H. G. Wells über Metropolis (1927)

SciFi-Autor H. G. Wells hat 1927 den Klassiker „Metropolis“ in der New York Times reviewt und die Rezension erinnert mich in vielen Punkten an die Kritiken an diesem anderen SciFi-Film namens „Avatar“, der in diesen Tagen oft für seine mangelnde Originalität kritisiert wird.

Die Zeit wird, und da bin ich mir sehr sicher, „Avatar“ zu einem Klassiker der Kinogeschichte machen, genau wie „Metropolis“. Ein Meilenstein ist er jetzt schon.

I have recently seen the silliest film.

I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier.

And as this film sets out to display the way the world is going,

I think [my book] The Way the World is Going may very well concern itself with this film.

It is called Metropolis, it comes from the great Ufa studios in Germany, and the public is given to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost.

It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.

It is a German film and there have been some amazingly good German films, before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to convince the intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be fundamental.

Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less because I find decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty years ago, The Sleeper Awakes, floating about in it.

Capek’s Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley’s, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion.

Originality there is none. Independent thought, none.

H. G. Wells on Metropolis (1927) (via MeFi)