Metropolis

 The film Metropolis, written in 1926, was set in 2026. If you've never seen it, it is worth watching once just for the early science fiction setting. Picture white arcologies with elevated roads and a lot of airplanes flying at building level. This was the first feature-length SF film. It is a silent movie with interspersed cards that you read. It was a big budget movie, for the time: inflation-adjusted, it cost a little more than Godzilla Minus One, or three times as much to make as Primitive War.


Like everybody in 1926, the film is talking about class struggle-- the Communists had recently attempted a takeover of Germany hoping for an outcome like in Russia. The plot was a little confusing, mainly because it is hard to understand the robot-Maria's motivations, Basically, Freder, the naive, pampered prince of the city falls in love with a reformer, Maria. When he goes to the deep levels of the city to follow her, he learns of the terrible conditions there among the workers, which he hallucinates as throwing people into the fires of Moloch. Maria gets replaced by a robot, who leads a violent revolution. Freder learns it is actually a robot when it gets burned at the stake. He fights the inventor of the robot on top of a building and wins and gets his father to negotiate with the workers.



There is another movie called Metropolis, which is an anime adaptation of a 1949 manga, an SF classic in its own right. It is called Metropolis only because Tezuka saw a still from the movie and liked the image as a futuristic setting. Both involve a robot mistaken for human and a revolution, though. A lot of anime tropes stem from Tezuka's work, including "a prodigy grows in power until he becomes a threat to the entire city" "gender swap" "a robot is the sympathetic lead" "giant creatures attack the city" and so forth. 




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