Fritz Lang's sci-fi godfather has been through several levels of re-cut hell over the past hundred years. Slashed by nearly an hour for its original western release, trimmed further by Nazi censors in 1936, color tinted and re-edited in the '80s (with a modern rock soundtrack) by Giorgio Moroder, then painstakingly restored for Blu-Ray in 2010, using lost footage from an old print in Buenos Aires. Up until now, my entire memory of the film comes from the Moroder version, which didn't make much sense from a story perspective but always wowed me with its wild, futuristic visions, ambitious special effects and expansive set designs.

The restored version offers improvement in both respects. Now cast in gorgeous monochrome, as intended, the art direction is even more stunning. New scenes and high-resolution scans give us new chances to admire the sprawling city, to really soak up the vast scale of Lang's concept. And the plot, naive and airy as it may be, actually moves in sensible directions now. It's incredibly slow moving and drawn-out, sure, overloaded with long shots of talking heads (which seems unnecessary for a silent picture) but at least it's headed somewhere.

As a long-time fan of the film, I'm glad to have finally seen the full thing. It's an iconic marvel, an artistic triumph that's, somehow, just as hypnotic now as it must've been in post-WWI Germany. That said, actually wading through the scenes without some sort of huge, dazzling art deco set piece, well, it can feel like work. I needed four sittings to get through this two-and-a-half hour behemoth, and I was personally invested before it hit my media shelf. First-timers will, no doubt, find it smothering. Deeply influential as a production, astounding as a purely visual showpiece, but critically flawed as a whole. Now excuse me while I revisit a few tunes from the 1984 release.