Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is a sweeping and monumental science fiction dystopian drama that is at times mesmerising and profound. The special effects are some of the best ever put to film, using a mixture of matte painting techniques, modelling and keen set design this early motion picture has aged surprisingly well considering that it is almost 100 years old.
Lang’s direction is clever and the camera work is at times quite modern in its approach, evoking emotional reactions. Lang relies heavily on the quickness of the film to be in time with the constant orchestral score to help elevate important moments as there is no dialogue spoken to convey emotional beats.
Metropolis is a black and white picture and this stark contrast of light and shadow helps to convey the melodramatic story being told. A story which uses biblical ideas and tales as one of its core narrative devices, this movie itself can be interpreted as a religious film in some ways - a tale of wayward sons and imperious fathers, sinners and patricians and so on.
The acting is at times ham-fisted and at times superb, which might be expected as motion picture acting was relatively new at the time, with most ‘early’ film actors having extensive backgrounds in stage productions and theatre where acting sometimes needs to be dialled up a notch so as to convey the emotion of a scene to the whole audience instead of just the front row.
Lang’s emotional core is of course the score, composed by Gottfried Huppertz, which is dramatic and majestic but over the course of the 2 and a half hour long movie we can see how Huppertz uses the same musical techniques to represent different emotions and eventually the score begins to become dull through familiarity.
Enjoyable but also hard to recommend as the source material, being very old, has not survived intact and as such large portions of the film are greatly decayed and some of the film is entirely missing, being replaced with story cards, so that the ‘full’ Metropolis doesn’t really exist in a way that audiences can enjoy.