Restored Metropolis on TCM Sunday night 9/18!!!

[Cicero]

^ I don't think it was particularly imaginative (except in artful use of the Deco aesthetic and Lang's peerless lighting and framing); it combined a number of already well-known interesting ideas from 19th Century and early 20th Century science fiction (from Wells, Shelley, and Capek, among others), but didn't really have any innovations of its own aside from the visual (and the use of an apparently science-fictional setting for a feeble Christian screed).

H.G. Wells's contemporary review, while lacking in some ways, is effective when it highlights the film's lack of imagination:

Capek's Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley's, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion. Originality there is none. Independent thought, none.

Where nobody has imagined for them the authors have simply fallen back on contemporary things. The aeroplanes that wander about above the great city show no advance on contemporary types, though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few helicopters and vertical or unexpected movements.

The motor cars are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even intelligent anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew; I may have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it; and this, though it must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the more convenient as a gauge of the circle of ideas, the mentality, from which it has proceeded.

. . .

It is a city, we are told, of 'about one hundred years hence.' It is represented as being enormously high; and all the air and happiness are above and the workers live, as the servile toilers in the blue uniform in The Sleeper Awakes lived, down, down, down below.

Now far away in the dear old 1897 it may have been excusable to symbolize social relations in this way, but that was thirty years ago, and a lot of thinking and some experience intervene.

That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even in New York and Chicago, where the pressure on the central sites is exceptionally great, it is only the central office and entertainment region that soars and excavates. And the same centripetal pressure that leads to the utmost exploitation of site values at the centre leads also to the driving out of industrialism and labour from the population center to cheaper areas, and of residential life to more open and airy surroundings. That was all discussed and written about before 1900. Somewhere about 1930 the geniuses of Ufa studios will come up to a book of Anticipations which was written more than a quarter of a century ago. The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that city populations were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution. This vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from being 'a hundred years hence,' Metropolis, in its forms and shapes, is already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.

I leave out his descriptions of the ridiculousness surrounding the catacombs and Rotwang's workshop. The cars and airplanes struck me as odd when I first saw them in the film; I think this may have been the only science fiction film I've ever seen that was set in the future but used only modern, unaltered vehicles (aside, perhaps, from automatically closing doors, though I wasn't sure whether the auto doors were meant to be self-closing, or whether the Thin Man caused the door closing behind on Georgy by some unusual means).

 

[RJDiogenes]

I guess it anticipated nuBSG.

That was fascinating. It puts the movie in a whole new perspective to get a contemporaneous view, especially from HG Wells, of all people.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Capek's Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley's, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion. Originality there is none. Independent thought, none.

Where nobody has imagined for them the authors have simply fallen back on contemporary things. The aeroplanes that wander about above the great city show no advance on contemporary types, though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few helicopters and vertical or unexpected movements.

The motor cars are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even intelligent anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew; I may have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it; and this, though it must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the more convenient as a gauge of the circle of ideas, the mentality, from which it has proceeded.

It's interesting that with minor rewording this could be used as a review of 99 percent of sf-fantasy movies produced ever since, including all of Star Trek and Star Wars.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, with the possible exception of its earlier stages of development, Star Wars never had the pretension that it was depicting the future or anticipating innovation. Quite the contrary, the artists there explicitly modeled that universe on World War II technology, for example; Darth Vader's appearance was modeled in part on samurai armor. A science-fiction-ized update of "Once Upon a Time...." opens every film. It was always intended both to seem completely familiar and to evoke a sense of nostalgia.

So, in the case of Star Wars, I think that would be unfair criticism.

 

[Christopher]

Quite the contrary, the artists there explicitly modeled that universe on World War II technology, for example; Darth Vader's appearance was modeled in part on samurai armor.

So there were a lot of samurai fighting in WWII, were there...?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Naw, there's a semicolon there that has some fancy grammatical function or other....

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, with the possible exception of its earlier stages of development, Star Wars never had the pretension that it was depicting the future or anticipating innovation. Quite the contrary, the artists there explicitly modeled that universe on World War II technology, for example; Darth Vader's appearance was modeled in part on samurai armor. A science-fiction-ized update of "Once Upon a Time...." opens every film. It was always intended both to seem completely familiar and to evoke a sense of nostalgia.

So, in the case of Star Wars, I think that would be unfair criticism.

It would be true, nonetheless.

Star Trek is very heavy on anachronistic flourishes of all sorts. There was never an attempt to portray a futuristic society, just people and institutions as we know them now with a visually imaginative gloss. They're in a freaking space navy, for god's sake, a borrowing of historical setting that was old when Forbidden Planet used it.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yeppers, can't argue with that. Ironic, huh, perhaps that in an effort to make things seem more believable they are in fact made more implausible?

Edited to add: Perhaps a better word instead of "believable" would be "acceptable".

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, treating the characters and setting as if nothing much will change in the next couple of hundred years is in fact a bid to make the show more plausible, while being a great deal less realistic as a depiction of the future.

Remember how annoyed people were (and are) by the attempt to portray human characters in TNG as somehow more emotionally "evolved" than contemporary human beings - it distanced the audience and limited the kind of dramatic stories that could be told. TOS, OTOH, treated the characters as idealized 20th century individuals - idealized in the sense that, for example, Kirk was an unusually noble and principled man but he was very much those things as measured in contemporary terms.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

With the caveat that no one wins an argument over what is realistic about the future, practically by definition since we can't compare with reality yet, a very big thumbs up to that post.

 

[RJDiogenes]

The Naval traditions that are current today are derived from traditions hundreds of years old; it's reasonable to depict a future where something resembling those traditions still exist, and have been carried over to a space fleet. That's not the same thing as depicting a world hundred years in the future where the same model cars are in use.

 

[Warped9]

In fairness, as has been mentioned, these things have always been evident a lot of film and television SF. And it's something a lot of the general audience might not really pay much attention to.

I, too, noticed the use of then contemporary looking cars, but then the car and airplane (or aeroplane as it was once spelled) were each only little more than twenty years old so it's not hard to see that they were thought still quite futuristic at the time. I did find it amusing to see the aircraft moving far too slowly to realistically stay aloft, and there was no hint of any sort of antigrav system in play. The clothing was also contemporary.