German film director Fritz Lang was sailing into New York City for the first time in 1924 when he was struck with his initial inspiration for Metropolis. He described his first glimpse of the skyline thus: "I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis." After telling his wife Thea von Harbou about his flash of inspiration, she wrote a novel, Futura in 1927, and that same year Lang released his film adaptation of that novel.
While Metropolis contains some of the most iconic visions of the future in film history and is often touted as the first science-fiction film, the thematic center of the film looks to the past. Although the story is populated with high-tech machinery and humanistic robots, Metropolis draws on age-old economic and political considerations for inspiration. Metropolis presents a dystopian future in which the divide between the ownership class and the working class is literalized spatially. The capitalists live high above the city in their skyscrapers, kicking back and enjoying a good laugh at the expense of those below, who work endlessly under the delusion that the wealth would trickle down.
The story of the film is one of economic inequality, the exploitation of the working class by the dominant owning class, and the lengths to which those in power will go for the purpose of ensuring the status quo is maintained. At the center of this premise is an inter-class love story. Shooting began in 1925 and took 17 months. Upon its release in America, Metropolis received mixed to negative reviews. The critic for The New Yorker, Oliver Claxton, wrote that it was "unconvincing and overlong." Lang himself was not satisfied with the film and suggested that his political conscience was naive at the time that he made the film. Years later, it received much retrospective acclaim, with critics citing its innovative visual style and groundbreaking approach to an ambitious futuristic storyline that was unprecedented at the time in filmmaking.
It is impossible to see a version of Metropolis as it existed when it first premiered. Over the decades, entire scenes were cut or have gone missing. As a result, a sophisticated effort has been underway to locate the missing footage and piece it back together as closely as possible to the state in which Fritz Lang originally envisioned it. In 1984, there was a partial restoration that included tinted colorization and a new electronic musical score by Giorgio Moroder and songs performed by popular artists from the time such as Adam Ant, Billy Squier and Loverboy.
The relative commercial success of that rock and roll version of Metropolis led to a concerted effort to track down as much of the existing excised footage as possible, and over the ensuing decades that search has resulted in the discovery of prints of highly varying quality from Argentina to New Zealand. The present version of the film that is available is the closest yet to Fritz Lang's original version.
