Film Review - Metropolis

October 04, 2016

Fig. 1 Metropolis poster (1927)

7 years after Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) another movie helped to set the blueprints for another genre of film making, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). This iconic film captured the audiences’ imagination with its set design that gave the viewer an understanding of the world it was in, not only in its importance to the story but also its scale in size.

Biblical based imagery was used throughout the film in the set design but mostly with the main building and the Workers’ living area. “It features a cloud-scraping contemporary Tower of Babel, an industrial workers' production hell-hole.” (Glancey, 2009) With this in mind it can be said that Metropolis is a futuristic retelling of the Tower of Babel as the city’s creator wants it to be in his image while not listening to those who make it run day and night. Knowing that it was designed around an ill-fated city makes the audience release that it too is ill-fated and that it will fall in the same way.

The buildings have also been designed to make you feel trapped with no way out just like the workers living underground, even the tall buildings above ground give off the idea that you are forever trapped as they tower above you.“The feeling of alienation, of being just a number in a much larger, anonymous social whole is derived from the city, built as an evolution of the assembly-line” (Prinsi, 2013)

Fig. 2

One way in which we are made to understand the large scale of the city is by the fact that we never see the boundaries. The closest we come to understanding its full size are the shorts that show the tops of the buildings and even then the audience is left asking about the true layout of Metropolis – Is it just made up of a small set of tall building located close together or do these buildings stretch outwards for a few miles?

Metropolis is such a landmark in the movie industry that it’s influences can still be seen to this day in modern Sci-fi movies such as the Star Wars saga “Star Wars’ biggest debt to Metropolis might be the visual design of Maschinenmensch, the iconic female robot whose looks were obviously never far from artist Ralph McQuarrie’s mind while he was creating his concept art for C-3PO.” (Giles, 2015)

Fig. 3 Maschinenmensch and C-3PO

But it’s not just in movies that Lang’s iconic work has left its mark, in the British rock band Queen used clips from the movie for their “Radio Ga Ga” music video and even has the band member Freddie Mercury reacting the scene when the main character, Freder, is working at the machine along with the band performing in front of an audience that have been dressed up as the Worker class.

Overall, Lang leaves us asking - Is one man’s utopia another man’s dystopia?

Illustrations