How to Bankrupt a Movie Studio, Invent Sci-Fi, and Make Rich Men with Monocles Lose Their Minds
It’s 3:15 AM. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with coarse sandpaper, the cold pizza on my desk is starting to look back at me, and I am currently watching a silver robot do a highly suggestive belly dance in a Weimar-era nightclub while a bunch of wealthy, monocle-wearing German aristocrats look like their eyeballs are about to pop out.
Welcome, my friends, to the colossal, visually jaw-dropping, and wildly expensive world of Fritz Lang.
If you’ve never heard of Fritz Lang, congratulations: your bank account is probably in much better shape than his was. For the uninitiated, this legendary director was a visionary perfectionist whose filmmaking method for this movie was simple but absolutely ruinous:
- Hire over 37,000 extras (including 750 school kids whom you will make stand in freezing water for weeks to film a flooding scene).
- Invent entirely new special effects on the fly—like using angled mirrors to merge live actors with tiny miniature models because green screens won’t be invented for another fifty years.
- Spend so much of the studio’s money that you practically drive Germany’s largest film company, UFA, into near-bankruptcy.
The result? Metropolis (1927).
The “Plot” (If we can even call it that)
We are in the year 2026. The super-rich live in towering, futuristic skyscrapers, playing sports and partying in “Eternal Gardens.” Meanwhile, the working class lives deep underground, working 10-hour shifts on brutal, soul-crushing machines that literally eat them when they malfunction.
Enter Freder, a rich boy with floppy hair who goes underground, sees a giant machine turn into a literal, human-devouring monster named Moloch, and decides he needs to save the workers. He also falls for Maria, a saintly girl who preaches peace.
BUT WAIT! A mad scientist named Rotwang (who has a bad haircut and a metal hand) builds a robot, kidnaps the real Maria, transfers her face onto the robot, and sends the “evil robot Maria” to start a violent, chaotic rebellion that threatens to drown the entire city.
It is basically a massive, steampunk opera about class struggle, featuring the coolest robot ever built and some of the most dramatic hand gestures in cinematic history.
Why You Need to Watch This Tonight
- The Robot (Maschinenmensch): This is the gold standard of sci-fi design. It looks incredibly sleek, terrifying, and beautiful all at once. Fun fact: George Lucas liked this robot so much he basically copied it piece-by-piece to create C-3PO in Star Wars.
- Rotwang’s Peak Mad-Scientist Energy: Rotwang is the blueprint for every mad scientist that followed. He lives in a weird, medieval cottage that is somehow sitting right in the middle of a futuristic cyberpunk metropolis. He has a giant glowing pentagram on his wall, a leather glove, and wild, unbrushed hair. The man is a mood.
- The Argentine Detective Story: For over 80 years, about a quarter of this movie was considered completely lost to time. Then, in 2008, a dusty, scratched-up 16mm copy containing the missing scenes was discovered in the archives of a small museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It’s like finding a lost Beatles album in a cardboard box at a garage sale.
The Verdict
Is it a good movie? It is a towering monument of human imagination. Every single sci-fi movie you love—Blade Runner, Star Wars, The Matrix, Akira—owes its entire existence to the visual grammar Fritz Lang created here. It is long, it is melodramatic, but the sheer scale of the practical effects will make you wonder how they pulled this off in 1927 without a single byte of computer graphics.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 glowing laboratory dials that spark for no logical reason.
Wanna see the granddaddy of all sci-fi?
Turn off your brain’s logic centers, put on a dark techno playlist to serve as a modern soundtrack, and search for the restored “Complete” version on your favorite public domain video platform. Because the copyright has expired, this absolute titan of cinema is completely free for you to experience.
[WATCH “METROPOLIS (1927)” ON YOUTUBE (Opens in a new window)]
