Metropolis

In the year 2026, society in the great city of Metropolis is ruthlessly divided into two groups. The idle rich live in towers high in the sky, their playthings powered by great machines deep underground, where the workers live and toil. One day Maria (Brigitte Helm), the daughter of a worker, brings a group of children to the surface to see the gardens of the rich. Feder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the city's manager, sees her and falls in love. He descends to the Underground City, where he witnesses a terrible industrial accident; disillusioned, he joins with Maria to help her achieve her dream of liberating the workers. Feder's father Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel) has other ideas: he instructs the evil scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to create a robot duplicate of Maria, whom Frederson intends to replace the young woman, and lead the workers not to liberation but to their own destruction.

The title of "first science fiction film" would probably have to go to Georges Méliès' whimsical 1902 short A Trip to the Moon, remembered for its well-known shot of a space capsule hitting the Man in the Moon in the eye. The first movie that truly reflects the values and aesthetic we have come to associate with filmed science fiction, however, is unquestionably Fritz Lang's 1927 landmark Metropolis, a masterpiece of visual imagination that still reverberates in modern pictures such as Blade Runner and The Matrix. Set designer Erich Kettlehut's designs for the city of the rich are classic Golden Age science fiction, with a characteristically German architectural flavor: the costumes of the rich suggest nothing so much as the later Flash Gordon serials, while the towers and spires of the city stab out of the ground toward the sky like structures from an H. G. Wells novel as envisioned by Third Reich filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. (Notice especially the outrageously Teutonic athletic stadium first seen near the beginning of the film.) By contrast, the Underground City presents a compelling vision of a technological dystopia teeming with life, a vision that would not again be fully realized until the 1980s and the birth of cyberpunk. Director Fritz Lang, who would go on to direct Peter Lorre in M, was a practitioner of German expressionism, and the dark shadows and frantically spinning gears and turbines of the Underground City convey oppression and misery like few other films before or since. The robot Maria combines both worlds, its sleek bronze exterior and art-deco lines melding the aesthetic of the city in the sky with the piston-driven power of the Underground. Remarkably, the robot would not be out of place in a science fiction movie filmed today; we would not be surprised to see it show up in Star Wars Episode III as C-3PO's sister.

The story doesn't make a lot of sense in places, due in part to the butchery the film underwent after its release. The broad strokes of the plot are certainly clear enough, however, and Lang's newly-restored visual imagery accompanied by the original score make Metropolis, literally, an incomparable experience.

Points to ponder:

• Brigitte Helm was only 17 when she starred in Metropolis.
• Lang's cut of Metropolis premiered in Berlin at more than two and a half hours; the studio cut it drastically soon after its release, and much of the cut material has been lost. Over the years different versions of the film exhibiting varying degrees of quality have circulated, with some versions coming in at less than 90 minutes. The new authorized DVD from Kino International presents the most complete version of the film currently available: a restoration team obtained all the frames known to exist from sources around the world, and spent three years digitally restoring each scene and assembling a version of Metropolis that comes as close to Lang's vision as any cut of the film has since its premiere. Scenes that could not be recovered are explained by new intertitles, which finally help restore the film's narrative to that intended by the director. Just as significant is the inclusion of Gottfreid Huppertz' original score, re-recorded for the restored version by a 65-piece orchestra and presented with the film for the first time since its 1927 premiere.