SummaryPossibly the crowning achievement of silent cinema, Fritz Lang's 1927 blockbuster fuses the frenetic storytelling of twenties pulp fiction with Lang's personal fascination with the darker side of human nature. (Kino International)
SummaryPossibly the crowning achievement of silent cinema, Fritz Lang's 1927 blockbuster fuses the frenetic storytelling of twenties pulp fiction with Lang's personal fascination with the darker side of human nature. (Kino International)
It took the German restorers four years to ready this print using dupe negatives and old prints found in archives around the world. Their work speaks for itself. Each frame of this classic is drop-dead stunning, the more so now that the movie no longer hiccups its way across the screen.
What is to say about Metropolis that hasn't been said already? For me, probably very little. Metropolis is an awe-inspiring and influential masterpiece of the sci-fi genre, and one of the best movies I have seen in recent memory.
Metropolis perfectly demonstrates the artistic vision of director Fritz Lang. Lang was a fine and intelligent director, and Metropolis shows this loud and clear as Lang's direction is superb. The film is very rarely boring to me, both the pace and length were well-judged in my view, and while the message may seem muddled to some people for others including me perhaps it is relevant and even powerful.
The music is haunting, beautiful and evocative, the story really impresses with its originality and the acting is expressive, although silent the facial expressions and gestures speak volumes. The best part about Metropolis and what resonates with me are the visuals, the cinematography is fluid same with the lighting while the costumes and effects are wonderful, but the real revelations are the city landscapes and settings which are gorgeous.
All in all, a brilliant film and an influential film not only of the genre but of cinema itself. 10/10 Bethany Cox
One of the most visually appealing silent films I know.
This is probably one of the greatest silent films ever made and one of the great classics of cinema before the Second World War. It is amazing how, in a sense, it is still up to date and influencing more recent films ("Elysium" is the name that occurs to me more quickly now because I saw it recently, but there are more). Its futuristic look has influenced most of the sci-fi films, such as "Star Wars", "Star Trek", the animated series "Futurama" and even the cartoon "The Jetsons".
Made with great quality, it is a film whose elegant cinematography already reminds us of the look of the first spoken films, in the thirties. There is some academic debate about whether this film belongs to the expressionist movement or not. Personally, I think there are clear expressionist influences on the story told, where paranoia and mistrust towards authority are constant, but visually, they are no longer expressionist.
The story told is deeply dystopian and mixes futuristic elements with biblical allusions: Metropolis is a huge futuristic city run by one man: Johann Fredersen, who lives in the New Tower of Babel. However, it is supported by an immense number of workers who, in the depths, operate a series of machines for hours on end, in inhuman conditions. Freder, the son of Johann Fredersen, decides to try to put an end to this injustice.
In the film, in addition to the good performances of actors such as Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm, production values stand out. The music is excellent and matches the film perfectly; the costumes are good and the sets, especially, are great. The special and visual effects are good and work very well. The scene of the creation of the Woman Machine is particularly stunning. Cinematography uses a lot of light and shadow and the film is very visually pleasing, one of the most pleasant in silent cinema, in my opinion.
Departing from a masterful manipulation of space, Lang transforms the futuristic city of the title into a field of dreams centered on death and sexuality.
After half a century, does the story hold up? Eh, pretty much. In the end, the story doesn't really matter that much as this is really a vehicle for the amazing visuals.
Una película de visualización OBLIGATORIA para todo aquel que ame el cine independiente del género de preferencia, es totalmente adelantada a su época y es visual y auditivamente una delicia, imperdible.
An unmitigated landmark for the science fiction genre and a triumph for the filmic medium in general, Fritz Lang's 1927 opus "Metropolis" thrives on breathtaking production design and visual effects, as well as some potent thematics and an imaginative central tension. Though I think, for me, things do get a tad indulgent here and there, with a few moments (particularly within the some of the performances) taking me out of the experience overall, I'm still grateful to even be able to see this in its entirety. The amount of trouble the restorers went through to bring this to us is still absolutely astounding to me. For that reason alone, I'd say it's more than worth a watch. Sure helps that this is quite an impressive visual feat to behold as well.
Fritz Lang's science fiction godfather has suffered through several levels of re-cut hell over the past hundred years. Slashed by nearly an hour for its original western release, trimmed further by **** censors in 1936, color tinted and re-edited in the '80s (with a modern rock soundtrack) by Giorgio Moroder, then painstakingly restored for Blu-Ray in 2010, using lost footage from an old print in Buenos Aires. Up until now, my entire memory of the film comes from the Moroder version, which didn't make much sense from a story perspective but always wowed me with its wild, futuristic visions, ambitious special effects and expansive set designs.
The restored version offers improvement in both respects. Now cast in gorgeous monochrome, as intended, the art direction is even more stunning. New scenes and high-resolution scans give us fresh opportunities to admire the sprawling city, to really soak up the vast scale of Lang's concept. And the plot, naïve and airy as it may be, actually moves in sensible directions now. It's incredibly slow moving and drawn-out, sure, overloaded with long shots of talking heads (which seems unnecessary for a silent picture) but at least it's headed somewhere.
As a long-time fan of the film, I'm glad to have finally seen the full thing. Metropolis is an iconic marvel, an artistic triumph that's, somehow, just as hypnotic now as it must've been in post-WWI Germany. That said, wading through the scenes without some sort of huge, dazzling art deco set piece, well, it can feel like work. I needed four sittings to get through this two-and-a-half hour behemoth, and I was already personally invested before it hit my media shelf. First-timers will, no doubt, find it smothering. Deeply influential as a production, astounding as a purely visual showpiece, but critically flawed as a whole. Now excuse me while I revisit a few tunes from the 1984 release.
Interesting movie, and I can see why it gained high praise for it's time... But the 1980s soundtrack RUINED the movie! The Music is completely out of place and has no actually connection of mood or ANYTHING to any part of the movie. This movie would be MUCH better if it had an orchestral soundtrack. Very random in terms of scene switching, too fast paced.
