EVERYBODY HAS SEEN THE images, but how many have sat through the whole thing? In 1927, when Fritz Lang first unleashed his 204 minute-long studio-busting sci-fi thriller Metropolis onto a bewildered public, the answer was “precious few.” Set in the year 2000, it bombed already on its opening in Berlin on January 10  and it did little better in a somewhat shortened version that premiered in Stuttgart and Munich on August 25. It was not until Paramount Pictures took mercy on this beached whale of a would-be epic, hiring scriptwriter Channing Pollock to cut it way down to a form that at least Americans could swallow, that the film finally started to attract an audience. “Metropolis knew no boundaries and had no logic,” Pollock later explained. “I gave it my own meaning.” This 1928 version, running to around an hour and a half, became the one the world would proceed to call Metropolis, a movie that everyone knew about but hardly anyone actually liked.

Sure, the visuals were always stunning – visionary even (director Luis Bunuel called it "the most wonderful picture book you could imagine") – but good visuals do not a good movie make. The generally poor film quality we usually got to see on late-night public TV was one strike against it, and the even worse (and widely divergent) soundtracks were another. But most of all, the egregiously dysfunctional story of Freder Fredersen, the naïve but courageous son of the great city’s lord and master, and the Christ-like figure of Maria, the prophet of Metropolis’s vast proletarian underground population, whose implausible love for each other brings the two previously irreconcilable classes together, seemed as cloying and downright insulting as on the day it was first presented. As a critic wrote in the Berliner Börsen-Courier the morning after the 1927 premiere, “[Screenwriter] Thea von Harbou has invented a preposterous plot whose motifs are stuffed to the gills. (…) She continuously works with hollow feelings. Horrible. A serious topic is transformed into gruesome kitsch. [It is filled with] special effects, not because ideologies themselves cause explosions, but because the film wants to show off its tricks. The conclusion – the tearful reconciliation of employer and employee – [is] appalling.”

 
Among scores of other innovations, Metropolis featured
the world's first video phone

Many subsequent critics focused on the film’s alarming political statement. During World War II, critic and social scientist Siegfried Krakauer described it as “fascist” and “totalitarian” at heart, since its utopia of “the heart” (Freder) serving as the link between “the brain” (the master of Metropolis) and “the hand” (the toiling masses) was the essence of corporatism and Nazi Party ideology itself. The charismatic “heart” of Lang’s vision, Krakauer believed, foreshadowed Adolf Hitler.

A number of producers tried to update the film over the years, most notably musician Giorgio Moroder, who tinted it and added a pop music soundtrack in 1984. But it was not until the thorough restoration and redigitalization by the Murnau Foundation in 2001 that the film transformed itself from a dysfunctional historical curiosity into a cinematic experience that no one should miss. This version not only includes previously lost film fragments collected from all over the world but also the rerecorded original score by Gottfried Huppertz, which turned up among the personal papers of the composer’s widow. While this version is still missing around 30 minutes from the 1927 original, it contains new title cards and also brief written notes bridging over the gaps. Thanks to this version, the movie not only looks great and sounds great, it actually makes sense.

 
Consumed by work:
In a horrific hallucination, a giant machine is transformed
into the man-eating god Moloch

Then in the summer of 2008 Paula Félix-Didier, the director of a film museum in Buenos Aires, made a miraculous find: a complete copy of Lang’s 1927 original that had been languishing in the museum’s collection for generations. All but a few scraps of film are there, including entirely new scenes and also new motivations for many of the main characters. The new authoritative version, which the Murnau Foundation (which holds the rights on Lang's films) has just completed in raw form and will be releasing to the public next year, not only tells the whole story but shows it as well.

 
When robots go rogue:
Topless machine woman Maria assumes the role
of the Whore of Babylon in the great city's infamous
Yoshiwara night club

The main difference between this and the 2001 version is that while the familiar Pollock story concentrates solely on the love story between Freder and Maria as well as the rivalry between the Master and the deranged inventor Rotwang, the Lang/Harbou script focused also on the previously insignificant characters of the worker Georgy, the Thin Man (the Master’s spy), and Josaphat (the Master’s secretary), who are now developed in full and represent the concepts of “friendship,” “loyalty,” and “betrayal” respectively. An essential piece of the back story, namely the tragic life and death of the Master’s beautiful wife Hel, whom the sinister Rotwang duplicates in the form of a robot (which is in turn transformed into an evil version of pure-hearted Maria to serve as an agente provocatrice among the workers), is presented in its entirety. The film also includes considerably more footage of both the “upper” and “lower” cities along with an extended journey by car along the streets and flyovers of Metropolis. True, the story is as mad as ever, but seen from today's vantage point it unfolds a prescient and majestical vision of both the twentieth century and our own era today that was simply too much for most 1920s moviegoers to swallow at one go.

 
Fritz Lang's Art Deco city of the future

But even in those days, some viewers understood exactly what they were looking at. In 1927 Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels went to see the original Metropolis in a provincial town. They were mesmerized. “When we seize power,” the future Führer remarked to his future propaganda minister, “we’re going to make movies like that too.” And, of course, they did just that. What Lang devised as a dystopian vision in 1927 became physical and political reality in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and many subsequent Nuremberg Rallies less than a decade later.

Few other films have been as influential as Metropolis, particularly in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. The eerie robot transformation scene presaged the Frankenstein movies of the 1930s and later. The mad, gloved scientist Rotwang clearly foreshadows Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. George Lucas’s C-3PO is a clear reference to the Maria robot, and  Blade Runner echoes the dystopic horror of Lang’s urban vision. Even the children’s movie Antz quotes the film’s grandiose flood scene.

 
Shades of Dr. Strangelove:
The mad scientist Rotwang with his machine woman

As a vision of a society and technology out of control, where humans are reduced to machines and machines become human, Metropolis still contains a message – or at least a warning – for us today. For those who wish to hear it, the 2001 Murnau Foundation version of the film is a fine place to start.

But the fact that a presentable edition is already available on DVD in no way detracts from the excitement surrounding next year’s premiere of the definitive "director's cut." For the film’s grand opening, the Murnau Stiftung is booking giant movie theaters and hiring full orchestras. You might want to start reserving your ticket now. I know I will.