Does a movement piece aiming to depict teeming hordes have to teem quite this much? That was my feeling Wednesday night watching the Ballet National de Marseille’s “Metapolis II,” shown at the New York State Theater as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival.

“Metapolis II” is a collaboration between the company’s artistic director, Frédéric Flamand, and the architect Zaha Hadid, who designed the sets and costumes. “Metapolis II” plies sensory overload as a performance methodology as well as a subject. The aim is to visualize, explore, chart, and distill urban dystopia, and on that score the piece succeeded, but its length of about an hour-and-a-half had the paradoxical effect of making the experience sometimes seem as numbing as watching paint dry. Some editing might be in order; the piece would achieve more by doing a little less.

“Metapolis II” brims with anthropological and sociological kinetic illustrations. The 21 dancers make constant exits and entrances, populating simultaneous occurrences at random points on the stage. The linchpin of the piece is three aluminum bridges. Probably influenced by last week’s visit by the Kirov Opera, I kept thinking of the rainbow bridge at the end of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” but these bridges are not meant as a passageway to Valhalla. They are rearranged by the dancers so that the stage is always in flux, suggesting a mutable built environment, familiar to New Yorkers who watch their city perpetually under construction. But the landscape onstage has the endemic, endless mutability of any urban environment with its inhabitants walking, stopping, interacting, streaming along the sidewalk, and pouring into and out of buildings.

The dancers climbed up the bridges, slid down them, and perched atop them like sentinels. They inserted themselves into manholes built into the bridges. They configured the bridges at oppositional or overlapping angles, or lined them up precisely in tandem to form one continuous vista.

The violinist George van Dam stood on a side apron of the stage, playing along with an eclectic soundtrack of every variety of tonality and rhythm, some of them mildly unbearable. Meanwhile, projections on a screen at the rear of the stage showed urban environments and their streetscapes and topographies. Simultaneously shot footage of the dancers accompanied their movemnets on stage, but from angles impossible for the audience to see from their fixed vantage points. At other times, the shadow play on the backdrop created an enormous open door upstage left, spilling a shaft of light running diagonally to the downstage right corner. Architectural monumentalism dwarfed the dancers silhouetted within the projected frame.

The dance language of “Metapolis II” is catholic, employing every variant of modern dance vocabulary and every tempo of locomotion from utterly static to frenzied gyration — all of which fall easily within the versatile dancers’ capabilities. Movement styles morph and merge throughout the piece, which revises an earlier “Metapolis” that Mr. Flamand and Ms. Hahid had created for the modern dance National Choreographic center in Charleroi, Belgium, in 2000. Since Mr. Flamand became artistic director in Marseille in 2004, he re-choreographed “Metapolis” for the classically trained Marseille dancers, and now some of the women are on pointe. But pointe work is not really essential here; it seems just like another element thrown into the mix. There is, however, a striking image of one woman on pointe, who wears something like an officer’s greatcoat — it’s like seeing Vronsky of “Anna Karenina” break into a bourrée.

Toward the end of “Metapolis II,” the dancers all stand on the bridges, their backs to the audience, watching footage of some type of exploding destruction. This might have been a good place to draw down the curtain. But some of the best was yet to come. Mr. van Dam left his forestage station and began to stroll among the dancers like the classic “flaneur” of urban mythology. The bridges were lined up laterally, one dancer standing at the same point on each bridge, and the three moved in synchronicity, forming a depth of field that stretched to the horizon.

“Metapolis II” has the look of something that synthesized the work of multiple improvisatory sessions drawing upon an array of interpersonal relationships: docile, regimented, belligerent, or mutually engaged. Small clusters of dancers planted around the stage created a hive of activity, like in a Hieronymus Bosch canvas. Tedious and wearying as it was at times, “Metapolis II” did make an impact.