JAS said

Stephen said

I like Ray Bradbury’s suggestion that you should get to come back for a year every hundred years.  Of course that would let you catch up on history if that’s all you wanted to do.   But how long would it be until you just didn’t want to come back?  How long until the world is so strange that you can’t find a point of connection?

  

I may already be there.

  

Yet if given the opportunity to glimpse into dim futurity I would not be able to resist.  What will the world be like a thousand years from now?  Ten thousand?  All we can say for certain about the future is that it will be different than we can imagine.  What frustrates prognostication is the unexpected, the unforeseeable.  Which is why science fiction set in the near future dates faster than science fiction set in the far future.  2001?  1984?

JAS said
I always think of Star Trek’s sophisticated computers, with tape drives. The original silent film of Metropolis envisioned a future that, while still predicting science we cannot manage, we can see from our more modern eyes that its predictions are very much rooted in its own era.

  

A good point.  We tend to think of the future as a bigger, shinier (or grimmer) version of the present.  H G Wells pointed out that the most subversive political and social message possible is to simply point out that the future will be different than the present.  It means that the current state of affairs will eventually pass away.  What self-appointed Master wants to hear that?

Actually I just saw the restored version of Metropolis as part of a silent film festival at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD.  The Silver is a gorgeous restored Art Deco movie palace built in 1910 I think.  Terrific film.  

JAS said

Stephen said

Actually I just saw the restored version of Metropolis as part of a silent film festival at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD.  The Silver is a gorgeous restored Art Deco movie palace built in 1910 I think.  Terrific film.  

  

I have what I think is the most recent restoration, and putting the excised material back in place and implementing the proper (original) order, makes the story a lot more cohesive. My one great reservation is that the ending of joining labor and management feels very much imposed and even a bit silly — a kind of deus et machina, if you will, for the sake of a “happy” ending. (It might be true that such a thing is necessary, but no one has really figured out a way for it to happen, and to last.)

  

The ending with its happy credo does seem a bit tacked on.   (Fritz Lang and his crew seem to have had much more fun with the career of the robot Maria and the flooding of the worker’s underground habitat.)  Pedersen will shorten the hours of the work day and provide some minimal health care, until somebody finally figures out how to invent the computer, automating the machine and making the workers unnecessary.   Lang didn’t have the spunk of Karel Capek, the Czech playwright who, in his similarly themed R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots), has his robot slaves exterminate the human race.  At the end two robot lovers develop feelings and head off, a new Adam and Eve.