Metropolis (1927)

One of the landmarks of cinema, Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a 1927 German Expressionist science fiction drama about a huge, futuristic city where the wealthy live a life of decadent privilege on top of the backs of the struggling masses. Freder, its main protagonist, is shaken from his complacency by the ethereally-beautiful labor organizer Maria and her revelations about the cruelty found in the lower levels of Metropolis. Things go sideways when Freder's wicked father disguises a killer robot as Maria and sends her to infiltrate a group of workers attempting to unionize. As that paragraph strongly suggests, Metropolis has a pretty strong undercurrent of Marxism. Rachel joins Ryan to discuss that element of Metropolis, but they also talk about the movie's groundbreaking special effects, the numerous attempts to censor and/or alter the story's message, the story's simplistic moralizing, the decades-long effort to find and restore the movie's lost footage, the director's difficult relationship to ascending Nazism, the hallmarks of German Expressionism in the film's structure, and Metropolis' influence on films like Frankenstein (1931), Modern Times (1936), Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984), Batman (1989), and many others.