Metropolis (Ufa, 1927, dir. Fritz Lang) exhibits an ambivalent, even paradoxical stance towards industrial modernity, which over the past century has profoundly resonated with audiences. The film's look has shaped science fiction films, music videos, video games, comics, and graphic novels. Its influence can be seen in the work of filmmakers and pop culture luminaries from Tim Burton and Ridley Scott to George Lucas and Denis Villeneuve, from Osamu Tezuka and Freddie Mercury to Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. Indeed, Metropolis has fashioned the way we imagine the future.

Set in a repressive urban dystopia that collapses following a humancaused disaster, Metropolis articulates fundamental fears about industrial modernity. The film paints a picture of the future in which nurturing natural environments have disappeared and technology permeates all aspects of life. As people have become enslaved by god-like machines, the fusion of human and apparatus seems inevitable. Despite these horrific premonitions, however, Metropolis is far from taking a purely technophobic stance as it flaunts technology's splendour, magnetism, and visionary power. By confronting the audience with monstrous machines and hostile high-tech environments of hypnotic grandeur, Metropolis simultaneously characterizes the future as astonishing and dreadful. This apparent contradiction can be best understood in terms of a “technological sublime.” The concept builds on theories by eighteenth-century philosophers like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller, who conceived of objects that exceed our sensory capacities and result in conflicting emotions of pleasure and pain as “sublime.”