Parufamet released Metropolis on 10 January 1927 in Germany.

It is a great film. Everyone should see it. It’s hard to believe it is almost a hundred years old. It looks great. And the special effects are awesome.

The film’s content is what most impresses me today. It takes on the unjust class divide in society. And sure, it also shows workers as fools. But it doesn’t do one thing that is all too common in modern films. It doesn’t present a bunch of demigods as the only characters worth caring about. And it doesn’t present the implicit message that humans are useless swine who should be ruled by their betters.

I’m thinking of superhero films, of course. Remember when they were fun?! Thor is refreshing given that he is explicitly a god. All the rest are just implicitly gods. The worst, of course, is Iron Man. That’s what a great nation needs! Bow down to your tech billionaire lords!

I’m not suggesting that these films cause people to be submissive to power. It’s the other way around. They are submissive to power. So they love entertainment that tells them they are worthless. And that’s not what happens in Metropolis. (But as I noted, it has problems. Otherwise, Joseph Goebbels wouldn’t have liked it so much.)

The film went into the public domain three years ago. And that’s all you need to know about copyright law. Because by any reasonable definition, Metropolis entered the public domain in the early 1930s. But think about this. It is 2026. We are just now starting to see a notable number of sound films fall into the public domain. It’s madness.

But we can enjoy what we have.

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Metropolis (1927) poster via Wikipedia. It is in the public domain.