The whole class-struggle motif is hopelessly dated. McDonald’s or Walmart are a workers’ paradise compared to the society depicted in Metropolis. I don’t see how it could be remade.
I’m with you Menocchio. I like Metropolis but I recognize that a modern remake has potential and it certainly won’t detract from the original. It’s not like the original is The Maltese Falcon where a remake is going to make it be completely forgotten.
Of course I fully expect a disaster. Let’s not be silly, if it gets made it will be a modern CGI-fest and rather likely to be changed to a generic action film. But there’s no reason that it has to be.
Wow, that’s a parade of arrogance worthy of the pit. I take it you’ve been there for such a profound characterization?
According to this cite, The Soviet production of “War and Peace” comes in at $ 500 million adjusted US Dollars, making it the most expensive film ever made.
Cartooniverse
Crikey! I couldn’t evenread a 75 cent copy. Heck, I like reading the Russians (not a euphemism), but couldn’t master that one (still not a… never mind)
Depends on which “Alexander”…if they had the fellow who did Reign: The Conquerer do it, it might have a chance. (Everyone would look like an anorexic spider-monkey in a gimp suit, but it’d be cleverly surrealistic enough.)
Metropolis became one of my favorite daydreams when I picked up the VHS form the Cult section some 13-4? years ago. I’ve lomg wanted to remix it with Stereolab rather than Vangelis as the soundtrack. this year I snagged an ebay copy, not widescreen for concrete’s sake, that I couldn’t finish.
So: anyone know a nice’print’ that i could obtain (serious description required my version is 1/5 cut off) and tell me how to add my own soundtrack. i am not against the original being redone but i hold out little hope. 500 remixes of the new and original and random NIKE ads are probably the best bet.
I respectfully add my own “not exactly”. As my link and Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics mention, Tezuka did state that when he created the manga, he’d only heard the title of the 1926 film and seen a picture of the female robot. However, for the animated film, I believe more borrowed imagery and themes were added (and Wikipedia seems to agree).
The problem with that claim (which has been in the Guinness Book of Records) is that the Russian War and Peace is actually four features released in 1965, 1966, and 1967. Like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings it was filmed at one time, but released as separate features. The English-language theatrical release edited the four features together, and shortened it somewhat.
From what I understand this is as close as we’ll ever get to Fritz Lang’s original vision.
Metropolis was in the public domain for many years, during which time numerous video versions have been released, almost all crap with a few shinning gems scattered around. It no longer is public domain and won’t be again until 2022 (four years short of when the film is set), so, for the moment, things have stagnated and you’re only left with two options.
A bit of history first: The premiere version is the holy grail everyone searches for. From it, two shorter cuts were made: one for continued showings in Germany, and another for release in the US. The US version was a butchery, cutting its length nearly in half, with the scenes rearranged and the dialogue rewritten into an entirely different story that was thought to be more palatable to American audiences. Several prints of this version still exists, and the majority of the public domain video releases are drawn from it. The German short version didn’t significantly change the story, but did drop some subplots and do some minor rewriting to explain away the gaps. It’s largely lost, with only scattered clips surviving today.
In 1986, the original script and sheet music from the score composed for the premiere (which included notes as to what was happening on screen for the orchestra to stay in-sync) had been found and so the first attempt to reconstruct the film using this new information was made. With only the American version to work with, the scenes were disassembled and put back into premiere version order, new intertitles created following the original story, and cards inserted to mark where footage is missing. The better public domain video releases are based on this reconstructed print.
In 1998, the copyright on Metropolis was restored (making the legality of the previous video and film releases uncertain, and public exhibition of them even more so). The Murnau-Stiftung, now with a monopoly on the film, began their reconstruction. In 2002, it was complete. The bulk is from the same American release prints all the others were based on, but to it, they’ve added all the extant clips from the German short version that could be found, bringing their reconstruction up to just a half-hour short of the premiere version (about a third more intact than the 1986 reconstruction). Unless a complete premiere print is ever found (highly unlikely, since there was only one), this reconstruction will be as close as we will ever get to it. It’s been released on DVD twice, once from Kino in region 1, and again from Eureka in region 2.
