Monsters Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Monsters - Essay Example The film assumes that artificial life creatures will be more female oriented than male and that technology will wrap itself around this premise. Keywords: dystopia, sexuality, technology, futuristic, robotic double, strata of society, freedom and equality, maschinenmensch, castration anxiety, love story, apathy, vamp, seven deadly sins, purge, male domination. The author of Metropolis, Thea Gabriele von Harbou (1888  Ã¢â‚¬â€œ1954), was the wife of film director and script writer, Fritz Lang (1890-1976), from 1922 till 1933. Von Harbou took two years to write what she started as a book in 1922, but converted into a screenplay in 1924. It did surface as a book also, in 1926. Forrest J. Ackerman (1916-2008), one of the foremost Science Fiction writers of the past century and the creator of the term ‘sci-fi’ (www.mania.com), felt that the book was, by the standards prevailing then, a shade melodramatic, had hints of propaganda, with the themes propounded somewhat naà ¯ve. Still, the novel was a remarkably powerful and forward-thinking dystopia with a striking denouement (ibid). Set in 2026 (www.answers.com), the scene is the futuristic sixty million strong megacity of Metropolis (www.moria.co.nz). In a ‘rich boy meets poor girl’ story, the boy falls in love with her, to the disappointment of his influential father. The boy begs his father to ameliorate the lot of the downtrodden. The villainous father does the opposite and seeks help from the modern-day Merlin, the mad scientist Rotwang, who creates a robotic double of the girl, devoid of empathy, who incites the oppressed to rebel and decimate the city (ibid), thereby forcing a reconciliation of each individual’s true worth. The 1924 script was screened in 1927, as the most expensive film ever made then, even though it was a silent film (www.moria.co.nz). Blazena Urgosà ­kovà ¡, a well-known film critic of that era,