10/12 Questions

• I chose to watch Metropolis because it was the one film out of the three that I had heard of, and had been meaning to watch the movie as it was. I felt I could kill two birds with one stone.
• The film begins in the upper class area of the titular city. Freder, the son of the ruler of the city, is minding his own business when he spots a woman who is showing Children of the lower class how his class lives. He is instantly smitten and wants to find her. He follows her down to the workers' area of Metropolis and sees one of the giant machines explode.
  When Freder tells his father about the explosion, and Grot, the head of the workers finds a bunch of plans in the pockets of dead workers, his father fires Josaphat, his right-hand man. Seeing this, Freder runs off. His father gets suspicious and sends a character named "The Thin Man' to follow him.
  Freder's father then finds a man named Rotwang to help him decode plans and finds out about a robot that Rotwang had been building to resurrect Hel, the woman he used to love. Meanwhile, Freder finds the woman again, and learns she is a prophet of sorts named Maria, who preaches that one day someone will come who can help the poor class communicate their problems to the rich class. Freder knows that it is him. Rotwang and Freder's father eavesdrop and then decide to make the robot's likeness into that of Maria's so that Freder's father can destroy the potentially budding rebellion. That robot then goes to convince all of the people to rise up, which will eventually lead to their demise.
  The workers rush to destroy the machines where they had been working, leaving behind their children. When the machines are destroyed, much at the dismay of Grot, their living quarters are slowly flooded, endangering the lives of the children. Fortunately, Freder and Maria manage to save the children and once everything is fixed, Freder becomes the man who can help both classes get along, stating that the mediator between head and hands must be the heart.
• This film is incredible. From design, story, and some special effects, you can see how it has influenced genres of movie and literature. A lot of the plot points and story elements in this movie are also in so many other dystopian works of film and literature. The highly stylized machines clearly inspired the Star Wars franchise (notably C-3PO and the planet Coruscant, which is a planet that is one giant city, a Metropolis of its own right), as well as many other futuristic, steampunk, and expressionist movies seen for the nearly 90 years since its initial release. You can clearly see its effect in countless movies and books that pay homage to it, much more than just the ones I mentioned.
• I think that this is a reflection on the Weimar republic in the sense that the governing class and the working class really were as separated from each other as in that movie. It was more or less begging for its own "heart" to come between the "hands" of the working class and the "Head" that was the government of the Weimar republic.
• While looking into the "Notes on Metropolis" reading, I read that the film may have helped Hitler out, as he probably saw himself getting the power he wanted by putting himself in Freder's role. I thought that that made a lot of sense, and that people could be easily convinced that he was the "heart."