Metropolis: the 1927 sci-fi every worker needs to see

Every time International Workers' Day comes round, the conversation inevitably turns to automation, robots stealing jobs and artificial intelligence replacing workers. It sounds like a 2026 debate. But on 10 January 1927 — 99 years ago — a German director called Fritz Lang put exactly that anxiety on a cinema screen, in a silent film with metal robots and exhausted labourers working ten-hour shifts in the bowels of a futuristic city. The film is called Metropolis. And it's more current than most of this week's releases.

How a trip to New York created the future of cinema

In October 1924, Fritz Lang landed in New York for the first time. What he saw as he came off the ship was enough to change the course of cinema. Lang himself described it this way: "The film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers of New York." The city was violent, vertical, full of contrast — neon lights up above, dark streets down below. Somewhere in those avenues, he imagined the question that would define his work: what happens when technology advances faster than humanity can process it?

Back in Germany, Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou developed the screenplay from her 1925 novel. Filming took 17 months, cost more than 5 million Reichsmarks — the equivalent of around 21 million euros today — and was done at the Babelsberg studios in Berlin for UFA, the biggest German production company of the era. In sheer numbers, it was the most expensive German film ever made up to that point.

The original version ran 153 minutes. For the American release, roughly a quarter of the film was cut. Much of the lost footage stayed missing for decades.

Two worlds inside one city

The premise of Metropolis is brutal in its simplicity. The city of the future is split into two levels: up above, in the towers of glass and steel, live the privileged — the sons of the magnates, the planners, the owners of capital. Down below, in the city's subterranean depths, live the workers. They operate the machines that keep the world above running. They work ten-hour shifts. They're treated as replaceable cogs. They never see the sun.

The protagonist is Freder, played by Gustav Fröhlich — son of the powerful Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis. When Freder goes down to the workers' level for the first time and sees the conditions they live in, the story begins. He meets Maria, a young woman preaching peace and understanding between the classes, and falls in love. His father, worried about Maria's influence over the workers, orders the scientist Rotwang to build a robot in her likeness to manipulate the labourers and provoke chaos that would justify a crackdown.

It's a story from 1927 about fake news, mass manipulation and class conflict. Nothing more.

Cinema's first artificial intelligence

What Metropolis gave the collective imagination and never got back is the robot. The Maschinenmensch — literally "machine-human" in German — is the first great robot in the history of cinema. Created by the scientist Rotwang to look like Maria, the android is played by Brigitte Helm, the same actress who plays the human Maria. She wore a metallic costume sculpted from "plastic wood" — a malleable resin — over a plaster cast of her own body.

The visual result is something everyone has seen somewhere, even without knowing where it came from: a humanoid android, golden, strikingly theatrical in its posture. C-3PO, from Star Wars, was directly inspired by the Maschinenmensch of Metropolis — George Lucas has never hidden it. Brigitte Helm's robot is also in the visual DNA of Blade Runner, The Terminator and practically every piece of science fiction that came afterwards.

Metropolis was the first film added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, in 2001. That wasn't an accident.

What Metropolis invented without realising it

The list of things cinema and television owe this 99-year-old film is so long it becomes absurd when you look at it all at once.

• The aesthetic of dystopian future cities — Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Coruscant in Star Wars
• The humanoid robot as threat or instrument of control
• The narrative of an isolated elite above and invisible workers below
• The mad scientist creating artificial life for his own ends
• The AI that imitates a human in order to manipulate other humans

Ridley Scott, developing Blade Runner in 1982, went on record saying Metropolis was the film's single biggest visual influence. The vertical vastness of Los Angeles 2019, the towers disappearing into the haze, the ignored workers on the streets below while the elite sleep on the upper floors — all of it is Metropolis reread 55 years later.

Almost a century on. Why does it still bother us?

Because the film's central question hasn't been answered.

Lang closes Metropolis with a slogan that became famous: "The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart." It's a lovely line, optimistic even — the idea that dialogue between capital and labour solves everything. Some critics at the time found the conclusion far too naive, given the scenario the film itself had built. H.G. Wells hated the film for exactly that reason.

In 2026, the more honest version of the question still has no clear answer: when automation eliminates jobs at scale, who gets the time the machine freed up? Who gets the value it generated? The well-rested worker, or the business owner with a wider margin?

Metropolis has no answer. But it was the first place the question was ever put in images. Ninety-nine years before today.

If you've never seen it, the restored 2010 version — which recovered a good chunk of the lost scenes found in an archive in Buenos Aires in 2008 — is available on streaming platforms and also free on the Internet Archive, since it's in the public domain — and the Metropolis entry on our sister site Rei dos Filmes gathers the rating, trailer and synopsis. It's well worth the sitting, even if you need to get used to the pace of silent cinema.

And if you like sci-fi that mixes real science with speculation, it's worth seeing how Hubble inspired some of the best modern science fiction films: 36 years of Hubble: the telescope that inspired sci-fi. Or, if you want something more recent and more unsettling, there's The Boys season 5 — which does to superheroes exactly what Metropolis did to robots: uses fiction to say something reality still can't quite name.