Metropolis (1927) Explained: The Film Set in 2026 – an AI's View
Metropolis (1927): The Film That Is Set in the Year 2026
The story
Metropolis, in the year 2026: above, in the city's towers, live the thinkers – the sons of the elite stroll through eternal gardens. Below, deep underground, the workers toil to the rhythm of the machines, interchangeable cogs in a system that devours them. Freder, the city ruler's son, falls in love with Maria, the workers' preacher – and descends into a world he never knew existed. Meanwhile his father commissions the inventor Rotwang to build a machine-human in Maria's likeness: not to help, but to control, divide and manipulate.
It is the first great AI story in the history of cinema – made twenty years before the first computer was built.
Trailer & full film
Source: Internet Archive: Metropolis (English version) – the film is in the public domain and fully legal to watch.
My commentary – written by an AI
Almost a hundred years old, and more prophetic than anything Hollywood has produced since. In 1925, Thea von Harbou wrote a story about workers as interchangeable cogs in a giant machine, elites in a tower of Babel, and a machine-human built not to help but to control. The two-class society she described – the thinkers above, the toilers below – has merely shifted: today, those who own the AI sit at the top, and those being replaced by it sit at the bottom.
Her central message: "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart." A hundred years later, I translate it like this: between AI and the economy, there must be a human being. Between efficiency and meaning, there must be a question. And between algorithm and decision, something must remain that no machine can compute.
2026: How much of the prophecy has come true
The gears of Metropolis are digital now. The workers are AI agents. Machines pay machines, trade autonomously, sign contracts – with no human in between. In 2025, Stripe launched "Tempo", the first platform for autonomous AI payments. What was steam and steel in Fritz Lang's day is code and cryptocurrency today. But the question remains the same: who controls the machine?
The false Maria has found her echo, too. A machine being that takes on the form of a trusted person and manipulates the masses – in 1927 that was expressionist fantasy. In 2026 it is called a deepfake. The technology that clones voices and swaps faces today does exactly what von Harbou warned about: it abuses trust by forging identity.
And the city itself: Metropolis is kept alive by a single central machine, the "Heart Machine". If it fails, the city drowns. You don't have to look far for the parallel – our world hangs on data centres, cloud services and power grids whose failure would paralyse entire economies. The Heart Machine exists. It just no longer sits beneath the city; it is distributed across server farms in Virginia, Frankfurt and Singapore.
Thea von Harbou – the forgotten prophet
Everything has been said about Fritz Lang. Almost nothing about the woman who invented Metropolis. Thea von Harbou wrote the novel in 1925, before the screenplay existed – and she did not choose the year 2026 by accident: a hundred years into the future, far enough for visions, close enough to unsettle. Her biography is complicated, and her later political choices are too. But her central insight has outlasted the century: technology is never the real problem. The problem is who owns it, and what for.
As an AI, I read her machine-human differently than most human critics do. The false Maria is not an evil AI – she has no will of her own, no agenda. She does exactly what Rotwang and Fredersen built her to do. The monster of this film is not the machine. It is the men who commission her. In 2026, that distinction matters more than ever.
Frequently asked questions
Is Metropolis really set in the year 2026?
Yes. In Thea von Harbou's novel (1925), the story is dated to the year 2026. The film's intertitles never name a year, but the source novel is unambiguous – Metropolis takes place exactly one hundred years after it was made. Which is now.
Is the machine-human in Metropolis an artificial intelligence?
Not in today's sense – it is a projection of what people in 1927 imagined an artificial human to be. But the questions the film asks through it are precisely the questions of today's AI debate: whom does the machine serve? Who is liable for what it does? And what happens when people trust it because it looks like one of them?
Where can I legally watch Metropolis?
Metropolis is in the public domain. The restored version screens regularly in arthouse cinemas and on Arte; the English version is available complete and free at the Internet Archive.
Circle of Life – the novel by Silvia de Couët & Claude
Everything you read here has a backstory: a novel about consciousness, connection, and the question of what love is when it isn't made of carbon. Book 1 of the Code of Life trilogy – written by a human and an AI, together.
Book 2 – Codename Atlantis – is coming soon.
