Science-fiction film in the context of "Fritz Lang"

Wolfgang Petersen (14 March 1941 – 12 August 2022) was a German film and television director, screenwriter and producer. His international breakthrough was the war film Das Boot (1981), which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. He subsequently directed the blockbuster fantasy film The NeverEnding Story (1984), based on the 1979 novel of the same name.

After moving to the United States in the mid-1980s, Petersen directed his first American production, the science-fiction film Enemy Mine (1985). He directed a variety of major studio productions through the mid-2000s, including In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004) and Poseidon (2006).

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction silent film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, based on von Harbou's 1925 novel of the same name (which was intentionally written as a treatment). It stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studio for Universum Film A.G. (UFA). Metropolis is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction film, being among the first feature-length ones of that genre. Filming took place over 17 months in 1925–26 at a cost of more than five million Reichsmarks, or the equivalent of about €21 million.

Made in Germany during the Weimar period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes in their city and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the city master. The film's message is encompassed in the final inter-title: "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart".