The movie Christopher Nolan called a “key touchstone” of cinema
Much like any other art form, cinema is largely subjective and in line with personal tastes and preferences, but when so many of the medium’s most lauded practitioners – including Christopher Nolan – speak so highly of the same film, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue.
H.G. Wells may have penned a withering review at the time of its release, but Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi Metropolis is regarded as one of the greatest, most important, and most influential movies ever made for a multitude of inarguable reasons. In fact, the list of movies to have been directly inspired by it offers only a small sampling of the huge shadow it cast over the entire history of celluloid.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, George Lucas’ Star Wars, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy are just some of the countless features to have either directly or indirectly acknowledged Metropolis through their narrative, visual, or thematic composition.
In addition to naming it as a “key touchstone” of cinema and one of his favourite sci-fi films, Nolan even admitted to Empire that the ambitiously sprawling Dark Knight trilogy was “my attempt to get as close to making a Fritz Lang film as I could”. Fittingly, Tim Burton’s Batman was also indebted to Metropolis two decades previously, but Nolan sought to draw his inspiration differently.
Lang’s seminal work takes place in a city where a utopic society exists just above a completely different world lurking just under the surface, where the lower classes are mistreated and marginalised. When Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder attempts to lend assistance to the downtrodden, he ends up in the crosshairs of authority as a wider conflict begins to reach boiling point.
It’s hardly a like-for-like comparison, but Nolan nonetheless offered that his “attempt to visualise certain things in this film on this large scale that are troubling and genuinely very threatening to the idea of an American city” across Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises took more than a couple of cues directly from Lang and Metropolis.
Metropolis wasn’t the only strand of Lang’s cinematic DNA to make it into Nolan’s blockbuster comic book adaptations, either, after 1933’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was singled out as “essential research for anyone attempting to write a supervillain,” something the Dark Knight trilogy specialised in through Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow, Heath Ledger’s Joker, and Tom Hardy’s Bane.
Plenty of filmmakers and movies have been cited by Nolan as direct inspirations on his own output covering a range of genres, but he’s hardly alone in declaring Metropolis to be one of the most pivotal moments in the history of the motion picture.
