6. "Metropolis" (1927) by German director Fritz Lang was cited as the most influential science fiction film of all time. Describe the film.

The film Metropolis was born during the era of German expressionism during the 1920s.  The film was united by highly stylized visuals, strange asymmetrical camera angles, atmospheric lighting and harsh contrasts between dark and light. Shadows and silhouettes were an important feature of expressionism, to the extent that they were actually painted on to the sets.

The film was written by Lang and his wife Thea Von Harbou.   Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia, and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's ruler, and Maria to overcome the vast gulf separating the classist nature of their city.

The movie was filmed in 1925, at a cost of approximately five million Reichsmarks. The film was met with a mixed response upon its initial release, with many critics praising its technical achievements while deriding its simplistic and naive storyline.

The movie portrays the luxurious, futuristic, Art Deco city of 2026 - an industrial world with skyscrapers and bridges, was divided into an upper, elite, privileged class of powerful industrialists and a subterranean, nameless, oppressed and exploited, ant-like worker class. It has been cited that the film had caused thousands of extras employed, and crude but effective cinematographic special effects achieved many of the film's unique hallucinatory imagery and dreamlike visions.

The film message exhibits the influence of historical events occurring during its time frame of the Industrial Revolution, including a time of economic misery and the rise of fascism in a pre-Hitler Weimar Republic Germany following the war, the rise of the American labor movement and unions during the 1920s due to oppressive working conditions, muckraking journalists, the contrast of poverty with the upper-crust classes of the Roaring 20s, the rise of immigration into the US and exploitation of workers, labor strife (Capital or management vs. Labor), and the 1917 communist uprising in the Soviet Union. It also reflects the on-going struggle between light and dark, good and evil, and the dark ages versus modern science.