Metropolis (1927) Review: The City That Built Sci-Fi

Is Metropolis worth watching?

Yes. Metropolis is a colossal achievement, a silent science fiction epic whose towering cityscapes, machines and crowds still look astonishing a century later. Fritz Lang’s vision of a divided future city laid down the visual language of the genre, and much of what came after, from Blade Runner to countless dystopias, borrows from it. Its main weakness is its message, a sentimental and simplistic answer to the social conflict it dramatises so powerfully, but the film’s imagination overwhelms its naivety.

What is Metropolis about?

Metropolis is set in a vast city of the future. At the top, in gleaming towers and pleasure gardens, live the privileged, ruled by the city’s master, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel). Far below, workers labour in shifts at enormous machines that keep the city running. Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), leads a carefree life until he glimpses Maria (Brigitte Helm), a young woman from the depths who preaches patience and hope to the workers. Following her down into the underground city, Freder sees for the first time the suffering that sustains his world, and he sets out to bridge the gap. Meanwhile, his father turns to the inventor Rotwang, whose latest creation is a gleaming machine in human form.

Lang directs this German silent film, written with Thea von Harbou from her novel. The restored version, which recovers footage long thought lost, runs 153 minutes.

A future built on an unprecedented scale

The film’s most enduring power is visual. Lang and his team created a city of skyscrapers, elevated highways and aircraft weaving between towers, using miniatures, mirrors and in-camera effects that remain breathtaking. The underground machine rooms are just as striking, huge, pulsing structures that dwarf the workers operating them, and one early sequence imagines a machine as a devouring god.

The crowd scenes are equally ambitious. Hundreds of extras move in rigid, synchronised blocks, a chilling image of human beings reduced to parts of a mechanism. Lang’s expressionist sensibility, with its geometric sets, stark lighting and exaggerated movement, turns social injustice into pure image.

Brigitte Helm and the birth of the screen robot

Brigitte Helm’s performance is the film’s centre. She is still a teenager here, and she gives Maria a luminous, almost saintly quality that makes her influence over the workers believable. Her scenes demand more than any other role in the film, and she rises to them with startling, uninhibited physicality.

Rotwang’s robot, a sleek metal figure with an eerie, serene face, is one of the most famous designs in film history, and its creation scene, full of electrical arcs and rings of light, set the template for every mad-scientist laboratory that followed. Rudolf Klein-Rogge’s Rotwang, wild-haired and obsessive, is a founding figure of the genre.

Where the message falls short

Metropolis is dazzling, but its politics are muddled. The film diagnoses class exploitation with enormous force, then offers a vague, sentimental answer that sidesteps the questions it has raised. Its famous motto, that the heart must mediate between the head and the hands, feels more like a slogan than an idea. The acting is often broad even by silent-film standards, and at over two and a half hours, the pacing can feel heavy, especially in its melodramatic middle stretch. Some imagery, including its use of religious symbolism, can seem heavy-handed today.

Who should watch Metropolis?

It is essential for anyone who loves science fiction, film history, silent cinema or production design. First-time viewers of silent films should know it demands patience and a willingness to adjust to its style; watching the restored version, with its orchestral score, makes a big difference. There is little that is graphic, though its scenes of peril and mob frenzy remain intense.

For more German cinema on a grand or unsettling scale:

• Das Boot, another German epic about human beings trapped inside a machine, in this case a submarine at war.
• The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s black-and-white study of the authoritarian impulses stirring in pre-war German society.

Browse more visionary films in our science fiction section.

The verdict

Metropolis is a monument of cinema, a film whose images of towers, machines and crowds have shaped a century of science fiction. Its politics are naive and its melodrama heavy, but few films have ever matched its ambition, and it remains essential viewing.

Rating: 4.5/5