the life of Maria is strikingly similar to the many early film adaptations of Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as well as the climatic scene in Tim Burton's Batman.

* A musical theater adaptation was staged in London in 1989. Another musical adaptation was created in Italy in 2004 called "Metropolis Il Musical".

* An anime adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's manga Metropolis was released in the U.S. in 2002. See Metropolis (2001 movie). The anime series Big O seems to draw inspiration from Metropolis as well.

* Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow contains several references to Fritz Lang's film, mostly voiced through the German rocket scientists and engineers who comprise a large part of its cast.

* The film has inspired or been included in several music videos, including Madonna's "Express Yourself", Spanish band Mecano's "7 de septiembre", System of a Down's "Sugar", Haddaway's "Life" and Queen's "Radio Ga Ga".

* Jeff Mills released an album named Metropolis inspired by the film in 2001.

* Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster decided to name Superman's base of operations after the Metropolis of the film.

* In 1997, Jean-Marc Lofficier and Roy Thomas and edgy expressionist artist Ted McKeever present an "Elseworlds" story in which Clark Kent and Superman inhabit the world of Lang's Metropolis in DC Comic's book Superman's Metropolis.

* Kraftwerk recorded a song named "Metropolis" for their 1978 album, Die Mensch Maschine. They were later offered the opportunity of scoring the 1984 restoration of the film, which eventually deferred to Giorgio Moroder.

* The 1994 full speech computer game Beneath a Steel Sky is set in a similar dystopian Metropolis. Its soundtrack is similar to Metropolis.

* Images from the film were used for the cover of the Be Bop Deluxe album Live in the Air Age

* In episode "Flame Street" from Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future TV series, members of the Resistance are cornered by the evil robot Blastaar and his troopers. During the laser fight, several posters of Maria can be easily spotted on the wall of their shelter.

* The film fell into public domain in the United States, but was restored to copyright in 1998. The lawsuit Golan v. Gonzalez unsuccessfully attempted to block its copyright restoration.

* On November 15, 2005, an original poster from 1927 (one of only four known in existence) was sold for a world record price of $690,000 by the Reel Poster Gallery in London