"... In its own time Metropolis was clearly more of an event than Kubrick's masterwork [2001] was in 1968 — an attempt to beat Hollywood at its own game that took well over a year to shoot, reportedly used up to 30,000 extras, and sabotaged the career of the most talented and prestigious producer of silent German cinema, Erich Pommer, who lost his job at UFA after the film went so far over budget it could never earn back its investment. The astonishing thing is that Metropolis seems much more relevant to current events than 2001, which assumed that the cold war would still be going on. Metropolis emphasizes not merely class divisions, but the emotional confusion underlying the creation of androids — also a major theme of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. 2001 dramatizes some of the same confusion, but the female robot in Metropolis, the false Maria, has much more in common with A.I.'s Gigolo Joe than she (or it) has with 2001's talking computer HAL (though someone ought to examine HAL's and Gigolo Joe's sexual ambiguities).
Not that the film was a flawless masterpiece in 1927. Indeed, Metropolis has one of the lamest endings of any great film I can think of, and this has survived intact in virtually all of the intermediate versions ... a lot of confusing plot points have led most critics to regard the film as irredeemably silly, even when they admire the breathtaking visuals. Lang's own disparagement of the film did nothing to discourage this verdict. But as the longer version shows, however naive the film's socialist notions might be — most of them are built around Freder's belated discovery that his father exploits workers — its post-Freudian contours and narrative conceits remain highly sophisticated.
... Peter Bogdanovich's extended interview with Lang in the 60s, in which Lang recalls an early version of the script that accounts for much of the medieval imagery: 'Mrs. von Harbou and I put in the script for Metropolis a battle between modern science and occultism, the science of the medieval ages. The magician was the evil behind all the things that happened: in one scene all the bridges were falling down, there were flames, and out of a Gothic church came all these ghosts and ghouls and beasties. And I said, 'No, I cannot do this.' Today I would do it, but in those days I did not have the courage. Slowly we cut out all the magic, and perhaps for that reason I had the feeling that Metropolis was patched together.'
... Occult imagery appears evocatively throughout Lang's career: caves, cellars, and catacombs with medieval or older associations as well as modern images of sex and power above ground. These visuals are particularly striking in Metropolis because of the way Lang ties them to all sorts of religious imagery, with many of the same associations. Some examples include the infernal image of workers at their machines underground, which conjures up Freder's Bosch-like vision of Moloch; the seven deadly sins, personified by seven statues inside the cathedral that forms a dialectic with Rotwang's cottage (old religion versus science as black magic); the Tower of Babel legend — recounted early in the film as an allegory about Metropolis, an allegory of an allegory — which proves to be even more central to the film's metaphysical as well as physical design. The collapse of occult science and modern science into each other leads to (and emerges from) an especially potent stylistic delirium when Freder, who knows nothing about the construction of the robot, experiences an oedipal trauma after stumbling upon his father lewdly embracing the false Maria. This causes a nervous breakdown, expressed through a radical montage sequence that's closer to experimental film than anything else in Lang's career — a riotous array of uncanny images and subliminal flashes, including direct scratches on the film emulsion that anticipate the work of Stan Brakhage by several decades. ..."
— Jonathan Rosenbaum: Unified Theory, Chicago Reader 2002

"... The paralyzed collective mind seemed to be talking [in Metropolis] with unusual clarity in its sleep. This is more than a metaphor: owing to a fortunate combiantion of receptivity and confusion, Lang's scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, was not only sensitive to all undercurrents of the time, but indiscriminately passed on whatever happened to haunt her imagination. Metropolis was so rich in subterranean content that, like contraband, had crossed the borders of consciousness without being questioned."
— Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton 1957

"... To dectect the beauty of the light and shapes in Metropolis, as in many other German films, we need to go beneath the surface. ... To describe the mass of inhabitants in the underground town in Metropolis Lang used Expressionistic stylization to great effect: impersonal, hunched, servile, spiritless, servile beings dressed in costumes of no known historical period ... In Metropolis, as in all his films, Lang handles lighting admirably: the futuristic city appears as a superb pyramidal accumulation of shimmering sky-scrapers. By means of trick shots and hyper-elaborate lighting, illuminated windows and stretches of dark wall stand out like the white and black squares of a chess-board; the light seems to explode, spreading a luminous mist, falling as iridiscent rain. ... Light can even create the impression of sound: the scream of the factory whistle is represented by a shriek of light from four spotlights."
— Lotte H. Eisner: The Haunted Screen. Expressionism in German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford 1973

"... Einige Kühnheiten, die am Anfang der Erfindung von Metropolis standen, nahm Lang schon im Drehbuch wieder zurück. 'Ich habe in meinem Leben in so viele Dinge hineingerochen, so auch in die Magie. Frau von Harbou und ich hatten in das Drehbuch zu Metropolis einen Kampf zwischen moderner Wissenschaft und Okkultismus, der Wissenschaft des Mittelalterst hineingeschrieben. Der Magier war das Böse hinter allen Geschehnissen: in einer Szene stürzten die Brücken ein, sie waren Flammen, und aus einer gotischen Kathedrale kamen all diese Geister und Gespenster und Ungeheuer. Ich sagte: Nein, das geht unmöglich. Heute würde ichs machen, aber damals hatte ich nicht den Mut. Nach und nach schnitten wir die ganze Magie heraus, und vielleicht hatte ich deshalb den Eindruck, daß Metropolis zusammengeflickt ist ... Die Hauptthese war von Frau von Harbou, aber ich bin wenigstens zu fünfzig Prozent verantwortlich, weil ich den Film gemacht habe. Ich war damals nicht so politisch bewußt wie ich es heute bin. Man kann keinen gesellschaftlich bewußten Film machen, indem man sagt, der Mittler zwischen Hand und Hirn sei das Herz - ich meine, das ist ein Märchen - wirklich. Aber ich interessierte mich für Maschinen.'
Feuerzauber, Okkultismus und Gespenster hätten Metropolis der Nähe zu anderen Zukunftsentwürfen entrückt, die ihn jetzt weitgehend als reaktionären Thesenfilm erscheinen laßt. Sie hatten deutlicher werden lassen, daß Zukunftiges hier so wenig spekulativ behandelt wird wie Vergangenes in den Nibelungen. ... Ausdruck des fragmentierten Raum- und Zeitempfindens des modernen Städters sind Langs Filme immer, die Western nicht ausgenommen. Der Kampf zwischen mittelalterlicher und moderner Wissenschaft hätte der sozialen Etagenkonstruktion vielleicht eine historische eingezogen: das Mittelalter als das Verdrängte des aufgeklärten Bewußtseins, wie das Proletariat das gesellschaftlich Verdrängte der Bürgerherrschaft ist. Das mehrstöckige Architekturmodell — mit den vergessenen Katakomben, in denen die Arbeiter, die Maulwürfe der Revolution, sich heimlich treffen, an der Basis und den mondänen Vergnügungsparks der leisure class in den Wolken — wäre dann deutlicher nicht nur als Raum—, sondern auch als Zeit-Maschine zu sehen."
— Frieda Grafe, Enno Patalas: Fritz Lang. München 1987, S. 94-96

Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Metropolis (1926) - Deutsche Filmgeschichte by Thomas Staedeli

The Reconstruction of Metropolis