Metropolis (2001)

Rintaro's Metropolis arrives dressed as a cyberpunk spectacle, all Art Deco towers and brass-lit machinery, but its true engine is a grievance. The city runs on robot labor, the human poor resent the machines for stealing their jobs, and Duke Red sits atop a ziggurat built from their misery. The film takes the side of the exploited without much ambiguity. Wealth here is not neutral. It is a weapon, and the plutocrat wielding it intends to rule the world with his dead daughter's likeness wired into a nuclear throne. The class anger is the plot, not a garnish on it. This is a wholly Japanese production with a Japanese cast and Japanese protagonists, and it never pauses to advertise that fact.

The android Tima is the emotional center, and she is handled with a restraint that will disappoint anyone hoping for a manifesto. She is a damsel who becomes a weapon, an object of male jealousy and male ambition, and the story never stops to interrogate what that means for her as a woman. The source manga gave us Mitchi, a flying android who changed sex at will. The film makes Tima permanently female, quietly closing a door the original had left open. The tragedy that survives is a girl asking who she is and receiving no answer.

The sermonizing is light. Robot rights and class war are folded into chases, explosions, and a collapsing tower, so the audience is never seated for a lecture. A faint allegorical hum of discrimination runs beneath the treatment of the machines, though the film frames it as labor conflict, not a lesson about prejudice. The result is a handsome, melancholy artifact from a time when a film could hold a political position without announcing it. We watched. We noted the architecture. We moved on.