When I watched metropolis I noticed a lot of parallels between it
contemporary science fiction and indeed science fact today. Science
fiction has always interested me and I could see that Metropolis
has been liberally borrowed from over the years by the
very genre that it helped establish. Also the film foretold technological
innovations such as the videophone, closed circuit television and
computers (in a quaint early 1900s style). One
of the main elements that struck me was Rotwangs Metal Hand.
Professor Rotwang has a cybernetic hand due to an accident that
occurred at some point during the development of the Futura, the
perfect worker a machine laborer born of the machine culture.
Rotwangs metal hand is what marks him as the link between
humankind and Futura, he is the halfway point between the two species,
a bio-mechanical hybrid.
The animated science
fiction film Akira, is about a group of children in post world war
3 Japan who have had their minds expanded as part of a
military project to explore the powers of the human subconscious.
This project was terminated and Tetsuo was the only child from it
to return to civilian life, the other four children were not so fortunate.
Three of the others have aged features but not developed physically
since their youth, the other child, the Akira of the title, had unleashed
such power from his mind that he was a critical risk to military security
and was quite literally disassembled, resting in a series
of specimen jars. The
main character Tetsuo lives a normal life until in his late teens
when the power untapped in his mind brims to the surface and he becomes
extremely powerful but also confused and distructive because he cannot
deal with the mental powers hes gained. At one point in the
film Tetsuo has his arm blown off by the blast from a weapon so he
simply uses his psychic powers to construct a new arm for himself
from the mechanical wreckage in the battlefield around him. Its
mind over matter. As the power of his mind becomes stronger his body
begins to succumb to its force to the point that his physical frame
mutates and grows vastly in scale in order to try and accommodate
it.
Eventually when the full extent of this power manifests his body cannot
contain it to the point that in order to stop the whole world been
destroyed by this energy the other children from the experiment along
with a resurrected Akira help him transfer from this plane of existence
all together, where he becomes another Big Bang, birthing
a new universe. Basically
this film makes the assertion that all the energy in the universe
from when the Big Bang happened exists within each of
our minds since every atom, including those atoms that we are composed
off, was born at that point.