Those are your two options. The Murnau-Stiftung reconstruction and restoration is superb. The picture looks as clean and crisp as it must have in 1927, with full orchestral accompaniment using the premiere’s score (slightly adapted, of course, since we’re still missing some scenes). However, the Kino DVD suffers from the same PAL->NTSC conversion artifacts that nearly all of Kino’s videos exhibit. If you have an all-region DVD player and a multisystem TV, the Eureka Masters of Cinema version would be my preference. Again, it’s mastered from the exact same source as Kino’s, but since it is PAL, there’s been no conversion and the picture remains clean. They’ve also retained the original German intertitles (gleaned from the script), subtitled in English, rather than Kino, which has replaced them with English-only intertitles.
I know I’ve rarely let go of mine.
Hey, if bits have been lost, but they have the original script…maybe they can just do a frame-for-frame recreation of the film, with CGI, but put the missing scenes back in?
[snort, snicker] Yeah, they can even keep it as a silent!
FWIW I think the version Dusty is talking about is the one that turns up from time to time on TCM. I know when I watched it a few years ago from there they talked a bit about that restoration process.
If this gets made, we can hope to see remakes of all those Depression-era films of hobos riding the tracks (who are really educated guys with hearts of gold). They would fit today’s world just as well.
I have it on good authority that the robot will be played by a CGI naked Angelina Jolie.
I could kind of see it being remade as a deco animated silent film but otherwise, nah.
I saw the Giorgio Morodor version in the mid 80s with the rock soundtrack and colorization before I saw a normal print. I’d actually like to see that one again, just so I can tell if I’d actually like it or not. I’m thinking not, based on my memories at the time.
Maybe Michael Bay can direct the movie and have the robot pee on John Turturro. :rolleyes:
Menocchio makes some good points about how a remake of Metropolis could be timely and well-done, but I’m hesitant. Old and damaged as the movie is, I found Metropolis really stunning, and I think of the film almost every day when I look up at the Empire State Building.
I’d rather see something animated that will compete less directly with what Lang did. I’ll see it anyway if it looks good, obviously, but for whatever reason, the age of a movie usually doesn’t get in the way of my enjoyment.
I’ve got a opy of this. I loved it when I saw it. It was the clearest image I’d cseen of the film, and the opening title animation (which was too washed out on every version I’d seen previously) blew me away. Since I have no musical taste, I even liked the soundtrack. (A lot of theaters ran it silent, with a different score, or even a live band or orchestra, I understand. Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston did this). I later saw the Kino video version, which is struck from the same print, but Moroder had also dug up some additional footage from elsewhere, so the Moroder print is actually more complete.
Curiously, though, Moroder’s version clocks in at about 89 minutes, vs. 90 for most of the other versions I’ve seen. He accomplished this by actually cutting parts of the film – mostly repetitive parts of scenes. I compared his version with others on a section-by-section basis to discover and confirm this.
The recent restoration is, however, far more complete and of better quality. In comparing scenes, it’s obvious that the image quality of the newest version is far better than even the Moroder version. There’s a featurette on the newly restored version that tells you how they did it, so it’s not surprising – they used lots of tricks, including wetting the film to eliminate scratches, and using computer imaging to correct and complete damaged frames and the like.
If you want to compare versions, look at the earliest scenes in Frederson’s office. There’s a big “Stock Ticker” Board in the background, where several columns of white numbers on black backgrounds are slowly “falling” from the top of the room (It looks eerily like a modern LED Stock “Ticker” readout – the futurology of the film is REALLY good). In the washed-out version that was available for a long time you can’t even make out that these are numbers. You might not even realize that there is anything at all back there, or you might see moving blobs. On Moroder’s or the old Kino version, you can tell they’re numbers, although they seem out of focus, and you can’t necessarily read them. On the newest restoration, they’re sharp and easily readable.
Odd coincidence: I saw this last weekend at a local repertory house. Yep, all four parts, complete and uncut (at least as uncut as is available), on the big screen. Quite a marathon.
And Walloon’s nitpick about title organization aside, every one of those $500 million dollars is on the screen. It’s a “holy cow” movie from beginning to end.