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Metropolis — Reborn!
The world’s first scifi flick returns, in all its cinematic glory.
When Fritz Lang’s masterpiece came out it was the world’s first real science fiction film (coining the genre and introducing techniques never before seen in moving pictures) shocking and enthralling audiences around the world.
If the effects are less spectacular to us now, it’s not for lack of effort or expense. They were huge and hugely expensive then. The film costing $1.3 million, a fortune at the time.
Lang said the concept for Metropolis came to him while on ship, gazing at the Manhattan skyline, and his design reflect that, with art deco skyscrapers and elevated roadways. The film predates the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings but at the time Lang first arrived the die was cast. New Yorkers were busy building the Barclay-Vesey Building, their first ever art deco skyscraper.
Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou ran with his vision and wrote the novel he subsequently used as a basis for the film, set in a dystopian 2026, in which the lifestyles of the industrial rich contrast with those of the industrial poor, who spend their lives underground —
