Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which first came out in 1927, is considered a seminal science fiction film and a triumph of early special effects and blockbuster cinema. But legendary author H.G. Wells (who wrote a few sci fi books of note) was not impressed with the movie, and he wrote an article for The New York Times in the same year where he referred to it as “the silliest film” and derided it for its lack of originality and inventiveness.
At the time that Metropolis hit the theaters in the late 20s, H.G. Wells was in the process of writing a series of articles for The New York Times dealing with notable events and current trends. As part of this series, he turned his attention to Fritz Lang’s film and interestingly enough had little good to say about this movie that was trailblazing new paths for science fiction on the big screen. Apart from referring to it as silly, he opened the article claiming that the film delivered “almost every possible foolishness, cliche, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general”. He noted that the film borrowed shamelessly from Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) first introduced the term robot, and that Metropolis also bore some similarities to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Wells also commented that the movie covered much of the same territory as his own work The Sleeper Awakes, published in 1897, but that it had failed to take into account the social advances that had occurred in the intervening thirty years which he felt disproved some of what he had previously written. He also did not believe that the movie’s predictions of the future were very accurate, neither was its portrayal of the “vertical city” or of the social and working conditions of the lower classes.
As he winded down his critique of the film, Wells lamented: “The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalizing and make-believe film wastes some very fine possibilities”. He felt that Lang should have polled some modern-day thinkers on their opinions of future directions and built his movie around that. Of course Wells seems somewhat bitter in the article over what he refers to as Lang’s “plagiarizing” of The Sleeper Awakes, so perhaps that in part prompted the response. And Wells failed to take a step back and possibly see that the film was not so much a prediction of the future direction of society, but more of a commentary on the socio-political environment of its day. Much of what we saw in Metropolis actually played itself out in the industrial nations in the decades prior to the release of the film, and its very likely that this was at least part of the message Lang wished to convey. But that’s not what Wells saw, and it’s often difficult for contemporary critics to place a film in its proper perspective without the appropriate amount of distance from it. Still, the movie has proved the test of time and it is considered a classic film today and a landmark for the science fiction genre and movie-making in general. All that despite the fact that Wells dubbed it “the silliest film” at the time that it came out.
Source: The Science Fiction Film Reader, 2004 (pgs. 5-12)
