runner-15

Is it a Great Western? Well no, but it's not a bad one either. Some reviewers have criticized the cinematography, costuming, anachronistic props, directing, writing, acting, and even the lips of one of the actresses.

Maybe it's just me, but it almost looks like there was a concentrated effort to do hit piece reviews on this film. Maybe there wasn't, maybe people have just got so jaded by mega Hollywood blockbusters and star filled epic westerns that B-westerns are just not appreciated these days. Now, by no means would I say that this movie is up there with Tombstone, The Searchers, Unforgiven, or even The Magnificent 7, but had I not actually seen this movie for myself before reading the reviews here, I would have thought that Ed Wood himself came back to life to make this movie.

This is a perfectly acceptable B movie with an interesting storyline based largely in real history. In fact, though some events were slightly modified and rearranged, this film fairly accurately tells the true story of the Rufus Buck Gang.

Though not as famous as many other outlaw gangs of the Old West, the Rufus Buck Gang was a group of young Native American and African American men, who, in July and August of 1895, went on a two week rampage of armed robbery, various assaults, and murder. Finding the exact number of murders and other crimes attributed to this short lived gang are hard to come by, but reports say they killed at least six people and assaulted three or more women, as well as committing various armed robberies.

Though I find the title of the film somewhat confusing, the movie is engaging and completely watchable despite whatever few flaws you may be able to spot. The story is told flashback style by Danny Trejo, known in the film as Digger, a cognac loving grave digger with a penchant for storytelling.

I attempt to take all factors into account when scoring movies, and as such, when judged against other B-movies this film garner's a perfectly acceptable score of seven out of ten.

Before I close, perhaps I should also define what a B-movie is. The term B-movie originally referred to a lesser known film, usually produced with a smaller budget, intended to be shown as the second half of a double feature, similar to how many famous records often had a less known song on the reverse or B-side. Double features were especially common during the Golden age of Hollywood from the early 1930s until the late 1950s. However, the rise in popularity of television lead to a decline of the double feature as a part of American culture. By the end of the 1950s, as more and more homes begin to turn to their televisions for entertainment, the double feature faded into history. Today double features are mostly limited to the few remaining drive in theaters in operation across the nation and the occasional special event, at least partially driven by nostalgia.

But even with the death of the Double Feature, the term B-movie lived on. Though most Hollywood studios moved their smaller budget production facilities into the television world, the term B-movie has lived on in the American lexicon by undergoing a semantic drift to mean any low budget film that is produced cheaply with little known actors and poorer production quality. And even though some of the actors in this film are well known, there are no what many people would consider A-list stars in this film and the film obviously had a smaller budget. So I judged it against other small budget films with few or no major stars, resulting in my score of 7.

A tagline for the movie I saw labeled it as a quirky comedy, and I loved the bright colors I saw in the trailer. So many movies today the color is so subdued and flat, I miss the Technicolor days. Plus, robot uprising. Those were the three reasons I watched it.

Well, I watched it, and... Well, it was definitely quirky, and I loved the colors. But that's about all it had going for it. I watched an English dub of the film and I just kept hoping it would get better, it didn't. Perhaps the comedy just didn't translate well for an American audience. I only really laughed at one scene, when the hypnotized woman was walking across the room dragging everyone else behind her, now that was funny. But the rest of the film, just meh.

The whole cast were perhaps the most dumbest bunch of characters assembled since Idiocracy. If the whole world was like this bunch, well, we deserve a robot uprising.

There are a lot of words you can use to describe this film, absurd, freakish, weird, boring, weak, illogical, shallow, goofy, and yes even disappointing. Other than the cinematography, this film has little to love. Two stars for the most part for overall story, but I did love the look of the film that added two stars.

There is a lot to unpack in this film so where to start. Let's start with a few facts. The version I watched is the colorized version available for free on YouTube. According to IMDB, H. G. Wells, the author of the novel on which this movie was based, actually began directing, but his inexperience resulted in director William Cameron Menzies taking over for him. However H. G Wells retained approval of every aspect of production. This eventually caused problems as Wells had a poor understanding of film-making.

Additionally, because of the difference between writing novels and writing screenplays, the dialogue is often heavy handed and unconvincing. Wells was criticized that his anti-war message was too heavy handed and "painfully overstated." However Wells did manage to predict a world war, worldwide instant communications, a type of cell phone, flat screen TVs, and space travel.

Moving on from the anti-war message we find that the real hero of the film was actually technology. After falling into a multi decade long war, mankind is finally rescued from the abyss by "Wings Over the World," a completely technocratic Society that has risen up in ashes of the war. For those of you who have never heard the term technocracy, a technocracy is a government in which the decision-makers are selected based on their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge. Wells was a well-known socialist and though not recognized as the father of technocracy his writings would seem to indicate that he was also an early believer in a technocratic Society. However his "Wings over the World" would seem to be a Socialist Technocracy with heavily fascistic leanings.

And that segues me into a critique of Technocracy. In the early twentieth century there was a strong technocratic movement, driven at least partially by the writings of Edward Bellamy and Thorstein Veblen. Howard Scott has been often been called the father of the technocracy movement as he started the Technical Alliance in New York in 1919. I myself was a proponent of technocracy for many years, until I recognized its flaws.

First, technocracy disempowers citizens and this would eventually lead to a form of dictatorship or fascism. Very quickly people would come to see their leaders, no matter how smart, educated, and altruistic, as an elite class, with no responsibility to listen to and address the concerns of the citizenry. The citizenry would quickly feel dominated and resentful, leading to apathy, social regression, resentment, and eventually to revolution.

Secondly, no matter how smart and educated someone is, they can still make bad and shortsighted decisions, often suffering from a form of myopia and/or even tribalism. Political scientist Matthew Cole observed that technocratic leaders might fail by coming to rely on a flawed theory of knowledge.

The events of the last few years should convince anyone that he should have said "would" instead of "might" as we have seen that the smartest and best educated people can and often will make horrible decisions driven by their own sense of superiority. And when confronted by their errors, even with indisputable evidence, they will most often double down on their erroneous presumptions out of a sense of their own pried and ego.

Overall, "Things to Come" Is a spectacular and visually stunning film with much to enjoy, but in actuality you should view it with a sense of "there but for the grace of God go us." It is a wonderful alternate history film from the mind of one of the greats of Science Fiction, no matter how flawed his views were. If you have never seen it, it is available on YouTube as I write this, both in the colorized version and the black and white original. A search for "things to come 1936 full movie" will bring both to the top of the results. The film is only an hour and a half long but covers a hundred years of world history as perceived by the mind of H. G. Wells nearly a hundred years ago.