"If you you've never seen the grandaddy of sci-fi robotlove, a new print is calling. Last days!"
– Time Out New York
“This silent masterpiece still packs a heavyweight punch! [Care of] a new print of the 2002 restoration, a landmark of reconstruction and beautification, Film Forum is your gateway to Metropolis, the better to kneel in awe before mighty temples to progress and doom along with the rest of the peons on-screen.”
– Nicholas Rapold, The New York Sun
“A MASTERPIECE OF VISIONARY SILENT CINEMA... one of the strangest, most fascinating films ever made, a futuristic nightmare that is both sublime in its grandeur and remarkably intimate in its emotions.”
- A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“Easily trouncing the recent Hollywood heat rash of over-extended superheroes and Hasbro infomercials, THIS SUMMER'S MOST SATISFYING SCI-FI BLOCKBUSTER is a crypto-Marxist, proto-Fascist spectacle first released 80 years ago!... Metropolis now seems both quaintly steampunk and disjunctively contemporary.”
- Ed Halter, Village Voice
“Lang’s pop-visionary epic has always been a milestone of precision craftsmanship on a gargantuan scale.
A proto-noir suspense film... a mad-scientist extravaganza and all-out disaster flick!”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
“The greatest of all pulp fantasies! Lang’s profligate hallucination of a future city is a movie whose every detail is subsumed to the overall effect.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“A spectacular high point of Expressionist design with moments of incredible beauty and power.”
– Pauline Kael
“One of the handsomest, visually most inventive films of the 20th century, and certainly one of the all-time great sci-fi films... a powerful parable.”
– NY Press
“The plutonium template for sci-fi moviemaking... Remains one of the most inspirational and influential movies of any genre.”
– John Anderson, Newsday
“A Messianic melodrama and a special-effects tour de force. Just about every science-fiction movie you can think of pays tribute to its influence, but to date none has matched its strangeness or its prophetic power.
- A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“A superspectacle... ESSENTIAL.” - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
(1927) Amid the gleaming towers of a gigantic city of the future, Gustav Fröhlich, pampered son of the Big
Boss himself, is smitten by a young woman (Brigitte Helm, in a sensational film debut) ushering workers’ children on a topside field trip, and follows her back to the depths — where he discovers what really makes
Metropolis run. And as slavishly regimented workers with numbers instead of names toil amid smoke-belching
machinery, he has a vision of slaves lining up for sacrifice at the flaming mouth of the idol Moloch.
But, anticipating unrest, the Boss makes plans to defuse it, inciting eccentric inventor Rudolph Klein-Rogge
to fashion an agent provocateur, the “robot-Maria” (Helm again!). Inspired (or so the legend says) by his first
glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, Fritz Lang’s visionary work of science fiction redefined the term “super-production” — in the process nearly bankrupting the Ufa studios — with its thousands of extras; already monstrous
sets inflated to the gargantuan by cutting-edge camera trickery (including the first use of the legendary
Schüfftan process, whereby miniatures and live action are filmed simultaneously); and eye-popping special effects
extravaganzas, including the explosion of the “heart machine;” the Frankenstein-like genesis of the robot girl; and a
cataclysmic, multitude-engulfing flood. A legend and a byword almost from first release, Metropolis was seen as
Lang conceived it only by the earliest Berlin audiences (“positively overwhelming” raved the Variety critic after
the premiere) — and then the cutting began, by the U.S. distributor Paramount, by Ufa itself, and so on, down
to a 1984 “restoration” that ran only 87 minutes. This version collates the seven existing source copies, with
1,257 scenes restored via a laborious multi-step digital process. The result, generated back to a pristine
35mm print, is probably the most complete, integral version of Lang’s work that will ever be seen — complete
with the original orchestral score recorded in stereo: the definitive version of Lang’s masterpiece.
A KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASE.
1:30, 4:20, 7:00, 9:30
FOR SALE AT AMAZON:
METROPOLIS
by Thomas Elsaesser
