Critics reviews

The first modern blockbuster, the big-budget big bang, but it clinches that title only owing in part to its visionary grandiosity, its awesome scale, its ribald ridiculousness.

Metropolis is flawed but not hobbled by its message. Its scope and style are still breathtaking, and – in its restored version – its narrative is thrilling and expertly paced.

It's still easy to feel Metropolis' power even after intervening decades... If A Trip to the Moon was the seed of science fiction on screen, Metropolis is its green stem, and much more too. The floodtide of Fritz Lang's visual techniques and the expanse of the film's evocation of the future might have met resistance of mind and eye in its day, but even in an abused and truncated form enough of his vision remained to stun the eye and light the creative spark.

With his engineering background and architect's eye, Lang favored orderly, symmetrical compositions; as the critic Frieda Grafe put it, he brought out "the hidden geometry in every shot." In "Metropolis" Rotwang's wild gestures, the robot Maria's erotic contortions and the destructive frenzy of the workers' revolt threaten to overwhelm Lang's clean lines and precise spaces.

The film's futurism is still breathtaking, from its Art Deco titles to the neon spiral in Rotwang's lab: this is surely must the first film to imagine people communicating by video screen.

Fritz Lang's 1927 film is a crazed futurist epic, a mythic sprawl with something of Jung and Wagner, and dystopian nightmare about a city-state built on slave labour, whose prosperity depends on suppressing a mutinous underground race whose insurrectionist rage is beginning to bubble.

If previous versions... made METROPOLIS seem more like a von Harbou film than a Lang one, the now "complete" version of this sprawling future fever-dream actually resembles a movie someone as smart as dear old Fritz would make. More nuanced because it is more excessive, the restored METROPOLIS is a film that understands (and feels through) its artificiality--as well as the fixations with death and female sexuality inherent in its material--instead of presenting it as straight allegory...

“Metropolis” employed vast sets, thousands of extras and astonishing special effects to create its two worlds. Lang's film is the summit of German Expressionism, with its combination of stylized sets, dramatic camera angles, bold shadows and frankly artificial theatrics.

Lang’s film defies rational dissection at every turn, drunk on the possibilities of exploring a new world defined by its creator’s loftiest aspirations, petty jealousies, and domineering hubris.

Lang's aerial views of choreographed crowds are positively Riefenstahlian; his sky-scraping, heavens-reaching city looks glorious as ever. Metropolis marshals all the resources of the German film industry to warn against the persuasive streamlining of mass production and new media; it must, paradoxically, be seen to be believed.

As modern as Bauhaus yet as ancient as Zhuangzi, who warned that "where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts." Meticulous constructions carry the sustained frenzy, all of the visual arts summoned and piled high into a fractured Tower of Babel, a panorama of pistons and gears where the camera emerges as the most ferocious mechanism of all.

As the longer version shows, however naive the film's socialist notions might be--most of them are built around Freder's belated discovery that his father exploits workers--its post-Freudian contours and narrative conceits remain highly sophisticated.