So the sun is out, and already a long summer at the multiplex is yawning ahead, bringing with it the promise of all manner of last-legs franchises, cod-ironic homages to 80s TV and late-stage-career Tom Cruise vehicles. For me, however, the real treat will come as the last weeks of the season ebb into autumn, at which point the most spectacular ride of the lot is due in cinemas, a movie with more visual wonder and dazzlement in its first five minutes than a weekend's worth of 3D extravaganzas. That film is Metropolis, now scheduled for a September British re-release.

But it won't quite be the Metropolis you may remember. Rather, it is now (more or less) the film that Fritz Lang always meant it to be but which, for almost its entire lifespan after its 1927 premiere, lacked long passages of lost footage – only for a near-complete print to be located in a dusty corner of a Buenos Aires film museum back in 2008, with the hitherto missing scenes authenticated and slotted into a new edit. And now, while America will get the first run of the finished article, the restored account of skyscrapers and subterranea is to be given a spin in UK cinemas too.

All of which is, in cinephile circles, about as big a draw as draws get. But what hopefully won't be overlooked in the excitement is that even without those long-lost scenes, Lang's masterpiece was always a vital experience in both senses of the word, one that should be getting regular exposure on the big screen anyway, and which after 83 years still makes for joyous and downright startling viewing. For anyone new to it (and actually, everyone else too), it's as unique a piece of film-making as cinema offers, no amount of passing time dulling its imaginative power. Really, watch just the trailer for the US re-release, and I defy you not to still be just a little astonished.

In fact, whether at 90 minutes or two and a half hours, I've always felt Metropolis is the one film capable of convincing even the most blinkered cynic of the pleasures of silent cinema. Clearly, in an age in which everything from Caligula to Alien is now considered lacking without a 3D revamp, not everyone is going to accept that its rightful place is not in the archive but the Cineworld and Vue – but the thing about Metropolis is that its sweeping modernist grandeur is so far removed from the stereotype of the silent movie as creaky and slightly risible as to pretty much put it to bed.

There are others, of course, that could also do the job: no one with a sense of either humour or adventure could fail to love The General; Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs has a timeless melodramatic oomph; The Cabinet of Dr Caligari remains indelibly unnerving. But all of them would need at least some measure of investment from the audience, a willingness to be watching a silent in the first place – whereas I truly believe that if you put Metropolis in front of an unsuspecting crowd at the local movie house, that after a few awkward minutes of giggling and shuffling about, its strange, hypnotic spell would still have its way with them. And another 83 years down the line, while of course I'm sadly unlikely to be here to collect, I'd make a bet it would do the same again.