Episode 179: Metropolis (1927)

This week at The Film Club we’re talking about Metropolis! The film takes place in a dystopian future where the wealthy industrialists live in high rises. Meanwhile the workers who keep the city running as well as building it live beneath the city. A man named Freder is the son of the wealthy city mayor Joh. Freder loves sports and spending time in the beautiful gardens but his carefree life is interrupted when he meets a woman named Maria who has entered the garden he’s spending time in to show the children of the workers below the city the lavish lifestyle of the people who live above them. Freder is so beguiled by Maria that he follows her to the lower levels of the city and begins to work a manual labor job so he can get to know Maria. In the lower level of the city also lives an inventor named Rotwang who is building a robotic woman in the hopes to bring his lost love back to life. Rotwang decides to use Maria as the model for his robot but secretly he’s creating this robot so it can destroy Metropolis. Join us as we dive into the world of Metropolis.