UK 108m Dir: William Cameron Menzies
Perception of time is a strange thing. I always think of HG Wells as a Victorian novelist so it seems strange to know that he wrote a screenplay for a motion picture.
Things to Come isn't really a narrative film and is more about speculating how the future will play out. It's a little odd watching this eighty five years into that future when we know how it played out.
Fairly swiftly the film gives us a Second World War and it's impressive just how accurate Wells' speculation on the near future was. There's scenes of London being bombed and people heading into underground stations wearing gas masks which feel like they come from a film about the London Blitz.
Wells though predicted a second world war would last much longer and has his going into the 1960s. There's a line right at the start of the film about how how war stimulates progress but Wells failed to speculate just how much progress would be made. His film ends with the first human spaceflight in 2036 which is an optimistic ending. Little did he know that only twenty years after this film was released the first human would go to space.
As a narrative film, it doesn't really work. Some actors do play different characters in different time periods but other than being related they seem to have limited things in common. There's no ongoing narrative thread, it's an essay turned into a film. Some have argued that Wells' point was that humans are unimportant in the grand scheme of things which is all very well but even if that was his intention here it still doesn't make for a great narrative.
What makes this film of special note is it's design work. This was really the first big sci-fi film complete with futuristic planes, spacesuits, futuristic cities and a space rocket. No-one had made something like this to this scale before and this remained the influence for subsequent sci-fi films until 2001: A Space Odyssey came along in 1968.
Fascinating as it is to think about speculative fiction from the past, the film lacks any narrative even if the design work was excellent for the time.
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