Metropolis This instant

Metropolis looks promising and exciting. I had the completely false notion before watching it that it was along the lines of Akira and Ghost in the Shell. It's considerably more cartoony than that, and yet it never seems to harbour any clear style, going from Astroboy cuteness to full-on anime. I don't think it's the masterpiece it has largely been hyped at, but it's far from a bad film either. It's definitely watchable and enjoyable, but it lacks a right-on identity. It tries to be a lot of things at once, and thus misses most of those marks.

The city is almost a character in itself; there are so many places we see in it, it's clear a lot of vision was behind this movie. The plot is a little too loose, though. It involves a cruel despot - Duke Red of the Marduks - seizing power in the midst of a rebellion by the oppressed lower class, who don't appreciate robots taking their jobs. Japanese detective Shunshaku Ban and his nephew Kenichi stumble into this plot and before long, Kenichi is on the run with a power-mad and robot-hating Marduk, Rock, out to get him and the girl robot Tima, whom Kenichi and his uncle save from a mad scientist's burning lab. There is a lot of dialogue and slow pan scenes that make everything more drawn-out than it really has to.

I can't decide what to make of this movie's vision. I can't tell what kind of artistic direction it was trying to take, cutesy or realistic. It often fuses the two, and not always to a pleasing result, sadly. The dialogue is often very stiff, too, and explains way too much to the audience than necessary. Three times in the film, we are told that robots can't leave their zones. Admittedly, a lot of the bad dialogue can be traced to the dubbing. The Japanese dialogue and the English dub quite differentiate on more than one occasion (this is evidenced by the English subtitles, even with the dub selected). Even if you're Russian, I would skip the Russian language track, as they didn't even bother to drown out the English dub before pasting it on top. Very sloppy work, as far as I'm concerned. But back to the film.

It has to be said that there are a lot of problems with the direction. The leader of the human rebellion talks about their poor living conditions. Then why not show it? A coup happens, and instead of an epic animated scene, we are shown a lot of old World War photos with a lot of special effects to give the impression of something happening. Instead of showing us what it really means to live in Metropolis, we're told everything. The viewer is a tourist, not an inhabitant of the film, which makes it feel very vague. The story's well thought-out, but the audience aren't drawn into it as well as they could have been. It doesn't make sense how the characters keep running into each other in this supposedly huge city, either, and it doesn't seem to terribly matter when characters are shot at. Another grave plot error is that the movie doesn't take a stand with or against robots, as to whether they're supposed to have personality or not. There is a 'tragic' death scene where a robot detective is shot, but because he has no personality, I can't tell if I'm supposed to feel sad or not.

Don't get me wrong, this movie has its good moments, but most of those occur in the last thirty minutes of the film, when Shunsaku Ban finally takes matters into his own hands, and stopping Duke Red becomes a matter of life and death... until Tima fulfils her "true destiny". The resolve is as vague as the character approach, but hey, it wasn't an astounding movie to begin with. Metropolis isn't astounding. It's a good film, but far from wonderful. An interesting cinematic experiment, it still needed its plot tightened up, because it all feels unnecessarily long. Most of all, though, it needed a clear artistic direction.Get more detail about Metropolis.