Summary
Freder and Maria embrace, while Rotwang tells Joh Fredersen to leave him alone and find his way back on his own. As Fredersen goes, Rotwang mutters, "You fool! Now you will lose the one remaining thing you have from Hel—your son!"
Maria and Freder clutch one another and Maria tells Freder that they will see each other tomorrow at the cathedral. They kiss passionately and Freder takes his leave. When Maria is alone, she takes a candle and walks through the catacombs. Suddenly, Rotwang drops a rock on the ground, unseen, which startles Maria. As she rounds a corner, she sees a shadow, which frightens her; then she continues into another part of the catacombs.
A hand reaches out of the shadows and takes Maria's candle, startling her. A light travels around the chamber rapidly, lighting up a skeleton on the ground nearby. Maria is terrified as she sees Rotwang wielding the flashlight, and runs from him screaming. She cannot find any escape and is eventually captured by Rotwang.
"End of the Prelude," reads a supertitle, as the scene shifts to the next day, Freder entering the church where Maria told him to meet her. He looks around as a monk preaches that the Apocalypse is "nigh." He references a verse from the Bible that describes a woman who engages in blasphemy.
Suddenly we see Rotwang's robot, with Rotwang sitting on the floor in front of it. He instructs the robot: "You will destroy Joh Fredersen—him and his city and his son." Meanwhile Freder looks around the church for Maria, and walks towards a row of statues, one of which appears to be a cloak-wearing skeleton. Each of the statues represent a different one of the seven deadly sins.
Looking at the skeleton, Freder says, "If you had come earlier, you wouldn't have scared me...But now I beg you: Stay away from me and my beloved!" He leaves the chamber and looks at the worker's hat that he has been wearing, marked "Georgy."
We see Georgy emerging from the nightclub he went to the previous night and getting in the car. As he climbs in, Fredersen's assistant grabs his arm and pulls him into the car. "Where is the one whose clothes you are wearing?" the assistant asks, having discovered the impostor. He pulls out Josaphat's address and they head there.
The scene shifts and we see Freder arriving at Josaphat's apartment and sitting down on a chair and asking for Josaphat to wake Georgy up. Having not met Georgy, Josaphat is confused and explains that Georgy never came to the apartment. Back in the car, Fredersen's assistant orders Georgy to go back to the machine he works at and forget everything.
Back at Josaphat's, Freder begs him to be loyal so that he can fulfill his destiny. He then says, "I have to go on, to look for the person to whom Georgy was supposed to have led me," and tells Josaphat he will return that night. As he gets on the elevator that transports him out of the apartment, Fredersen's assistant climbs out of an elevator that is arriving in the apartment.
We see Georgy's hat on the floor as the assistant looks around the room. He picks up the hat and asks Josaphat about it, but Josaphat feigns ignorance, shrugging and looking at the hat curiously. The assistant pulls out his cigarette case and when he opens it reveals the piece of paper with Josaphat's address that Georgy gave him. Lighting up a cigarette, the assistant threatens to stay in his apartment all night to question him. Josaphat orders him to leave, but the assistant refuses. He pulls out an identification showing that he works for Fredersen, which startles Josaphat.
As the assistant puts on gloves, threatening to go tell Fredersen about Josaphat's role in all this, Josaphat attacks him. The assistant pushes him to the ground, telling him that he will return in three hours.
The scene shifts and we see Maria being held in some kind of cell. Rotwang approaches her and says, "Come! It's time to give the Machine-Man your face!" and Maria cowers as he corners her with a table. They struggle, but Rotwang pushes her onto the table. She manages to wriggle free and begins screaming through a barred window. In the square outside, Freder can hear her cries, and runs to Rotwang's door, trying to break it down. He bangs on the door, breaking it open just as Rotwang manages to subdue Maria.
When Freder enters Rotwang's dwelling, the door slams behind him and another opens in front of him. He wanders up the stairs and through the door into a library, then down a set of stairs into an empty cell. He puts a stick in the door to make sure it doesn't close behind him, but it does and he is locked in the cell, beating on the door to no avail. Suddenly, he sees Maria's scarf on the floor nearby and calls for her.
We see Maria on a table in Rotwang's workroom, as he turns on a large machine and prepares to use her face for the robot. He turns the machine on and it begins working furiously to bring about the transformation. As beakers bubble and an orb casts electric rings around the Machine-Man, the metallic robot eventually turns into a perfect reproduction of Maria.
Freder sits on the ground, dejected, when suddenly a door opens. He goes through it and up a staircase where he finds Rotwang and asks where Maria is. We see the real Maria still unconscious on the work table, as Rotwang tells Freder that Maria is with Fredersen.
We see Fredersen reading a letter that says, "She is the most perfect and most obedient tool which mankind ever possessed! Tonight you will see her succeed before the upper ten thousand. You will see her dance..." and a card from Rotwang. The robotic version of Maria walks towards Fredersen looking at him seductively and he says to her, "I want you to visit those in the depths, in order to destroy the work of the woman in whose image you were created!" She winks ominously at him.
Suddenly, Freder comes into his father's office where he finds him with his arms around Maria. He is shocked and appalled and the room spins to reflect his horror. The scene shifts and we see Freder lying in bed, ill from shock, as a doctor assures Fredersen that everything will be fine. Fredersen leaves the room.
Analysis
The story becomes less straightforward in this section of the film as the "prelude" ends and the exposition is taken over by the major conflict of the film. While Fredersen believes that he has enlisted Rotwang to help him and Rotwang agrees, we soon learn from Rotwang's aside that he has a different plan altogether, and seeks revenge on his old romantic rival. The plot is now a convoluted web of different competing priorities, between Freder's desire to lead the revolution, Fredersen's desire to tamp down on his son's rebellious streak, and Rotwang's desire to destory everything.
What began as an idealistic journey for the young impressionable Freder has ultimately set in motion a menacing plot to ruin him in this section of the film. Not only does Fredersen's assistant apprehend Georgy, the worker with whom he switched places, but Rotwang kidnaps his beloved in order to make a robot that will destroy him. Meanwhile the innocent Freder does not realize any of this is happening and must discover it slowly, as if in a nightmare.
The motivation keeping Freder going against the odds is his sense of his own cosmic destiny to help the workers in the workers' city. When he asks Josaphat to be loyal to him, he justifies his request by saying, "How else will I be able to fulfill my destiny?" In his mind, it is not only his desire that drives him to seek to dismantle the system his father has created, but his divine fate, his destiny. His sense of purpose fits perfectly into Maria's philosophy and her dream of having a mediator between the wealthier classes and the working classes. Thus, their shared love is about romantic desire as well as shared ambitions.
The film has many attributes of a German Expressionist film. The attributes of Expressionism are perhaps most explicitly evident in the film's approach to structure and architecture. The buildings in the film are imposing and impressive, and the characters wander through intimidating landscapes and structures in their pursuit of their desires. Monumentalism and modernism were major tenets and important elements of German Expressionism, and the movement's preoccupation with stylized shapes, huge scale, and right angle is certainly on display in the set design of Metropolis, a film that epitomizes the genre according to many critics.
Some of the most impressive visual tricks in the film take place in the famous transformation of the Machine-Man. We see white rings encircle the robot, as electric bolts beam from a machine to the machine encasing the unconscious Maria. The Machine-Man pulses with veins of light as it begins to take on the physical identity of the beautiful maiden, and its metallic shell is replaced with Maria's damask skin and dark painted eyelashes. The image of the robotic version of Maria opening its eyes, with a strange electric halo encircling its head, is an iconic image in the science fiction canon, and in the cinematic canon more broadly.
