Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is lauded as a must-watch for film school students as well as a classic aspiring filmmakers should experience before honing their craft, and rightfully so. Based on a 1925 novel of the same name by screenwriter Thea von Harbou, the 1927 German expressionist sci-fi film is teeming with awe-inspiring set design, detailed background art, and, most of all, an enduring class-conscious message about the division between workers who sacrifice their bodies to erect the utopia while the privileged reap the benefits.
While your patience may vary when listening to a piano, guitar, and drum accompaniment loop for nearly two hours (I opted to play some ambient music from my own music library to give my brain a break), the film has quite a lot to say despite being a silent picture. The film follows Freder Fredersen, the yuppie son of the eponymous city’s socialite industrialist, as he falls for a girl and winds up in a city-mouse, country-mouse misadventure, living among the disgruntled workers as a cutting-edge new technology threatens to upend their would-be utopia forever.
Although the film has motion in the anime space, inspiring Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka’s 1949 manga of the same name, which was later adapted into an anime film written by Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, it also has a serendipitous relevance: it takes place in 2026 (or at least Italian musician Giorgio Moroder’s re-scored version does).
But for the sake of nearly a century-old time-capsule funsies, we’re going to run down the predictions Metropolis made for 2026—both technologically and socially—to see whether they were on the mark or way off. Spoilers: it got more existentially right than technologically wrong.
Newspapers being the primary news source
Metropolis aims to imagine what society might look like a century into the future, and we can’t fault the film for quaintly assuming newspapers would still be the way we get updates on the world. Now everything is on tablet computers in our pockets that we can doomscroll through to our hearts’ discontent. If anything, some might argue that the film’s depiction of newsstands with daily papers printed behind them for folks to grab as they go about their day is by far a more tactile preference than being paywalled to learn tidbits of exclusive news.
Humans being a necessary part of automation
Quite depressingly, Metropolis‘ depiction of all the cutting-edge automation that keeps its decadent cities running comes at the expense of human laborers who live leagues below the surface in hovels. The film even doubles down on this obvious metaphor with a nightmarish sequence that reimagines its machines as the gaping maw of a creature into which its workers mindlessly march, sacrificing their bodies to lubricate its mechanical insides. But for how poignant a metaphor Metropolis posits for the future, the reality is that most of today’s tech is even more fully automated, with only a few humans overseeing any work from production lines to self-checkout aisles. RIP, Lang. You would’ve loved Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.
These death-trap open-concept elevators
While freight elevators still exist in industrial warehouses and apartment complexes whose owners tout them as vintage while painting over power outlets and ceilings with god-awful popcorn finishes, we thankfully haven’t followed Metropolis‘ vision of every run-of-the-mill lift becoming a sort of conveyor belt, with folks expected to jump inside the moment it hits their floor. We’d probably be less averse to seeing logs on the back of a semi truck on the freeway on some Final Destination-type beat and more fearful of taking the elevator if we did adopt Metropolis‘ city-wide elevator system.
High-end prostheses
Metropolis could’ve decorated its sets with beakers and spirally tubes and lights and called it a day, but one part of its production design that feels eerily visionary is its take on the progression of prosthetics. Granted, the only representative of prosthetic hand tech is a mad scientist who orchestrates societal collapse, but the flourishing of his newfangled appendage is worth celebrating even if it gets used for evil.
Cybertrucks (sort of)
Toward the end of Metropolis‘ disaster film-like last-act frenzy, we got a brief but shocking shot of what cars look like in 2026. While they still resemble the old-school motorcars, they also share an unfortunate futuristic aesthetic, with trapezoidal hoods from bumper to bumper, giving them the same uncanny look as Tesla’s rolling dump truck, the Cybertruck. Maybe Elon Musk should’ve stopped hewing so closely to Blade Runner vehicles as a copyright-infringing point of inspiration and gone back further for a car no one wants to be caught dead driving.
