Metropolis (1927)

Metropolis boasts an amazing art-deco set design (esp. for a movie made 80 years ago) and is a visionary sci-fi story of the future (set 20 years from now). It's a silent movie in German made by Fritz Lang and this is a restored edition that's still regrettably incomplete. George Lucas has admitted he was greatly inspired by Metropolis as he created Star Wars -- and it shows in almost every scene. (Even the female lead's orchestral theme sounds like Princess Leia's score by John Williams.) This is not a CGI-cobbled Technicolor film, however, if you can appreciate black-and-white films (for example, those of Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks), you should enjoy this one because it's on many people's lists of the top 100 films of all time. The theme is that mechanized industry can steal our humanity, esp. when the privileged leisure class deigns to think itself as more worthy than the working class and sends workers and their families to exile, the better to enjoy the fruit of their labors while denying them of the same. The mechanistic imagery is striking and almost kaleidoscopic in the opening scenes. The drudgery of the workers is evident in their tightly choreographed body language. The female lead is lovely and her eyes are extremely expressive; she serves as a premessianic figure, a sort of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, heralding the coming "mediator" who will unite "the head and the hands," which "must be joined through the heart." Metropolis surprisingly has a great deal of religious imagery: the male lead has a vision of industry as Moloch, consuming the people in fire; the female lead exhorts her followers in catacombs with a backdrop of multiple crosses; and much of the second half of the action takes place in a cathedral setting. The acting style is generally modern and restrained among the handful of named characters, however, the lip-smacking and leering of the men in the nightclub and the frenetic vamping of the evil robotic clone of the female lead will strike modern sensibilities as quite comical and dated. Five stars.