Hello readers!

For the month of April I thought I'd try something different.  It just so happens that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will be performing a concert at the beginning of May called the "Sci-Fi Spectacular", which will feature guest host George Takei in all his glory.  As a lead-up to this nergasm of epic proportions, I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring of "best of" lists and do a top 10 of Sci-fi TV shows and a top 10 of Sci-fi movies.

There really is no criteria for these lists.  It's all down to my personal opinion.  However, I am going to try to throw in some things that you don't often see on major top 10 lists, to keep it fresh.

So, without further ado, it's on to the #10 Greatest Science Fiction Film:



Metropolis (1927)

What better place to start than at the beginning?  A lot of people credit A Voyage to the Moon as cinema's first "science fiction film", but this is the movie that really started to show how the medium could take imagination to a whole new level.

The story of Metropolis is deceptively simple:  a huge city is divided along very basic caste lines into the glorious upper city, where the business tycoons and their descendants frolic in pleasure gardens and marbled skyscrapers, and the worker's city, a hellish underworld where the machine minders are subjected to appalling living and working conditions.  The ruler of this world is Joh Fredersen, an intellectual and businessman.  Fredersen's son, Freder, exists in ignorant bliss until his daily life is disrupted by the intrusion of Maria, a mysterious woman who bursts into the pleasure garden with a crowd of children from the worker city in tow.  Freder becomes obsessed with Maria, and in pursuing her comes to discover "how the other half lives."  It's no wonder this movie resonates with an audience espousing the virtues of the 99%.

It sounds simple, but interwoven into this plot were several subplots which have only been recently rediscovered thanks to the restoration of new prints of the film.  Metropolis has a troubled history, as the original cut was chopped down for time and then thought to be lost.  Perhaps most upsetting was the 1984 release, which added many lost scenes but replaced the orchestral score with contemporary pop songs.  Until recently, this was the only cut which could be easily obtained in North America on DVD.

However, as luck would have it a new print was discovered two years ago in Argentina, and premiered in Berlin with a live orchestral accompaniment.  You can now watch this cut through public domain on youtube.  This cut restores much of the lost subplot of the "prince and the pauper" switch that Freder makes with a machine worker named Georgy, as well as fleshing out the role of the eerie "Thin Man" character.

The effects used in Metropolis would become staples of the industry for years to come:  models, camera perspective tricks, mirrors and specialized lenses...these are things we take for granted now, but at the time were incredibly groundbreaking.


It's worth noting that critics at the time were not so charitable after the first screenings, and Lang himself mentioned that he "detested it after it was finished".  A lot of the criticism levelled at the movie centred around its central message, the infamous tagline "THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART."  However, I think there's quite a bit more depth to be found retrospectively, and I think that's why this movie has achieved the status it has in critical circles.

For starters, that same prescience which foretold the shape of modern cities also foretold some of the horrific practices the Nazi party would later enact under the Third Reich.  The scenes portraying monotone, filth-covered, malnourished workers being fed to a monstrous machine are disturbingly accurate when taken through the lens of the Holocaust.  Ironically, members of the Nazi party were huge fans of Lang's work, especially Metropolis.  Lang, by most accounts, detested the direction and goals of the Nazi party, and when his then-wife Thea Von Harbou joined the party he divorced her a year later.

But beyond this movie's foresight, there is also a powerful emotional core.  German expressionism serves wonderfully here, and the powerhouse performances run the full gamut of facial and body work that goes into crafting a surrealist atmosphere.  It's crucial to remember that this movie is not played "straight", where actors are performing realism.  Everything is taken to the emotional extreme, not just at the performance level but also in the message as well.  The workers machines, for example, are literally giant clock faces that they manipulate by moving the hands to different lights.  Our hero, Freder, is driven to exhaustion manning this machine:



It's deliberately exaggerated, but no less potent despite being rather obvious in its message.  The sheer sincerity of the cast in every scene overrides the absurdity of their actions and decisions.  The performer who truly steals the show though is Brigitte Helm, who pulls double duty as the doe-eyed Maria and her sinister robotic duplicate.  She magnificently portrays an earnest innocence as the leader of a peaceful revolution, then transforms into sadistic glee when orchestrating an armed uprising as the false Maria.

The influence of this movie on later science fiction cannot be overstated.  The look of the mad scientist Rotwang's laboratory, and his physical appearance, have been mimicked over and over again:

His laboratory is replete with tesla coils, levers, gauges and mixtures.  We have no idea what any of them do.  Their purpose is not to enhance the plot, but to enhance the mania of science gone wrong.

Fritz Lang's work stands the test of time not just as a film, but as an experience.  It is tremendously influential, heartfelt, and groundbreaking.  Everything has a beginning.  For science fiction cinema, look no further than  Metropolis.