Metropolis 1927 by Aidan Codd.
This film Is about a city that is powered by slaves that live below ground level, the mayor of the city has a son who can see what is going on under every ones nose in plain sight. So he tells his father that he wants it to change because there shouldn’t be slaves in the utopia in which they live. His father tells him to leave it and that its fine because one knows so no one cares ,but his son decides to go and solve the problem himself . He goes down to the workers and trades lives with one of them and sends him to an address where he can go for help. The man ignores him and just walks away, but the son takes the man’s place and does a full day’s work. The Mayors son ends up going with the other workers to their church that is set in a deeper cave. At the church he listens to a woman talk about God and peace and when everyone has gone he stays and talks with the woman, she calls him her messiah and believes he has come to help set them free from the underground and help them back into the normal world above. He says he will help and promises to return. All the time the son has been underground his father has been spying on him with a friend who is a scientist that has had some dealing with the cities design. They both wonder why the son wants to stay down there, the father finally leaves the scientist and the scientist starts to think to himself that within the church he had found the last bit of good in his creation of hell that he had tried to create. The scientist sets out and captures the woman who runs the church, you then see the mayor with the scientist next to a robotic woman, he uses a machine to transfer the image of the woman onto the robot. The robot woman then tricks the worker’s and they destroys the lower city but they foolishly had left their children down underground, luckily the son works out that it’s not the real woman and helps all the children escape. The workers go mad when they find out they have been tricked and burn the robot woman. The son stops the scientist from escaping but he dies and the mayor agrees with the workers to work together and make a better world for each other and thats how the film ends.
What I liked most about the film was the shots of the city and factory, they were portrayed in such an amazing way that it gave you a sense of scale and depth of the city of which you didn’t see much of, but you could picture how vast and extraordinary it is and could be. Here are a few reviews I found of the film.
Metropolis has the look and feel of a protofascist future with its towering columns, and uniformed styled military precision. It has been argued by writers such as Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner that films like Metropolis, along with Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) foretold the coming of the fascist era and the Third Reich. This is of course nonsense, especially in the case of Frtiz Lang.
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