With
Metropolis in 1926, science fiction cinema achieved its first real masterpiece. Seen some 50 years later much of the film does seem muddleheaded and a rather naive excuse for staging some stunning visual effects and one can see how
H. G. Wells came to call it
'quite the silliest film'.
The plot is illogical, simplistic and filled with contradictions but, in terms of pure science fiction cinema, the plot is really only a vehicle for
Fritz Lang's vision of the future, a vision that was to have a profound effect on the cinema for years to come.
The story, set in the year 2000 had the son of the Master of Metropolis rebelling against the exploitation of the workers, sentenced to live perpetually underground and to keep the city's machines in operation. Only the persuasive powers of the heroine
Maria keep the workers from revolution. When the son is chosen to mediate between workers and rulers, his father orders a robot double to be made of Maria and the double incites the workers to revolt and destroy the machines, flooding their own homes beneath.
Only the intervention of the real Maria saves their children from drowning. The false Maria is unmasked, the Master is reunited and reconciled with his son and the last title of the film aptly sums up its utopian naivety: '
The heart must mediate between the brain and the hands'.
What the film does succeed in portraying is a credible visual future metaphor, achieved by means of its powerful architecture and model work and by the use of the Schufftan process which enabled live action to be combined, by means of a mirror with some of its reflective surface removed, with models or paintings.
Metropolis is, above all, an architectural film designed to show an all too credible future visually extrapolated from the Germany and America of the 1920s, and in its visual aspects, including Lang's handling of the crowds, the film succeeds impressively. If the science fiction content seems dated now, the elements which have become clichés of the genre still retain their power.
The machines are genuinely terrifying and the creation of the robot Maria, with its pseudoscientific apparatus, flashing sparks and whirling generators, was to become the archetypal scene of creation for subsequent genre movies.
Lang then went on to the theme of interplanetary travel with his
Die Frau im Mond 1928, which also was released under the titles
The Girl in The Moon and
By Rocket to The Moon.
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