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A silent-film spectacle. A live musical experience.

In 2027, The Invincible Czars celebrate 100 years of Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction landmark Metropolis (1927) with a brand-new score performed live alongside the movie.

Experience a towering city, a sinister inventor and an unforgettable robot with a new tastefully modern score performed live in the theater.  Part science fiction, part fever dream and part warning about a world consumed by its own machinery, Metropolis is a larger-than-life movie now enhanced by a larger-than-life musical score.

ABOUT THE FILM

High above the streets of Metropolis, the wealthy live in luxury. Far below, workers toil at enormous machines that keep the city running. These two worlds aren’t supposed to mix — but when Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), the privileged son of the city’s ruler, meets Maria (Brigitte Helm), he discovers the human cost of his comfortable life. Meanwhile, his father turns to the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), whose extraordinary mechanical creation becomes a weapon in a struggle for control of the city. What could possibly go wrong?

Directed by Fritz Lang, Metropolis imagines a future that is both dazzling and deeply unsettling. Its monumental buildings, subterranean machinery and stark divide between the powerful and the powerless turn the city itself into a character: beautiful, hungry and always working. This is a world where technological wonders and human suffering exist side by side — and where keeping the machines running can become more important than the people running them.

At the center of it all is Brigitte Helm, playing both the compassionate Maria and her destructive artificial double. The same face becomes a source of hope and an instrument of chaos, giving the movie a wonderfully unnerving question: what happens when people can no longer tell the real thing from an imitation? Between its mechanical spectacle, doomed schemes and genuinely human stakes, Metropolis gives modern audiences plenty to marvel at — and plenty to recognize.

ABOUT THE SOUNDTRACK

How do you give a city of the future a musical heartbeat?

For Metropolis, The Invincible Czars are creating a new score that brings their adventurous musical personality to the film’s extraordinary world. The project takes the band from the supernatural shadows of Nosferatu and Faust into a different kind of nightmare: a society where people serve the machines instead of the other way around.

The aim is an experience that feels immediate, immersive and alive — not a museum piece, but a meeting between a remarkable old movie and musicians responding to it in the room. The film supplies the towering machinery, mistaken identities and impending catastrophe. The Czars supply the live musical pulse.

ABOUT THE BAND

The Invincible Czars have been making adventurous, hard-to-categorize music in Austin, Texas, since 2003. Their tastefully modern live soundtracks bring that same spirit to classic silent films, combining a love of cinema with the energy and personality of a live band.

Their approach is simple: take the movie seriously without taking the fun out of it. Whether you’re a longtime silent-film lover or walking into your first screening, the invitation is the same — leave the everyday world behind and step into something strange.

For Metropolis, dress for the future. Or at least a very strange version of it.