The Most Influential Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror Movies Part 2: Metropolis

The First Classic Sci Fi Movie Was Way Ahead of Its Time. It’s a Modern Science Fiction Story Created 10 Years Before Modern Science Fiction

Going a little out of order but so what. Metropolis is a classic of the silent era. It’s one of the first great science fiction films. Most impressively it is a modern science fiction story that was made a full decade before modern science fiction really got started. The term “Science Fiction” wasn’t even in use at the time. Hugo Gernsback is credited with coming up with the term “scientifiction” in 1926 but switched to the easier to understand and pronounce “science fiction” in 1929.

In 1937 John W. Campbell became the editor of Astounding and instituted a policy that moved the genre from the pulp fantasies of the 1920s into what we now call Science Fiction; stories based on speculation about the future, where some advancement or discovery becomes the basis for the conflict and the plot.

Campbell’s policies ushered in writers like Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clark and took the genre out of the Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers era and moved it towards works like Dune and Childhood’s End.

But all of that lay a decade in the future when Metropolis premiered. But Campbell probably would have approved of most of the film if not the entire work. There is some mysticism but mostly what people take away from this film is the incredible vision of the future.

The sharp divide between the workers and the rich is something that was going on in society in the ‘20s. Fritz Lang simply extrapolated what would happen if the trend continued. Something that is very Campbellian. The movie didn’t invent the dystopia but it was one of the first to portray it in such stark terms.

The term “robot” had only just been invented. The play R.U.R. premiered in 1921, just 6 years prior to this film. Yet here we see one of the definitive robots in sci fi. Not only that, but a robot duplicate; a trope that would reappear again and again from the Twilight Zone to Austin Powers.

And of course you can’t have a robot duplicate without a mad scientist.

All of this combined to make a classic that was in every sense of the word ahead of its time; every bit as ground breaking in its subject matter and story as with its visuals which became the standard for science fiction design throughout the ‘30s and early ‘40s.

Next up: Nosferatu