GIORGIO MORODER PRESENTS METROPOLIS Blu-ray Review

Fritz Lang's Metropolis has undergone a huge resurgence in the last 3 years.  Ever since the discovery of more than twenty minutes of lost footage was discovered in South America, interest in the film has skyrocketed.  What was once a film mainly adored by film geeks has now become the universally acclaimed and recognized masterpiece that it should always have been. The staggering amount of press surrounding the rediscovery has led to repertory screenings around the world and interest in all things Metropolis.  One of those things is the avant garde interpretation made by composer Giorgio Moroder in the early '80s.  This version of the film has long been unavailable on legitimate home video, but Kino Lorber have managed to wrangle the surely sticky rights situation and release Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis on Blu-ray and DVD. This version of the film doesn't stack up to the Complete Metropolis either in scope or in image quality, but it is a vision worth preserving, and Kino have done a fine job with it.

In 1984, Academy Award®-winning composer Giorgio Moroder (Midnight Express, Flashdance) introduced Fritz Lang's science fiction epic METROPOLIS to a new generation of moviegoers. Working in collaboration with film archives around the world, he supervised a special reconstruction of the film, with color tinting, fewer inter-titles, and newly restored footage. A pioneer in the field of digital music, Moroder backed this special edition with a throbbing new score, punctuated with pop songs from some of the biggest stars of the early MTV era: Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler, Loverboy, and others. Unavailable on home video for more than two decades, Kino Classics is now proud to revive the 1984 edition of METROPOLIS, an historic achievement in film restoration, and a dramatic vehicle for the visionary music of Giorgio Moroder.

I'm not going to explain Metropolis to you, the film has been around for over eighty years, and a plot synopsis seems unnecessary. It is the first truly universal science fiction masterpiece. Lang's vision of a dystopian future stands up today, and the special effects on display are hugely impressive considering the film's age. The expressionist tableaux that pepper the film are superb, and the entire visual experience is almost overwhelming.  Moroder saw something in Metropolis, and decided to try to make the film more contemporary.

Moroder's Metropolis is not the same as Lang's.  He did painstaking research to find all of the best elements and all of the missing footage he could, but ultimately, as we now know, he came up about an hour short.  Some of the missing footage he attempted to recreate via montage, and some he just explains away via intertitles. Another step he took was to remove the original intertitles and instead subtitle the film, which is a very odd experience if one is used to watching silent films. These two adjustments alone make up for much of the decreased run time, but there was still a lot left out that Moroder couldn't have known about.

In addition to the adjustments in content and speculative editing, there are visual changes to Moroder's version.  Giorgio Moroder took inspiration from a color tinted print he found and endeavored to color tint the entire film.  In addition, he tinted and rotoscoped several of the sequences in Rotwang's lab to make them more visually dynamic. The most unusual visual adaptation in my mind is the introduction of moving backgrounds in the Babel sequence. It all comes off very strange.  The tinting and motion work are pretty rudimentary, as even in 1984, digital effects weren't very prevalent. The results are sort of uneven, but interesting to watch.

The most audacious/sacrilegious alteration made by Moroder was the soundtrack.  Rather than attempting to recreate a score as it would have been heard in 1927, he rescored the film with his own electronic music as well as pop-rock pieces from some of the biggest names in pop music of 1984, including Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler, Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, Billy Squier, and others.  The result is often disconcerting, and at times almost laughable, but strangely endearing.

Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis is remembered both as a well-intentioned early attempt at modern film reconstruction and as blasphemy.  I think my opinion is somewhere in the middle.  It isn't great, but it is something worth saving, and anything worth doing is worth doing well, and for that I give due credit to Kino.

The Disc:

Kino's Blu-ray of Moroder's Metropolis is a strange case.  They released The Complete Metropolis about a year ago in a digitally restored edition, but made the conscious choice with Moroder's version not to use the restored footage.  The result is that Metropolis looks pretty rough, but accurate to how it would have looked when he started screening it 26 years ago. The image looks as true to it's archival material as we can expect.  The sound is another matter, Kino have included both DTS-HD MA 5.1 and an LPCM 2.0 track, I can say with confidence that the 5.1 track is definitely better balanced. The music really comes to life, and the edition of a low end channel makes a ton of difference.  This is a truly well done surround remix.

There are two extras on this Blu-ray disc, and only one of them is really worth watching.  The seventeen minute documentary, The Fading Image, takes an early look at film preservation with a specific focus on Moroder's quest for Metropolis.  It is actually pretty interesting and manages to squeeze in a lot of quality information in a short period, I like it a lot.  Kino rounds out the package with a gallery of photos and the original trailer for Moroder's restoration.

Kino's Blu-ray of Moroder's Metropolis is a great preservation of an interesting and not inconsequential piece of Metropolis history. What you get out of it will depend on you, but I will say that the film feels different in this iteration, and it certainly worth checking out.