Video calls
Another prediction Metropolis got right is that 2026 will be a year when video calls are the norm. Albeit, the movie’s version uses a giant machine that’s part rotary phone, part giant tablet, and part fax machine, taking up quite a bit of real estate on a wall inside a room roughly the height of a door and the width of two. Still a win, but 2001: A Space Odyssey’s video calls remain the more ergonomic choice.
Our incessant need to make tech in the likeness of women
Chalk it up to Freud or humanity’s predisposition for feminizing ships, but for whatever reason, we can’t help but make new tech assistants some facsimile of a woman. Be it Siri, Alexa, or whoever’s voice assistant, tech bros are fond of selling the masses on a helpful robot that all but flutters its eyelashes at us with an agreeable female voice. Metropolis had its finger on the pulse with this prediction. The film even touts the automaton as “the most perfect and most obedient tool which mankind ever possessed.”
What’s more, actress Brigitte Helm does an exceptional job bringing Futura, Metropolis‘ man-machine automaton, to life with unnerving expressions and jutting arm gesticulations that hint at the menace behind technology asking if it could before asking if it should.
Tech advancements being big with perverts
Towards the latter half of Metropolis, Futura is unveiled not at some big tech convention but at a gentleman’s club. There, she does a little dance, and it gets all the men hot and bothered, leading them into a frenzy where they’ll do practically anything to get their hands on her. All the while, viewers witness the juxtaposition of her world premiere with that of the seven deadly sins coming to life as death plays the flute.
If that isn’t a metaphor for the state of tech, I don’t know what is. Whether it’s folks marrying AI in the Metaverse, apps advertising chatbots to date, or whatever new frontier VR has achieved in the porn market, Metropolis launching its new tech exclusively to answer how it will serve the lonely and horniest of us is funny nearly a century later because it’s true: tech will always try to angle to degenerates.
Technology sowing discord and duping the masses
As we’ve seen with deepfake and AI technology impersonating world leaders, politicians, celebrities, and influencers (the last of which has been used to digitally undress women, or, in Grok’s case, something way more deplorable), technology made in the image of man has a high propensity to be used as a weapon to make us all worse. Metropolis wastes no time opting to use Futura in a slew of agitative propaganda, leading its workers to stage a revolt that ultimately puts children in harm’s way by flooding the depths they inhabit and destroying Metropolis’ great machine.
All of this is achieved thanks to Fredersen’s father, who saw that a peaceful revolution was at hand from the working class, prompting him to use Futura (taking the likeness of Maria, the workers’ prophet, for lack of a better term) to incite a self-destructive rebellion that would see their end.
We should kill the machines, actually
While Metropolis‘ finale sees a death of the machines’ sentiment that started out as one manipulated upon the workers to take up, it still rings true, with its blue-collar citizens recognizing that the “head” and the “hand” could only connect through the “heart.” While the heart stands for Fred as a mediator between the industrialists and the working class, seeking common ground in a nice bow to tie up the film’s class-conscious themes, it also culminates in the workers rebuking Futura as a witch and burning her at the stake. It’s a scene that’s taught in film schools as an important one cinematically, but for our purposes, it’s one that works thematically as well.
For the past six years, AI has been breathlessly lauded as the next frontier that everyone has to adopt in their workflow or risk being left behind. However, rather than being implemented mechanically to identify cancer or the like, its major selling point is its proliferation in art. Y’know, that thing we as a species enjoy doing. Like Futura, AI has taken the role of a charlatan in 2026. It’s glorified plagiarism, an autocorrect machine placating the masses who would rather steal with extra environmentally taxing steps than pick up a pencil and let their own imagination take form through their own means. More of us could take pointers in lynching new artless tech than join in drinking the Kool-Aid and ignore how it’s slowly killing us before it’s too late, like the folks in Metropolis.
If any of this inspired you to give this certified cinematic classic a watch, you can check out Metropolis streaming on Tubi
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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