Back when Fritz Lang's Metropolis first appeared at the start of 1927, the film ran some two and a half hours. When it went into wider release, it was shorn of about an hour of material, and has only ever been seen in this shorter version since then. Lang himself estimated that the original cut of the film was lost for good within about six months of the film opening. In the meantime there have been various attempts to restore it. I have one of these earlier attempts on video, where the restoration consisted of step-printing the 90 minute version to stretch it out to an absurd 140 minutes.

Fortunately there have also been attempts to properly restore the thing, and the latest and probably best of those is with us now. This new restoration brings the film up to about two hours in length. A good part of it is, therefore, still missing. Even so, this is probably as close as we'll ever get to the original unless those missing 30-40 minutes ever reappear. Nothing essential to the plot is missing, and additional intertitles have been created to cover missing footage and scenes.

The other reason to see the new Metropolis is because it looks damn good. The restoration of the film has been carried out digitally based upon the surviving original negative and original nitrate prints, so that not only is it as close to the original running time as we'll probably ever get, it looks better than it probably ever has done since 1927. For the first time ever I could actually clearly make out the word "Metropolis" in the film's opening sequence (the title has been just about illegible in other prints I've seen).

As for the film itself... Well, all visions of the future inevitably wind up looking dated, because they're inextricably tied to the period when they were made. Metropolis is thus a very 1920s version of the future. The videophone is an undeniably interesting innovation, but the cars all look suspiciously like 1920s roadsters, and the Yoshiwara club has that 20s thing going on too.

That aside, the film has aged very well. The overriding moral (about the heart being the mediator between the head and the hands) probably seems a little trite, some of the acting might strike modern viewers as overdone (the German Expressionist acting style was already slightly out of date when the film was made) and one or two other stylistic oddities may stand out.

Apart from these considerations, Metropolis is still a pretty amazing piece of work. The vision may have dated but that doesn't mean the film isn't visionary stuff. If you like your SF leavened a little with Gothic tinges and topped off with a neat, lengthy action climax, then Metropolis has that. If you haven't seen it before, this new version is a good way to be introduced to it, and if you have seen it before, then see it again.

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