Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Metropolis is an urban re-vision expressed as science fiction. Set in the year 2000, it depicts the effects of technological society on workers who live below ground-one level lower than the machines-and who are ruled by a "super-trustee" who lives with his collaborators in the paradisiacal garden of Yoshiwara. Lang even posits a virtual woman cloned from people's hero Brigitte Helm. Luis Buñuel called Metropolis "a glorious symphony of movement...the rhythmic progression of wheels, of pistons, of hitherto unimagined mechanical shapes," and critic Richard Combs concurs: "Metropolis has survived mainly on the novelty of its special effects and Lang's dynamic counterpoint of a monumental, architectural geometry with a crazed, pathetic ballet of mechanized ant-man in revolt against his Utopian overlords. (T)he film's visuals acquire a splendid abstract poetry of their own."