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The Iron Hand

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 Rotwang’s 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. Rotwang’s 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 he’s 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. It’s 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.


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