102. Things To come (1936)

Directed By William Cameron Menzies

Synopsis

World War II starts in 1940! By 1970 parts of the world are still in a post-apocalyptic state, except for a little village led by a resolute group of Gauls... well no actually, there are some guys who have planes and stupid helmets, who civilise the rest of the world. In 2036 the world is grand and monorails abound, there's TVs and acrylic is the hot thing! Luddites show up but Science prevails!

Review

There is a big, big difference between American and UK science fiction, in the US the hero usually faces overwhelming odds and wins by virtue of being smarter or whatever, think Star Trek. In the UK they seem to like the storylines where the hero gets screwed, or dies or is just bleak, think Ian M. Banks or J.G. Ballard. Here you have a mix of both, while being a hopeful story of the future it is also bittersweet. Science evolves but humanity not so much, it ends allright but with a sense of sacrifice and that's a good thing.

In the end it is worth watching for its special effects and its predictions of the future. It is actually not that innacurate if you ignore the cosmetic bits, the buildings look like Frank Lloyd Wrigh'ts Guggenheim, which was to be inaugurated in 1937, the acrylic actually makes stuff look pretty modern. The second World War is also predicted, but what I found strangest of all is predicting widescreen, flatscreen television, with what seems to be a tape or DVD player. Oh and YouTube, some luddite decides to broadcast his message to the world and he just has to go into a place where his message is broadcast to all the world... YouTube.

Of course there are some interesting ideas to the plot, although the system which is advocated is a bit totalitarian it replaces militaristic authoritarianism, which I suppose is a good thing. Don't be fooled, this is still a very B-Movie, the acting is not that great for example, but it has enough to love about it to be reccomended... watch it. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Wells is assumed to have had a degree of control over the project that was unprecedented for a screenwriter, and personally supervised nearly every aspect of the film. Posters and the main title bill the film as "H. G. Wells' THINGS TO COME", with "an Alexander Korda production" appearing in smaller type. In fact, Wells ultimately had no control over the finished product, with the result that many scenes, although shot, were either truncated or not included in the finished film. The rough-cut reputedly ran to 130 minutes; the version submitted to the British Board of Film Censors was 117m 13s; it was released as 108m 40s (later cut to 98m 06s) in the UK, and 96m 24s in the United States. The standard version available today is just 92m 42s, although some prints are in circulation in the United States - where the film is in the Public Domain - that retain the additional scenes that constitute the original American release.

Wells originally wanted the music to be recorded in advance, and have the film constructed around the music, but this was considered too radical and so the score, by Arthur Bliss, was fitted to the film afterwards in a more conventional way. A concert suite drawn from the film has remained popular; as of 2003, there are about half-a-dozen recordings of it in print.

After filming had already begun, the Hungarian abstract artist László Moholy-Nagy was commissioned to produce some of the effects sequences for re-building of Everytown. Moholy-Nagy's approach was partly to treat it as an abstract light show but only some 90 seconds of material was used (e.g. a protective-suited figure behind corrugated glass), although in the autumn of 1975 a researcher found a further four discarded sequences

Here, today you get the whole film!: