Metropolis

continued

could also focus on its cubist set designs, its surrealist lighting and imagery, or the film's advanced science-fiction premise and how close to reality it really is. In the midst of all this, it's easy to overlook that the film is also just another love story.

In Metropolis the future is now — our now. We are living Lang's vision of the future. The faces of those coal miners trapped 245 feet underground as they emerged from the rescue baskets are reminders that miners and other laborers are still working deep underground and that there are people everywhere in the world working like automatons to keep our prosperity afloat.

Set in the twenty-first century, Metropolis tells a familiar tale of a corporate upper class that lives in towering angular skyscrapers, cavorting amid fountains, gardens, and peacocks, with airplanes, cars, and trains to shuttle them about. Lang's city supposedly was inspired by his first glimpse of the New York skyline from the deck of a ship. Far below this realm of skyscrapers and luxury lies the misery and drudgery of catwalks, furnaces, factories, and a mechanical devotion to machinery.