My immediate reaction to Things to Come is essentially the same as it was to Avatar - a big budget spectacle with a too-preachy message and a fairly dull story. While I did appreciate the anthological structure to Things to Come, the stories of each of the time periods (present-day war, dystopian fiefdom, and futuristic utopia) were littered with overly dramatic, overly talkie, and overly dry characters that I really couldn't care less about, let alone the sheer horror I felt imagining having these types of people running society. Without a lick of intentional humor and a surprising lack of overt optimism until the end of the last act, the film beats the horrors of war over your head while…

'Things to Come' is the loosely based cinematic adaptation of H.G. Wells' novel 'The Shape of Things to Come'. The film is an interesting but dated what-if scenario about the petty and destructive nature of mankind. It's a film that looks at how we hate what we fear or simply don't understand. It also shows what we could achieve as a civilisation if we put aside our differences and focus on science to propel ourselves towards a better tomorrow. However, seeing as man is at the forefront of scientific progress, will it benefit all mankind, or are we doomed to repeat past failures?

'Things to Come' has lofty ambitions, and whilst it doesn't quite reach the heights it sets, it…

This classic sci-fi follows Earth over hundreds of years, a society destroyed by nuclear war gradually rebuilding itself from nothing into a seemingly utopian world. Drawing from HG Wells’ source material, the film tells an epic, decade spanning saga; considering when the story was written and filmed, everything here feels very prescient, something that’s especially true of the war segment that makes up most the first segment. 

It even predicts aspects of the Second World War years before they happened; a sequence eerily anticipating the Blitz ends up containing some of the most striking moments of the whole film, a level of frankness and detail in the destruction of familiar sights that scared audiences at the time—and still resonates in…

Based loosely on a novel by science fiction writer H. G. Wells, with a screenplay which he also wrote, Things to Come is a stunning visualisation of assumed predictions spanning a period of almost one hundred years, commencing in the year 1940. 

It's not predisposed to look through rose-coloured glasses at prospects, and as could be expected, violent confrontations are foreseen early on. They persist for several decades before finally giving way to systematic starvation and disease, and director William Cameron Menzies brings the bleak projections to the screen remarkably. 

It's an intriguing film with incredible sets and is epic in terms of it's mushrooming of ideas which it chews over, primarily dominated by the futility of war. There's some…

A film adapted by H. G. Wells from his own novel The Shape of Things to Come. Things to Come is most interesting (to me) for the way it predicts the incoming Second World War a few years before it actually happened. The film takes place in Everytown, which is plunged into war. The decades pass and the town then becomes the victim of disease and then a dictator, before salvation comes from the skies. It's basically a big budget spectacle with some impressive special effects but without much of a real story to pull it all together. The overarching message warning against war and too much progress feels rather preachy to the point where it comes off like a…

A neat collaboration between legendary art director/production designer William Cameron Menzies (who would also do Invaders From Mars nearly 2 decades later) and seminal science-fiction author H.G. Wells, who team up to realize his speculative polemical novel "The Shape of Things to Come" that predicted the aftermath of a second world war to be a plague-ridden post-apocalyptic dark age that would destroy mankind but also give it an opportunity to rebuild itself as a new pacifist utopia focused on scientific progress and... aircraft engineering.

In cinematic form any ideas this material had about manufacturing civilization, political dictatorships, organized religion (oddly missing from the film version) and warmongering savagery is largely dramatized as a series of dull and simplistic character debates/speeches…

A sometimes fascinating artifact of the 1930’s idea of futurism. H.G. Wells took some speculative essay writing of his and reshaped it into a screenplay for British production that would be the decades spanning Things to Come. It begins on a world war breakout at Christmas 1936, with lots of shocking death from dropped shell bombs in Everytown, England (Get it: “Everytown”). There seems to be less focus on character than on objective events as an endless war carries on for decades; after development of chemical warfare in the 1960’s, a plague wipes out much of the population. The midsection of the movie, following events of 1970, is made up of trite philosophical debates between war-mongers and peacemakers that is…

A stunning display of mind-blowing special effects and gorgeous futurist designs, this century-spanning piece of speculative fiction is one of the few mainstream Western films to prioritize humanity as a collective species instead of a handful of characters. There is no individual protagonist here — instead, the film focuses on human nature via a series of disparate groups and families, finding unexpected optimism in our destructive tendencies. Yes, there’s stiff acting and stilted dialogue that make the project feel like a cheap B-movie, but its epic scale and collectivist spirit make it an unlikely humanist midpoint between Battleship Potemkin and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The film, produced three years before the start of WWII, begins on the eve of a potential…