An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was directed by Fritz Lang and since it was available on YouTube, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it was less obscure than the other movies I have seen from the 20’s and even though it seemed to have a decent reputation, to be honest, I had a rather hard time to get into the damned thing though. It’s the oldest movie I saw from Fritz Lang (I have to admit that I completely forgot that I also watched ‘Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler’ about 2 years ago which was released only 1 year later) but, even though there were some interesting ideas, the whole thing was just too disjointed for me. At some point, he completely deviated from the main story to tell 3 different tales taking place in different locations which was obviously an excuse Lang used to indulge himself. The Arabic and Italian tales were not bad at all, the production design was pretty cool, however, with the Chinese tale, it was really cringe-inducing to see the same (Caucasian) actors playing some Asian characters as well (It then reminded me of ‘Cloud Atlas’ which used the same trick of using the same actors to play characters with various ethnicities and it did receive some huge criticism back then). On the other hand, I have to admit that this Asian segment was the wildest one with some magical stuff involved. However, the issue with these 3 separate segments was that they had no impact whatsoever on the main tale after all so it all felt rather pointless to me. At least, visually speaking, it was pretty good for a movie made in the 20’s, I also really liked the way they depicted Death and I’m pretty sure it did inspire many movies that came afterwards. Anyway, to conclude, even if it didn’t really work for me, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Fritz Lang’s work. 

6/10