10 April 2012
Believe the hype. Twenty-five minutes of lost footage, found in Buenos Aires, make new sense of Lang’s masterpiece.
The result is a socialist-Christian fable so visually inventive, frantically erotic and psychologically subterranean that it makes your head and heart spin.
You can imagine someone like Tim Burton wanting to re-create this perverse universe. (And with Johnny Depp as the innocent Freder, or the deranged avatar inventor, Rotwang, what studio would deny him?) But there’s no need for modern-day tweaking.
Metropolis — virtually restored to its original coherence (some blanks remain) — provides cinema’s definitive take on the future imperfect. A future that feels all too close to home.
Metropolis
Cert: PG
