Metropolis was one of the first feature-length Sci Fi films that had a wide release. The sheer amount of effort that went into the film was incredible. There were claims that there were tens of thousands of extras in the film to give a clue. Poor children were recruited from the streets to act in the scene where the housing area was flooded.\u00a0 The ambition in this film was immense.\u00a0 The end result, however, falls a bit short.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, I do think there is a lot about this film that is groundbreaking. A lot of the special effects and designs used in the film were incredible for the time, and I can see how this film would inspire film makers for generations to come. In that sense, it borders on being a masterpiece.<\/p>\n
What holds it back, however, is that its story doesn’t hold up to modern standards of storytelling, and why would it?\u00a0 It was a film for its time. Watching this, I felt the film was made to push the special effects boundaries and really see what you could do with the film. The story was unique for the time and interesting, but it wasn’t the main driving force for the film itself. The main goal was to make a loose point about politics and economics while pushing the boundaries of film.<\/p>\n
Comments about the film at the time included statements that the story was too simplistic, and I find it hard to disagree with that. A sort of billionaire-style executive has oligarchic control over the city and wants to disrupt protests by creating a robot copy of the leader of the protests to corrupt their cause. Things go wrong, and the protests turn destructive. It’s up to the oligarch’s son to bridge the gap between the two immovable sides of the story. He solves the conflict (and ends the film) merely by taking out the robot and getting the two sides to shake hands. <\/p>\n
“The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must be the Heart!”<\/p>\n
I feel this simplistic solution belittles the real point the movie was trying to make…that workers and the owner class can easily become disconnected from each other the more distance between the two there are. They can then seek destructive solutions to their problems instead of trying to work together. How can the heart connect them when there is so much that divides them? How can they seek common ground? There’s no expansion of how this would play out, but I guess at least a hand shake is a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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