I saw it this week and was baffled by the insight and the scale of it.
you really think so? it's true that the government in the film was authoritarian, but the plight of the workers seemed far more salient than the structure of power that was keeping them in their place.
The movie goes as far as showing that oppressed workers will lash out in a violent protest, but then it deflects this anger towards the mad scientist, and the conflict kind of fizzles out? And I think it ends with the owner of the factory promising not to oppress them as much, and the owner's privileged son promising to upkeep this, basically reinforcing the existing social order.
Doing anything else would stray dangerously towards socialism, though, so as a product of its time it's understandable.
Capital and labor are both dysfunctional in the movie, and this is portrayed in a typical socialist way: The upper classes are libertine, corrupt, inattentive, immoral. Labor is overworked, unrepresented, exploited.
However when labor tries to emancipate themselves from the oppressive and rigid order imposed, chaos ensues. They can't manage themselves correctly! So the ultimate solution is a synthesis. The classes stay in their positions (because this is the natural order) but conditions will be improved and so on
"natural" does NOT mean good or that it is worth preserving.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Now in the plot "the robots revolt and cause the extinction of the human race".
Also there is his older brother, the Golem. He has his own movie from 1915.
The protagonist of Metropolis is in the title: Metropolis, the city, from the greek μητρόπολις, meter = mother, polis = city (or state).
The movie's Big Philosophical Statement is people should be nice to each other, but the visual effects were unmatched at the time and hold up well even now, assuming you find a good restoration. It's truly a marvel of its era, in every possible sense.
Stumbled across this movie as a youngster, very much thanks to a certain iconic scene:
“Burn’s wetware matches her software.”