METROPOLIS

METROPOLIS is where so much of screen science fiction begins.

Fritz Lang’s silent epic imagines a vast future city divided between the privileged world above ground and the workers who keep its machines running below. Freder, the son of the city’s ruler, discovers the human cost of the system that sustains his comfort. Then comes Maria, the Maschinenmensch, the false prophet robot built to manipulate the masses and protect the interests of power.

Nearly a century later, METROPOLIS still feels enormous. Its architecture shaped the look of cinematic cities from BLADE RUNNER to BATMAN, and even more recently Coppola’s MEGALOPOLIS. Its robot design influenced everything from C-3PO to fashion, music videos and the wider visual language of artificial humanity. The film’s class politics remain blunt in the best way: a society that treats workers as machinery eventually starts to behave like one.

The lore around METROPOLIS is almost as famous as the film itself. It was one of the most expensive films ever made in Weimar Germany, then heavily cut after release, with missing footage turning it into a damaged legend for decades. The 2008 discovery of a near-complete 16mm print in Buenos Aires helped restore much of Lang’s original structure, making the film’s modern reputation feel partly like an archaeological rescue mission.

I’m including METROPOLIS in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it gives AI one of its first great screen bodies. The Maschinenmensch isn’t just a robot. She’s technology used as spectacle, labour control, political theatre and mass manipulation. That’s a lot for 1927. Frankly, we’re still catching up.