Dealing with massive advances in technology, the movie hits the Luddite nerve. In the early parts of the film, it seems that the working class must suffer ruthless exhaustion, and the educated class suffer a parallel mental exploitation, in this futurist world in which machines become godlike.
A single vocabulary word captures this nicely: in hallucinogenic scene in which the protagonist, the son of the industrialist plutocrat who runs the mega-city, is enlightened as to the true nature of industrial exploitation, a machine is re-envisioned as the ancient Mesopotamian idol Moloch. Seeing workers fed to the machine as ancient polytheists fed live humans into the fires lit to worship the idol, the protagonist shrieks "Moloch!" and faints.
In more technically artistic ways, too, the film is a classic. Its use of lighting, shapes, and motion clearly delineates a style to which the film belongs. Film historian Lotte Eisner describes the scenes depicting large numbers of workers going to and from their factories:
To describe the mass of inhabitants in the underground town in Metropolis Lang used Expressionistic stylization to great effect: impersonal, hunched, servile, spiritless, slavish beings dressed in costumes of no known historical period. The stylization is extreme during the change of shift when the two columns meet, marching with rhythmic, jerky steps, and when the solid block of workers is heaped into the lifts, heads bowed, completely lacking individual existence.
The geometry of forms - whether of groups of people, or of buildings - is one aspect of Metropolis imagery. Another is lighting, an important element in any film.
In Metropolis, as in all his films, Lang handles lighting admirably: the futuristic city appears as a superb pyramidal accumulation of shimmering sky-scrapers. By means of trick shots and hyper-elaborate lighting, illuminated windows and stretches of dark wall stand out like the white and black squares of a chess-board; the light seems to explode, spreading a luminous mist, falling as iridescent rain. The models of the city, with its streets and jutting bridges, seem huge.
Film historian Siegfried Kracauer, who is noted for over-reading the future into the past, and the audience into the film, combines these two tendencies by seeing films as reflecting the psychology of the current audience as it leads into a grim future. For Kracauer, Metropolis is not be exempted from this, his usual method:
One film was more explicit than all others: Metropolis. In it, the paralyzed collective mind seemed to be talking with unusual clarity in its sleep. This is more than a metaphor: owing to a fortunate combination of receptivity and confusion, Lang's scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, was not only sensitive to all undercurrents of the time, but indiscriminately passed on whatever happened to haunt her imagination. Metropolis was so rich in subterranean content that, like contraband, had crossed the borders of consciousness without being questioned.
Kracauer believes, then, that audiences of 1927 contained the psychological seeds of the evil which would be unleashed in 1933, and that the scriptwriter had absorbed this Zeitgeist and exuded it again into the plot. Whether one agrees with Kracauer or not, it is true that the plot is in some respects haunting; the scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, was also Fritz Lang's wife, and had written the script in novel form. It was published separately as a novel. Despite Kracauer's possibly overly psychological interpretation of the film, his summary of the plot suffices:
Freder, son of the mammoth industrialist who controls the whole of Metropolis, is true to type: he rebels against his father and joins the workers in the lower city. There he immediately becomes a devotee of Maria, the great comforter of the oppressed. A saint rather than a socialist agitator, this young girl delivers a speech to the workers in which she declares that they can be redeemed only if the heart mediates between hand and brain. And she exhorts her listeners to be patient: soon the mediator will come. The industrialist, having secretly attended this meeting, deems the interference of the heart so dangerous that he entrusts an inventor with the creation of a robot looking exactly like Maria. This robot-Maria is to incite riots and furnish the industrialist with a pretext to crush the workers' rebellious spirit. He is not the first German screen tyrant to use such methods; Homunculus had introduced them much earlier. Stirred by the robot, the workers destroy their torturers, the machines, and release flood waters which then threaten to drown their own children. If it were not for Freder and the genuine Maria, who intervene at the last moment, all would be doomed. Of course, this elemental outburst has by far surpassed the petty little uprising for which the industrialist arranged. In the final scene, he is shown standing between Freder and Maria, and the workers approach, led by their foreman. Upon Freder's suggestion, his father shakes hands with the foreman, and Maria happily consecrates this symbolic alliance between labor and capital.
In synopsizing the story, Kracauer alludes to Homunculus, a 1916 film which influenced Lang's style. Although Metropolis has a seemingly happy ending, Kracauer sees a more foreboding moral to the story:
On the surface its seems that Freder has converted his father; in reality, the industrialist has outwitted his son. The concession he makes amounts to a policy of appeasement that not only prevents the workers from winning their cause, but enables him to tighten his grip on them. His robot stratagem was a blunder inasmuch as it rested upon insufficient knowledge of the mentality of the masses. By yielding to Freder, the industrialist achieves intimate contact with the workers, and thus is in a position to influence their mentality. He allows the heart to speak - a heart accessible to his insinuations.
In Kracauer's interpretation, every film made prior to 1933 somehow foreshadows the grim usurpation of power by the National Socialists, and every film in that era also somehow manifests society's psychoses or character flaws which enable or even cause that seizure of power. But despite Kracauer's over-reading, it is true that after assuming control of the nation in 1933, the party did offer Lang the opportunity to work in its propaganda agencies. The power of Lang's work had been recognized and understood. Lang knew that refusing such an offer would endanger him, so he simply fled from Germany and settled in the United States.
The history of Metropolis, and in some cases the history of the history of Metropolis, has taken various turns in the almost 100 years since it was released. It premiered in Berlin with a running time of 153 minutes. Over the next several years, as it was released and rereleased in various countries around the world, it was abridged in various ways. Many versions had a run time of around 90 minutes, meaning that over 40% of the movie was lost.
In recent decades, as film historians began to understand that this film is a priceless historical treasure, the efforts to restore the film to its original state began. Three tasks faced the restorers: first, to gather all the footage which could be found; second, to ascertain the correct order of the various scenes in the film; third, to digitally sharpen the images, treating each frame as a digital image. At 24 frames per second, the restorers faced the job of analyzing and manipulating approximately 220,000 separate photographs! After years of work, a restored version of Metropolis was released in 2001 at a length of 124 minutes. The restorers had gathered every bit of footage they could find, sharpened the images digitally, and made educated guesses as to the order of some scenes. This was the best that could be done, and historians and the viewing public would have to content themselves with it.
To the great surprise and joy of cinema fans everywhere, a museum in Buenos Aires discovered, in 2008, a nearly-uncut version of Metropolis. After several more years of restoration work, it was released with a run time of 148 minutes. The Argentine footage not only restored missing sections of the film, but also served as a guide to the exact order of the scenes. Today, there are perhaps only five minutes of material missing, and a viewers can have nearly the same experience as that original audience in 1927.
