The Influences of Star Wars: Metropolis

During my freshman year of college, I took a class called Imaginary Cities. It dealt with the city as portrayed on film. A neat concept, but the teacher made the class unbearable. For a multitude of reasons, it turned out to be the most unorganized mess of a class I’d ever taken. A prime example was our first major homework assignment. The class had to write a short paper in response to either Metropolis or Man with the Movie Camera. Now she didn’t inform the class of what kind of films these were or even what the point of watching them would be. Most of the students were not film students and they were going to go with Man with the Movie Camera because it was the shortest option. While that’s an important movie, I’d argue it’s neigh unwatchable for a modern audience and I was one of only a handful of people that opted for Metropolis. Sure the longest possible cut is 210 minutes, but those minutes just fly by. It remains one of the crowning achievements of early cinema and while it’s only notable for inspiring one specific aspect of Star Wars, I find more and more similarities every time I watch them.

The obvious take away is the design of C-3PO. Just looking at the poster for Metropolis, with the golden Maria robot staring into your soul, it’s blatantly what inspired Ralph McQuarrie’s original preproduction design for C-3PO. Those blank eyes that somehow convey so much emotion by remaining absolutely still translated directly from one decade to another, it’s that stare that convinced Anthony Daniels to take the part of the lovable droid in the first place. It’s an iconic design that certainly has let both robots stand the test of time.

Yet in Metropolis’ cityscapes I see much of the art-deco designs of Star Wars. The vast size of each movie not withstanding, all the parts that make up these massive designs all seem to be doing something. In a lot of films if you see a machine moving, you can probably figure out what its function is. It’s communicated simply to the audience because why have anything moving on screen if it’s not adding to the film? Yet in both Metropolis and Star Wars, the machines have tons of interworking parts that you’ll never figure out how they function. However, where this might distract in another film, it adds to the scope here. You figure all those parts are working together and have their own functions, it makes the entire set-up appear more complex, even though design wise it might have just been done to fill space. Lazy or not, both films clearly put some time and effort creating the effect. If Lucas took anything from Metropolis outside of his droids, it certainly was its scope.