eep beneath the vibrant clubs and lush gardens of the Upper City, hordes of workers toil away in the drab and dank realms of the Lower City, slaves to the giant machines that keep alive and bustling the modern marvel that is Metropolis.
And all is right with this world for Freder Fredersen (Frölich)—only child of Metropolis' ruler, industrialist Johhan Fredersen (Abel)—until, one day, he happens to catch a glimpse of a group of wretched children from the Lower City, and of the beautiful and saintly woman shepherding them
about his privileged realm.
Freder goes searching for this angelic creature in the bowels of Metropolis, where he witnesses the overwhelming despair and mortal danger that are a part of the workers' everyday lives. After an unsuccessful appeal to his father on behalf of these people, Freder decides to return to the Lower City and to switch lives with one of its denizens.
Meanwhile, Johhan Fredersen consults the frantic genius Rotwang (Klein-Rogge) about the mysterious plans that have been found on some of Metropolis' workers. But the occultish scientist is more interested in showing Fredersen his latest invention—a machine-woman that he is one day away from making indistinguishably human.
Rotwang does discover the meaning of the plans, however—they are maps of catacombs that exist below the Lower City. And what the two men discover there is truly astonishing. In a bright cavern, the woman who so entranced Freder, Maria (Helm), preaches to a group of reverent and desperate workers
of the "mediator," a savior who will some day serve as a link between the mind that orders Metropolis and its hands, the people who suffer so to keep it running.
Having seen his own son among this throng, Johhan Fredersen orders Rotwang to make his machine-woman in the likeness of Maria, with the intention of using the robot to his advantage against the agitated workers and his mesmerized offspring. Rotwang fatefully obeys, and the events that then unfold try not only Freder's heart but the existence of Metropolis itself.
A sparkling city brought back to life
Within weeks of its Berlin premiere in 1927, Fritz Lang's budget-busting silent film Metropolis had more than an hour cut from its original two-and-a-half-hour length by its German and American distributors. For decades, various severely-truncated versions of the monumental work circulated. 1987 saw the first real effort to reassemble as much of Metropolis' original footage as possible, and today, thanks to some painstaking research, the advent of digital technology and the end of the Cold War, audiences can experience the nearest thing to Lang's original vision as anyone has in 75 years.
Not only does this latest restoration contain the film's original 1927 orchestral score and some vastly improved image quality, but it returns to Metropolis several plot elements that had been missing for so long. These include the conflict between Johhan Fredersen and Rotwang (they both loved the same woman, Hel, who died giving birth to Freder; Rotwang originally builds the robot with the intent to resurrect her image for himself), the presence of the "Thin Man" (a mysterious and ominous character the industrialist orders to follow Freder after he starts acting out of the ordinary) and various events that take place in Metropolis' red-light district, "Yoshiwara."
Sadly, not all of Lang's original footage has been found, but where film is still missing new intertitles written especially for this purpose provide the details. A number of production stills also fill in some of these gaps, and a new translation of the work's already-existent intertitles only make more clear and complex what could be at times, in previous versions of the film, a rather puzzling movie.
Myriad contemporary science-fiction films owe much to Metropolis—Star Wars, Blade Runner, Brazil and Tim Burton's Batman movies are only some of the better known, more obvious examples. And with this restoration, viewers can appreciate even more of this futuristic, expressionistic, pulp science fiction's social(istic) messages, symbolic suggestions, design marvels and imagistic, cinematic power that has had such an effect on so many moviemakers and
moviegoers over the years.
