when I saw "2hr 28min black and white silent film from 1927 made in Germany" I thought "aw no this is gonna be boring as fuck" and then it was one of the most impressive and beautiful works of art I've ever seen. This movie pulls off shit modern films can't pull off. It's absolutely bonkers. It's weird at first to get used to not hearing the dialogue, and not knowing what most of the dialogue is (they only put up text cards when it's deemed important/contextual), but the performances are suitably theatrical that you can easily infer the emotions of each scene, and that score goddamn. When I say, if you have a surround sound setup or just some really nice speakers/headphones, you MUST get the Kino Lorber blu-ray and blast this orchestral bliss out of them... It's STELLAR.
Completely fucked up that a (mostly) complete version of this movie wasn't reassembled until 2010, and even then all the extra footage they found comes from one of the most abysmal 16mm prints I've ever seen in my life, because at some point in the 80s the Argentinian government - who were the ONLY ones with a remaining copy of the unedited film - decided to transfer all of their nitrate 35mm prints to 16mm as cheaply as possible and then TRASHED the originals - it's a crime against art, and surprisingly relevant to the film's themes regarding the Tower of Babel and its destruction. The movie states quite impactfully "They all spoke the same language, but they could not understand each other."
I'll definitely have to be revisiting it again someday because goddamn, a masterpiece. I'll also have to check out Fritz Lang's other films.