Metropolis

I had some down time here at work where I had to be on-site and available, but there was nothing going on.  So last week I pulled up the Netflix “Watch it now” feature and opened up Metropolis.  I’ve heard so much about it but I’ve never seen it before.  It’s a 1927 silent film and because I’m surrounded by 26 cabinets filled with electronics, all with their own cooling fans, I can’t hear a thing.  So a silent movie was just perfect.

Well it turns out that silent films aren’t so silent.  The music is an important element to this movie.  When I left the laptop speakers on “mute”, I just didn’t feel anything so I turned the speakers back on.  Even though the score was low and quiet because of the crappy speakers on this laptop and the surrounding fan noise, the music’s emotion added so much more to the film.  I’ve watched silent movies before, some of them with orchestration added, some left completely silent.  The worst ones try to add modern music to the movie.  My first copy of “Nosferatu” had a Type-O Negative soundtrack and while I really liked the band, it was just so out of place that I had to find another copy of the movie.  Bad choice.

We have a future city where the rich and affluent play in gardens in the sunshine and the working class live underground with the machines that run the city.

Honestly, we could stop right here.  You’ve seen this one done a hundred times and you know what’s coming.  But I’ll continue anyway because I liked this version.

The man who runs the city is busy in his office, his grown son chasing women in the “Pleasure garden” when a working class woman comes topside with a gaggle of dirty children.  When he asks who she is, she responds only with, “These are your brothers” and is shooed away by the servants.  The young man is intrigued and begins investigating what is going on beneath the city.  He finds a worker who is almost passing out at his post and relieves him by taking his post.  He wears the man’s uniform so no one will question him because all the workers look the same in uniform.  After ten hours of constant work he is amazed at how hard it is to be a worker.  He sits on the floor where he finds one of the mysterious notes and begins looking at it.  A fellow worker sees this and tells him there is another secret meeting going on tonight.

Dad is in the office dealing with a problem.  There have been mysterious drawings and plans found on the workers down below and there have been accidents due to the overworking and exhaustion, also a few minor acts of sabotage.  Dad takes these plans to his top scientist for analysis.  The scientist has just created a robot that can replace the workers without tiring and without pay.  He says that in 24 hours, he can make one that will also look perfectly human.  After showing off his shiny new robot, he examines the drawings and says they are the catacombs beneath the worker’s city.  The two men descend to investigate.

They come across what amounts to a church where Maria, the mysterious woman who visited earlier, is encouraging love and patience to all the workers.  She is telling them that the head and the hands must come together at the heart and they are still waiting on their mediator to arrive.  The father tells the mad scientist to kidnap Maria and make his new robot look like her so he can sow discourse among the workers and have a reason to replace them with robots.  The son tries to rescue Maria and save the workers but it is too late.  They are worked up into a frenzy by the robot Maria and they are charging against the machines.  Little do they know that their destruction of the machines will flood their homes and kill all their children.  The son and Maria rescue the children and expose the truth to everyone.  In the end, the son is the mediator they have all been waiting for and he gets the worker’s foreman and his father to shake hands.

It’s impossible to watch this movie and not discuss the religious and political commentary in the movie.  The son as the messiah, Maria as the voice of compassion, the seven deadly sins, tower of Babel…  The film was made in 1920′s Germany, a time when there was revolt and upheaval in much of the world.  Marxism had just taken hold of Russia a few years before…  There’s something there beneath the surface but I’m not digging too deep for it today…  It’s pretty much exposed for what it is and plainly read.

I especially liked the datedness of this movie.  The futuristic cars were nothing but 1920′s cars with silver cone-shaped hubcaps.  And the women in the pleasure garden were flapper girls.  I have to wonder what our modern “futuristic” movies will look like to people in another 80 years.

Some of the scenes went on way too long.  The total movie came in right at two hours, it didn’t need to be that long.  Some of the length can be blamed on the overacting they had to do to get the point across without words but even then it still dragged a bit.  Like the scene where they were having a party to test and celebrate the new robot’s human qualities, that scene was this movie’s Podrace.  It just didn’t need to be in there at all or at least cut it down to a few minutes…

In the end, it’s a good film and a lot of that is because it was early.  A lot of movies have used the same premise but they are all compared to the original.  I’d even say that this movie owes a bit of it’s premise to Wells’ Time Machine.  But as a stand alone movie, it was very good.  The scale models of the cityscape were outstanding and the machines looked menacing.  I’m still fascinated by the machine the son ran while he worked his ten hour shift.

The only part that I question is the idea that now that they are talking, the working class is still happy to continue laboring to keep the city running for the planners?  What are they getting out of it?  The ending leaves it open to interpretation but I’ve got to think that once the worker’s eyes are opened, how do you shut them again?  Even if you institute labor laws, eight hour days etc…  How do you keep the working class happy to live below ground, never seeing the fruits of their labor?  You might say that we have the same thing now where the rich play while we work but at least we get to accumulate our own riches, maybe even work ourselves up into the upper classes.  While we work, we can enjoy the results or our work.  We can spend our time off doing the same thing the rich people are doing (just maybe not as often…)  I don’t see these underground workers being welcomed into the rich people’s pleasure gardens any time soon.  I’m not convinced the mediator would be able to reconcile such a vast difference between the classes.  Unless the whole point was lost on me and it was a commentary on how little it takes to pacify the working class.  As I see it, if we revisited Metropolis a year later we either see the workers forced to work by the barrel of a gun or we see the ruined cityscape that used to be Metropolis.

8 of 11 Skulls