Metropolis, a 1927 sci-fi movie, is set in a dystopian capitalist society where a whole city is owned by Joh Frederson. The story revolves around his son, Freder Frederson, wandering around the city having an adventure. To put it simply. It’s about class struggle. Maybe faith. At one point, I thought it’s an anti-capitalist movie and at another point, I thought it’s anti-communist… but maybe it’s both or neither.. it’s just a movie.
I started it out of curiousity to get a perspective on what people thought of as super futuristic in 1927. The movie is said to be set in 2026. The year I’m currently writing this in. It’s 18th January, 2026. It feels a little surreal that people 100 years ago dreamed of this time and made stories about it. I’ll go over the technology of Metropolis (as much as I could understand it) in this blog article. I’m not going into the science behind it or discussing it’s feasibility. These are just general observations - mostly just random thoughts as I go over the tech in the movie in my head.
City
There’s a scene of the city when Freder goes to The New Tower of Babel. It’s like a set of buildings. The middle one the tallest. There’s elevated streets or railway tracks rather where we see trains moving. And there’s a lot of planes everywhere, many of them not even flying higher than the middle building. Besides airplanes, I think it’s also got Zeppelin’s I’m not sure. Also, the traffic is crazy down there. Or maybe it’s not? No cars were blocked, it was flowing traffic!
By 1927, cars were already quite common. I think the movie wants to show maybe the increased number of cars and the organised traffic.
Also, the buildings that are often shown are really quite dull. They’re grey blocks with a lot of windows. Most of the buildings looked like that except special ones. I suppose that’s what the current state of the world is? I should pay more attention to the buildings around me I guess. They are indeed dull gray blocks in my head.
My theory is that city people are possibly atheistic - they also have “Satanic” symbols randomly. In contrast to that, the workers are shown to be actively religious.
Fuel And Work
The city is run by the people “underground”. They’re upto weird stuff to power the city.
In one case, a factory is being powered by or rather kept cooled by a lot of human workers. It’s simple, all they gotta do is flip levers continuously! There is a lot of (white?) smoke coming off of the machines or is just in that area - I assume it’s due to those power generating machines.
Then there’s another device that’s like a huge human sized clock. It’s got three hands. I didn’t understand the mechanism fully but often some lights at the edge of the clock turn on, and a worker needs to move the clocks hands quickly to point to that light.. often only two of the hands need to be moved and apparently it takes effort to move those hands. People have ten hour shifts there making sure to match the hands and the lights and not doing so will I guess stop providing power to the city.
Communication
While there’s hardly modern era digital stuff seen in the movie (there were a lot of levers and clunky buttons), but there was a video call telephone!
It’s kinda funny that they still have to hold the telephone to their ear. Maybe it’s a privacy thing. I would have been so impressed if they had introduced a touch screen system somewhere too. but this video call took me by surprise too.
Robots and AI
There’s no AI like we have now (LLMs). As far as I know, I think only Isaac Asimov kinda got it right imo - I’ll maybe write more on it in another blog article.
So, in the movie, there are no robots, and it seems the only robot gets invented at that point. So, in real life 2026, there are many humanoid robots, so we are quite ahead there! BUUUTT… the newly invented tech in Metropolis allows encoding a human in the newly invented robot.
The robot that this guy, our local scientist Rotwang (Red wang?), invents has a consciousness already it seems or something that looks like consciousness. The robot can move on it’s own but just looks like a machine. It can be made to look like a human by apparently kidnapping a human. The skin added on this robot can be melted by fire. So, this skin I think is just skin, I’m not entirely sure.. maybe it has some memories and a little personality too. It’s just weird that the workers just start believing robo-Maria… but again they have no reason to not believe that that’s not their Maria. Ratwang didn’t have to make the perfect Maria - just passable enough to get his message across. Also, Ratwang messed up one eye of the robot, it keeps twitching or is unnaturally small or something. It’s freaky but it does serve the purpose of distinguishing real Maria and robo-Maria if the make-up, clothes and expressions weren’t enough.
I think they could have easily made machines simpler than humans to just replace the workers and maybe let the workers have a luxurious life.. but who knows how it works, you know? Like even if they did have tech that could relieve those workers current duties, who’s to say whether those workers won’t have been in some other kind of dangerous job. And if every dangerous job is automated, we still never know if the poor ever get a chance to have a good life whether they still have opportunities to get like white-collar jobs. Who knows what the universal basic income situation is there either. It’s possible, they’re just jobs for the sake of jobs. Something to pay them for, but then couldn’t it have been better to make it less manual labour less stressful? I suppose, one could argue they wanted to keep the workers busy so they don’t think it’s a fake job.. but come on why not just start universal basic income at this point? idk idk. happy to learn - feel free to message me! or maybe we’ll find it together as time goes on.
Conclusion
These are the technologies I noticed in the movie Metropolis. It was a fun watch. I think the most futuristic thing in metropolis is the robot the Maschinenmensch. I believe we have already surpassed the Maschinenmensch technology-wise, I mean get a humanoid robot and stick an LLM in it.
The cities have a lot of traffic, but not as well managed as that one scene in the movie depicts. We do have a lot of planes in the world. The tallest building in the world is Burj Khalifa at 828m. The tallest building in the world in 1927 was the Woolworth Building standing at 241m.
I wonder what the craziest thing for someone who traveled in time from 1927 to now would be - cuz there’s a lot, right? Also, who’s writing the next Metropolis? Someone needs to make Metropolis 2 in 2027 imagining 2126 asap.
There are a lot of aspects that people in 1927 couldn’t have predicted, but there are many things that they did! so let’s not stop dreaming. let’s imagine crazier futures and let’s keep advancing humanity to the next levels with deep scientific research. After all, we still haven’t even invented a lot of existing sci-fi.