Scene from the German science fiction film Metropolis (1927), by Fritz Lang
What Metropolis predicted, reflecting anxieties from 100 years ago, was alarming to say the least (and got some things right).
It is considered one of the all time (it inspired, in 2024, in an obvious way, the most recent work by Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis). Em 1927placed its action practically a century ahead of its release date: in the year… 2026.
Metropolis is a German science fiction film Fritz Langwhich here takes us on a hypnotically ordered journey into the future that has already arrived. It describes, in particular, the increasingly extreme inequalities that threaten to implode the very system that supports them.
Metropolis recently returned to public debate, not only because 2026 has arrived, and not as an architectural prophecy, but as a political and social diagnosis.
The film did not try to guess exactly what the buildings or transport of the future would be like — here presented as gigantic and flying or suspended, respectively.
The film proposed, instead, a question that continues to organize urban life: who benefits from progress and who pays its price? For Lang, technology always depends on who controls it.
The city in the film appears as a character. Its vertical structure — with a luxurious “above” and a subterranean “below” — is not just an aesthetic idea, but a visual thesis. At the top, skyscrapers rise, elevated roads, synchronized traffic, almost choreographed rhythms of circulation. A landscape of efficiency, modernity and power. Underground, there is another world: factories, machine rooms, work corridors and workers’ housing buried beneath the surface. The city works because the effort that fuels it is hidden.
The brightness and order of the urban center are sustained by an incessant, dehumanizing work system. The machines never stop And neither do the workers. The future, here, is not a place of rest: it is a place of continuous production.
The “perfect” city is often the city that has learned to hide the human cost of its perfection.
The year 2026, in the logic of the film, is defined by separation. The world above is that of the ruling elite, protected by comfort, vigilance and apparent serenity. Power is concentrated in an architect and city manager, who governs from a tower. The environment is controlled: gardens, clean lines, silence, distance. A world where the rich rarely have to look down.
The underground world contrasts in every way with that above. Workers move in synchronized shifts, replace each other like cogs in a gear and seem defined more by function than by identity. They have no time, autonomy, dignity. The idea that there can be material progress without human progress creates a tension that can explode at any time.
The city works because “the head” is separated “from the hands”, compares Isha Chaudhary in . The problem is that this separation creates blindness: decisions that affect millions are taken by a few, without contact with the consequences.
What “got right” about 2026?
When the vision of 1927 is compared with the present, it becomes clear that **Metropolis** is not relevant because it “guessed” the urban landscape.
Despite not getting the urban landscape we have today right, Metropolis identifies persistent mechanisms of modernity: concentration of power in cities; dependence on complex infrastructures; and invisible work behind systems that promise fluidity. Macabre realities, including modern slaveryfrom the consumer’s field of vision.
The film also captured how, if a large machine fails, the entire city shakes. In a 2026 where everything seems safe, interruptions in electrical networks, communications, automated services or digital platforms are enough to bring normal life to a halt and cause general panic within a few hours — the reader is currently remembering 2025, most likely.
