I blame the Independence Day holiday for not seeing this fantastically good news sooner: most of the lost footage of Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece Metropolis has been found in Argentina. For decades, audiences have had to make do with the cut down version that distributers produced to make the film more accessible (Lang's original version ran about three-and-a-half hours long.) Unfortunately, some things about the movie don't really make sense in the distributors version. Devotees helped by creating versions with title cards sprinkled throughout that told viewers the best guess as to what happened in the deleted scenes, but now guesses can be replaced with the truth of Lang's vision. Metropolis spins a tale of class warfare in a futuristic city that was the forerunner of Judge Dredd's Megacity One, Bladrunner's Los Angeles, DC Comic's Gotham, and many other science fiction cities. Metropolis is an important movie, not least for creating the character of Maria, a beautiful robot that can be considered the direct ancestor of Battlestar Galactica's Six. But the movie's most significant influence was on real world architecture: Lang was inspired by the rash of skyscrapers going up in places like New York City, and extrapolated the new skylines for his sets. In turn, architects, planners and futurists were inspired by his movie and brought elements of Lang's fictional city into designs for real urban developments in a classic feedback loop between science fiction and science fact.
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