Film

Metropolis (1926)

Director: Fritz Lang

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Lang's towering, tumultuous 1926 folly rises again, in as scrupulous an approximation of its original form as can be hoped for. A commercial disaster in its day, it was soon bowdlerised from Lang's 137-minute edit, left to sow its influence in various prints of disrepair. Finally, a consortium of German and international archives collaborated on the field and lab work behind this definitive restoration. Any unrecovered footage is now almost certainly irrevocably lost. What is here fills in some of the potholes, but more to the point, showcases Lang's vision resplendently. The image quality is a revelation. Of the amendments, there's more of various bit-characters, plus the spectre of Freder's mother Hel, the origin of the bad blood between his father, the city's potentate, and the mad magus-inventor Rotwang. The director's strengths, however, rarely extended to the nuances of character or individual interplay, and what with the overwrought Expressionist acting and Lang's dualist leanings, the silly dialectics of Thea von Harbou's script stand horribly exposed. A frenzied cinematic spectacle and a crude yet visionary parable, Metropolis is still impossibly ambitious. And that this patched-up print pulls the film apart at the seams is all too apt.

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