Think back to all the science fiction films you have watched over the decades. Star Wars. 2001: A Space Odyssey. E.T. Good company, every one of them.
Now imagine a movie older than all of them, older, in fact, than sound in film, sitting at the very top of the heap.
That is exactly where Metropolis landed. The entertainment publication Collider released a ranked list of the 60 best sci-fi movies of all time, and the 1927 German silent film took the number one spot.
Metropolis was directed by Fritz Lang and adapted from a 1925 novel written by his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay. The film’s themes, like classism and the exploitation of working people, clearly still resonate. It holds a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The rest of the top five made for impressive company. Rounding out the list just below Metropolis were Blade Runner from 1982, 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968, Alien from 1979, and Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back from 1980.
Other films on the list included E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from 1982, Back to the Future from 1985, WALL-E from 2008, Mad Max: Fury Road from 2015, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from 2004, Ex Machina from 2013, and Everything Everywhere All at Once from 2022.
Here is the twist. Fritz Lang himself was not so sure the film deserved its legendary status, at least not at first.
In a 1971 interview, Lang admitted that after finishing Metropolis, he did not like it. He felt parts of it were too simplistic, and he disagreed with its central message. Von Harbou had written that the bridge between the powerful and the working class should be the human heart. Lang thought that was too easy an answer.
“I thought that cannot be the answer to problems in society,” he said.
But Lang changed his mind. After moving to the United States and talking with younger Americans about their feelings toward institutions and technology, he kept hearing the same word come up: heart.
“When you talk to today’s youth and ask them what they think is missing… then all of them say ‘the heart,’ which makes me wonder, maybe Harbou was 100 percent right after all,” Lang said.
Lang died in 1976 at age 85. He and von Harbou had divorced in 1933. But the film they made together nearly a century ago is still being talked about and now ranked first among the greatest science fiction movies ever made.
Not bad for a silent picture from 1927.
