| Metropolis, 2001. Directed by Rin Taro.
Synopsis: The Ziggurat Corportation, under the direction of Duke Red has built a vast, well, ziggurat at the center of a vast future city. The underlying reason for this is as a means to seize control of the city and eventually the world, because inside the ziggurat is a weapon capable of manipulating the activity of the sun. With a flip of a switch, it is capable of creating an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out robot and computer systems worldwide. This serves two purposes: the overt pursuit of power and the clandestine destruction of the robots that serve this society as menial workers. Duke Red is the head of the robot-hating Marduk party, whose muscular arm is his son, Rock. But Duke Red's machinations are even deeper than this, because even more secretively, he has engaged a renegade scientist to create a perfect robot in the image of his dead daughter. Rock, who hates robots with all his being, discovers the plan and takes steps to destroy his father's plans. Meanwhile, the renegade scientist is being pursued by the law. Kenichi and his uncle have arrived from Japan, hot on his trail, and have been assigned a robotic guide to the city. Kenichi rescues the robot girl--he thinks she's real--when Rock destroys her creator's laboratory, and soon, he and his uncle are embroiled in the building upheaval that can only end in revolution, one way or the other.... Strange Corridors: This new Metropolis is not based on the Fritz Lang movie of the same name, although it shares with it two central images: the vast future city and the robot girl. The film is ostensibly based on Osamu Tezuka's manga (comic book) from 1949. Tezuka had not seen Lang's Metropolis before he created the comic book, but he HAD seen the the movie poster, from which he drew the images of the city in all its art-deco splendour, and the image of the robot girl. It is pure accident that Tezuka's comic book, like Lang's film, is about class warfare. Rin Taro has obviously seen Lang's Metropolis, and from the influence of the film and from the comic book, he has concocted an interesting hybrid. Tales of the City: The city is the central character of the film. Let's get that straight at the outset. The plot of the movie as a whole is an excuse to fill the screen with an eye-drugging vision of a future city. We're talking the city from Lang's film, Blade Runner, Batman, and the covers of Amazing Stories, all formulated into a single uber-vision. Taro goes one further, too, because having elaborately, lovingly constructed his future city, he spends the last ten minutes of the film destroying it. This destruction is scored with Ray Charles singing "I Can't Stop Loving You,:" which gives the whole thing a Kubrickian feel. As pure abstraction, the film is simply a joy to watch. Philosophical Conundrums: The central story of the film--the relationship between Kenichi and Tima, the robot girl, raises interesting questions about the nature of identity as posed through the instrument of artificial intelligence. Like Spielberg's A.I., Metropolis raises the question of whether the hardwired, programmed love of a machine for a human being is the real thing or whether it is monstrous. Like Spielberg, the film isn't equipped to deal with the issues it raises, although the use of the Ray Charles song is a wicked piece of irony unlike anything Spielberg included. The biggest stumbling block to a coherent philosophical standpoint is the narrative structure of the film. Like many Japanese cartoons, the plot and character motivations on display in this movie are, well, incomprehensible at best. In fact, I would urge anyone who watches the movie to completely ignore the philosophical underpinnings of the story. That way lies heartache. Metropolis works best as a pure abstraction. In a way, this is appropriate. After all, Lang's original film is none to coherent itself... |