Metropolis is a movie about a city in the future called, you guessed it. Metropolis. It’s a city that is divided into two parts, one for blue collar workers, and another for regular people. Freder – the son of the commander of Metropolis someday decides to go down to the part of the city were blue collar workers reside. During their work, Freder is a witness to a terrible accident that alters his vision of reality. He comes to a conclusion that hard working people shouldn’t be excluded from the lives of elites of the city, as the workers are the ones who build the city.
Movie Metropolis shows an interesting vision of the future. First vision is the development of technology, which manifests as the city itself. Metropolis is a monumental, dense urban jungle full of skyscrapers. Roads in Metropolis are laid out in not only different directions, but also they appear at different elevations in the city. There are planes flying in between skyscrapers and people build robots. However this is not the most important vision in Metropolis. This movie touches on social inequality by showing a division into two groups – good and bad, or masters and workers. We can see a dystopian image of the future painted in this humongous city. The workers are pictured as kind of robots who, act, move, dress, and live the same lives. They perform a neck breaking labor and nobody cares about their fate. The other half of the city population, the elites, live in completely different world. Their lives are lavish and devoid of problems regular workers face.
Metropolis is a rather scary movie, especially to people who live in 21st century. Some obvious parallels can be spotted. The most obvious one for me is how wealth in our world is distributed, currently there are 80 people who own as much as the world’s poorest 3.6 Billion. Situation like that can lead to a major dystopian future, where oligarchs die in decadence and regular workers die in poverty. At least everybody dies in the end anyways. Yup, death makes us all equal.
