So this is another one of those movies that probably a lot of you have seen, because Fritz Lang’s silent SF epic is one of those classic movies with piles of geek cred. It’s actually weird that I’ve never seen it — I blame my one-time hatred of silent films, and my mistaken perception that this was a movie with cool visuals but a nonsensical/”trippy” story.

Because it’s not that at all. The story is actually incredibly compelling, and this is one of the few movies to get my coveted “I watched it basically straight through without even pausing it for internetting” award, which is particularly notable because it’s 2.5 hours.

Of course, it occurs to me that maybe that 2.5 hour length is related to the reason I had the impression it didn’t have a clear story: Because up until recently, it wasn’t 2.5 hours and its story was very different. While there’ve been a bunch of different versions of this (including one from the ’80s with a pop soundtrack with like Freddie Mercury and Pat Benatar, which I’m sure was insufferably awful), a whole shit-ton of the movie was lost for a long time, and only rediscovered in Argentina and New Zealand in 2008; so this version, the 2010 “Complete” release, is the first version with all that footage restored.

And so the story is this tale of an oppressed worker class in a mechanized future city, who are following an underground preacher of messianic salvation prophecy. But then due to various machinations by the ruling elites, a robot takes her place and begins preaching violence, and the workers rise up and destroy the machines (and therefore their own city). It’s a wildly political story, and interpreting it in the proper context needs you to remember that it’s a movie that came out in 1927, so it’s only five years after the end of the Russian Civil War kicked off by the Bolshevik Revolution; and of course the Weimar Republic in which Lang filmed it was itself relatively new (and shortly to meet its end).

The way the story is told, as this kind of timeless SF fable, it’s easy to apply it to the current day — the gig economy! Occupy Wall Street! etc. — and you might find it to be insufficiently revolutionary (or too revolutionary) in that application, but I suspect it’s nearly impossible to put ourselves into the mindset that audiences of the time would have been in.

(The audiences at the time were probably a lot cooler with the rampant sexism, too: Women in utopia are basically nymphs who are rewards for the men; the main female character is basically a virgin saint and when they replace her with the robot version, the first thing they make it do is a striptease for a leering audience.)

Anyway, after all this, I feel like I’ve buried the lede here, which is: This is a super-brilliant movie. It is visually stunning, not just for a movie from 1927, but for a movie from literally any time period whatsoever. Like, even leaving aside the phenomenal design — which you shouldn’t, it’s just so astonishing — the effects shots themselves look cheese-free in a way that you rarely see even these days. Immediately from the title shot, the movie is jaw-dropping and compelling and it’s an absolute must-see. I’m seriously running out of superlatives here; if you haven’t seen it, you really really should. A++++++++++++++ except with more pluses.