What aspect of this video did you think was metropolis-loving? I admit, I've only seen bits and pieces of the movie - I tried to watch it once but couldn't get through it - but to my understanding it was all about the workers below vs. the elites above, and robots and stuff and took place in a futuristic city. The city shots at the beginning and end of the video don't look terribly futuristic to me. There's an elevated train, sure, but it's the normal, old-fashioned-looking el, not like what's depicted here:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/5555/metrop3m.jpg

And was the poor lighting a specifically metropolis-y thing or just an old movie thing? I figured Gondry was just trying to be old-timey with both city and camera. Maybe because there are robots dancing around, and the robots seem to be made of the city, and the technology controls the city in metropolis? Were you going that deep? Or is there some other part of Metropolis I'm unfamiliar with? Or is this coming from Gondry himself and, like "around the world", might be rather oblique to the outside?

I do think it's got an aesthetic similarity that may or may not have been what Gondry was deliberately going for- in the NYTimes mag article recently about Gondry the video was discussed, but no mention of Metropolis was made that I can recall. Nevertheless, I do think that the techniques of early modern cinema chime with Gondry's love of archaic approaches to special effects and such, and that the song's "Cell Phone's Dead," not like "Rotary Phone's Broke" or something like that... so, you know, ironic juxtaposition of setting/technique and content... I mean, he may or may not have been thinking of Metropolis in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was. Of course the political content is pretty much ignored as far as I can tell, but that's a different story.

As Jesse said, I felt an aesthetic similarity in the cinematography. E.g.,

http://www.leninimports.com/metropolis_44big1.jpg

by the way, did anyone see science of sleep? if so, what'd you think?

you realize i posted almost the exact same picture, right, but to make the opposite point?

perhaps because the weird domed building isn't in your shot it looks to you similar to the cityscape in the video, but consider the crucial difference -- the rail lines or roads or whatever they are in metropolis are up in the sky, on multiple levels, seemingly criss-crossing between buildings -- an image of vertically expanding transit lines in the futuristic city as an inevitable next step from ever vertically-expanding housing, increasingly disconnected from the more "natural" earth, necessarily no trees or people, beautiful but intimidating, echoed very distinctly in the jetsons and the 5th element, to some degree in the matrix (though the environment wasn't a "city", per se), unintentionally in the futurama of the 39 world's fair, deliberately in futurama the show, etc. etc. The shot in gondry's video is one low-lying elevated crossing a busy intersection -- what you might see today if you lived near yankee stadium or in southern/outer brooklyn or near the charles st. station in boston, or anywhere in chicago, or along 2nd avenue back when that el was still running:

http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/show?17415

Not from the proper perspective, of course. I agree with jesse -- gondry is obsessed with archaic effects, so I would conclude the "base" environment of the video is supposed to look like, perhaps, a film *made* around the time of metropolis, but not terribly evocative of the special case of metropolis -- a futuristic city as envisioned a long time ago. The introduction of special effects begins to give a certain weird feel that you get from metropolis, that things aren't as you might be able to experience them, but in this case the special effects aren't futuristic -- they're just special. so the dimension explored is reality-altering, but not in any temporal direction.

Well not to belabor the point, but it's very much temporality that's being played with, temporality being another Gondry fixation.