Metropolis Review

To quote the tutor Phil, ‘Metropolis is the benchmark for sci-fi films’, I would like to elaborate on this point and say yes it is a benchmark, but not just for sci-fi but for pure brilliance from start to finish. The director of metropolis is Austrian-American director Fritz Lang, the movie is made in 1927, so it’s very early in the sense of special effects, but this film is jam pack with them. It is possible to see that this film breaks all rules and pushes the boundaries to the extreme. For example the scale of the building had never been seen in the era the film was made, although the shots where made with miniature models and painted backgrounds, there are still a giant sense of depth to the whole city.

Damien Cannon also notices the visual masterpiece, ‘This is a world of arching expressways, fantastical skyscrapers and myriad aeroplanes’. Damien used the word ‘world’, when in fact this is only half or what is seen in the film, another half of the world but completely different. The underworld, a place where endless machines are controlled by zombie-stated men; these machines are what keep everything running on the upper beautiful world. When reviewing the film, John K. Davis describes the movie as, ‘Society has been divided into “thinkers and owners,” who live high above the city in luxury, and “laborers,” who live in its bowels and whose only purpose is in operating the machines that run the city’.


Personally what I found the most amazing effect in the whole movie is the transformation of robot to human and the reverse. It just astounding to think that that effect was created more than eighty years ago! The level of difficulty must have been so high yet it was pulled off expertly.

Metropolis is a silent film, which draws to closer to the masterpiece background and the camera angles, Dennis Schwartz once wrote, Lang's incredible genius like set designs (using "the Schufftan process" -- which involved placing mirrors to seamlessly combine actors, full-sized sets and miniatures; this allowed Lang to create spectacular shots of actors moving against seemingly massive sets) and Lang's stunning unforgettable visuals (an impressive presentation on a large scale of the dehumanized workers buried underneath the city they built)’. Dennis describes the difficulty it took to get to what he had achieved