Critics found it visually beautiful and powerful – the film's art direction by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht draws influence from opera, Bauhaus, Cubist, and Futurist design,[8] along with touches of the Gothic in the scenes in the catacombs, the cathedral and Rotwang's house[9] – and lauded its complex special effects, but accused its story of being naive.

In 1984, Italian music producer Giorgio Moroder released a truncated version with a soundtrack by rock artists including Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant.

[14] In the future, wealthy industrialists and business magnates and their top employees reign over the city of Metropolis from colossal skyscrapers, while underground-dwelling workers toil to operate the great machines that power it.

His son, Freder, idles away his time at sports and in a pleasure garden, but is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Maria, who has brought a group of workers' children to witness the lifestyle of their rich "brothers".

He had visited New York City for the first time and remarked "I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis,"[18] although in actuality Lang and Harbou had been at work on the idea for over a year.

[2] Describing his first impressions of the city, Lang said that "the buildings seemed to be a vertical sail, scintillating and very light, a luxurious backdrop, suspended in the dark sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize".

[19] He added "The sight of Neuyork [sic] alone should be enough to turn this beacon of beauty into the center of a film..."[18] The appearance of the city in Metropolis is strongly informed by the Art Deco movement; however, it also incorporates elements from other traditions.

[29] Brigitte Helm (Maria) had been given a screen test by Lang after he met her on the set of Die Nibelungen, but would make her feature film debut with Metropolis.

For the scene where the workers' city was flooded, Helm and 500 children from the poorest districts of Berlin had to work for 14 days in a pool of water that Lang intentionally kept at a low temperature.

[30][31] Helm recalled her experiences of shooting the film in a contemporary interview, saying that "the night shots lasted three weeks, and even if they did lead to the greatest dramatic moments—even if we did follow Fritz Lang's directions as though in a trance, enthusiastic and enraptured at the same time—I can't forget the incredible strain that they put us under.

[40] Nestled within the original score were quotations of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle's "La Marseillaise" and the traditional "Dies Irae", the latter of which was matched to the film's apocalyptic imagery.

[41] In 2007, Huppertz's score was also played live by the VCS Radio Symphony, which accompanied the restored version of the film at Brenden Theatres in Vacaville, California.

[42] The score was also produced in a salon orchestration, which was performed for the first time in the United States in August 2007 by the Bijou Orchestra under the direction of Leo Najar as part of a German Expressionist film festival in Bay City, Michigan.

For the film's 2010 "complete" restoration premiere, Huppertz's score was performed live and subsequently re-recorded by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frank Strobel.

Considering that Metropolis was too long and unwieldy, Parufamet commissioned American playwright Channing Pollock to write a simpler version of the film that could be assembled using the existing material.

He faulted Metropolis for its premise that automation created drudgery rather than relieving it, wondered who was buying the machines' output if not the workers, and found parts of the story derivative of Shelley's Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's R.U.R., and his own The Sleeper Awakes.

[2] In The New Yorker Oliver Claxton called Metropolis "unconvincing and overlong", faulting much of the plot as "laid on with a terrible Teutonic heaviness, and an unnecessary amount of philosophizing in the beginning" that made the film "as soulless as the city of its tale".

[75] German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer later wrote of Metropolis, "The Americans relished its technical excellence; the English remained aloof; the French were stirred by a film which seemed to them a blend of [composer] Wagner and [armaments manufacturer] Krupp, and on the whole an alarming sign of Germany's vitality.

According to Roger Ebert, "Metropolis is one of the great achievements of the silent era, a work so audacious in its vision and so angry in its message that it is, if anything, more powerful today than when it was made.

"[79] Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide's entry on the film reads, "Heavy going at times but startling set design and special effects command attention throughout.

"[80] Colin Greenland reviewed Metropolis for Imagine magazine, and stated that "It's a measure of the sheer power of Lang's vision that it survives this heavy-handed cosmetic modernizing quite intact.

Inspired by his first sight of Manhattan, Metropolis is a dark dream of the city of 2026, where the idle rich live in penthouses and play in rooftop pleasure gardens while the faceless workers toil in the machine caverns far, far below.

[91] This was the case even though cinematographer Karl Freund followed the usual practice of the time of securing three printable takes of each shot in order to create three camera negatives which could be edited for striking prints.

[2] In 1984, a new restoration and edit of the film, running 83 minutes, was made by Italian music producer Giorgio Moroder, who paid $200,000 for the rights, outbidding his Cat People collaborator David Bowie.

[94] In August 2011, after years of the Moroder version being unavailable on video in any format due to music licensing problems, it was announced that Kino International had managed to resolve the situation, and the film was to be released on Blu-ray and DVD in November.

[95] In 2012, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films gave Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis a Saturn Award for Best DVD/Blu-Ray Special Edition Release.

[96] The moderate commercial success of the Moroder version inspired Enno Patalas, the archivist of the Munich Film Archive, to make an exhaustive attempt to restore the movie in 1986.

[41] On 1 July 2008, film experts in Berlin announced that a 16 mm reduction negative of the original cut had been discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[106][107] The negative was a safety reduction made in the 1960s or 1970s from a 35 mm positive of Lang's original version, which an Argentinian film distributor had obtained in advance of arranging theatrical engagements in South America.

Huppertz's score was performed by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frank Strobel, who also re-recorded it for theatrical and home video release.