Things to Come (1936)

SCI-FI

AN WELL MADE FILM WITH HOPES FOR THE FUTURE. DON'T BE FOOLED BY THE COVER...IT IS NOT A COLORIZED COPY OF THE FILM. July 21, 2008

One of sci-fi's most underrated movies.

It's a great movie and like the best sci-fi it has a solid story to complement the special effects, it's a prophetic story even anticipating WWII, and giving a social critique about man's relationship with technology and where ourfuture might lead us, solid acting, good story, but bear in mind that it's from an era before CGI and in the infancy of big budgets and special effects. June 30, 2008

THINGS TO COME (Colorized) - Definitely worth the price

First of all, I just wish to clear the air for those fans who may be sitting on the edge wondering if they should buy another poor copy of THINGS TO COME, a wonderful but extremely dated film. This DVD transfer is about the best I have watched since I started collecting copies of this old movie.

All my prior VHS and DVD copies were made from terribly degraded originals and could barely be watched without feeling like you weren't forcing the situation. This DVD is far from perfect, but may possibly represent the best they can now do, and is worth the price in any case. I really don't know the business of digital enhancement, however, I suspect a more meticulous job of making the transfer might improve the DVD only slightly, after all these years of wear and tear on the film.

Viewers interested in the preservation of the original B&W film will be happy to read that an enhanced B&W copy has been included on the DVD. As a test, you might wish to turn down the color setting to "zero" and screen the color version in B&W and see if you can tell the difference between the two.

For the record, when I first saw this movie as a child I was mesmerized by the story and its message and would have given the film five stars. Now, with more mature taste for sci-fi and after the jading of senior citizenship, I would only rate it at three stars. By today's standards the script (which sounds very idealistic and elitist) could use some major rewriting. Also, this film's special effects would benefit immensely from today's precision modeling and CGI effects. Then again, it would no longer be the THINGS TO COME we all love.

I must confess, I have never read the HG Well's book to compare the script to, and it may also contain narratives I consider "elitist". This is especially true when an alliance of engineers, technicians and aviators believe their skills and common sense can be used to govern the world. I only believed in technocracy when I was a small child.

If I may just comment on the special effects used to represent the march of technology and creation of a new age; this series of images was very impressive in the early 50's when I first watched it. It is interesting to see how a socialistic-technocracy could lead to the same Earth raping that we now credit only capitalism with. It was, however, nice to watch the unbridled march of technology without a green peace movement. Oh yes, they did have that anti-technology movement at the end of the film when their spokesman said attempting to stop the first lunar flight, "We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail". I bet NASA can relate to that statement which predicted that no good accomplishment will go unpunished.

It is also amazing to me how the imagined technologies of the future shown by this film were outstripped by actual inventions and innovations in (at least) the following fields: aviation, space, medicine, manufacturing, mining, tunneling, electronics, computers, the world wide web, communications, TV, radio, and robotics (not to mention nano-technology). We now watch more impressive real world machines on nightly news and TV episodes of Modern Marvels.

I no longer understand what Raymond Massey was raving about during the last two minutes of the film. Somehow his words drove me to tears when I was a boy of about eight, back when I thought I understood what he was gibbering about.
June 17, 2008

Predictions of the future

It is hard to believe that the film was created so long ago. Although audiences back then laughed at the large screen televisions and the wrist comunicators, it was an accurate prediction of today. It also depicts that nothing really changes, the same people fight to stop other people from doing what they believe is right. They had the same "DO GOODERS" back then. March 19, 2008

There sure is a future for Wells, but what a future !

H.G. Wells in 1936 was past his prime and the books of his that will survive were long gone by. He was coming to the end of his life and he was confronted to his dream gone sour. At the very beginning of the 20th century he defended the idea that the world was doomed because the evolution of species, natural biology, on one side, and Marxism, market economy on the other side, were necessarily leading to the victory of the weaker over the stronger due to the simple criterion of number. The weaker were the mass of humanity and the stronger were the minority elite. He defended then a strict eugenic policy with the elimination of all those who were in a way or another weakening the human race. First of all the non-Caucasian, with the only exception of the Jews who would disappear thanks to mixed marriages. Then, within the Caucasian community all those who were not healthy, the alcoholics, the mentally disabled, all those who were genetically disabled, etc. That was not Hitler. That was H.G. Wells and that was not after the first world war. That was more than ten years before. And twenty years before the first world war he had published The Time Machine that defended the idea that the human "race", left to its own means and due to the vaster cosmological evolution of life on earth, would see the differentiation of the human "race" into two "species": the working class would become a subterranean laborious species and the bourgeoisie would become an idle surface species. The point was in the novel that the surface sophisticated and weak idle species was the prey of the other species who were the predators. Wells was convinced humanity was in danger and politicians were supposed to stop this evolution by imposing a strict eugenic policy. The first countries to follow this injunction were the Scandinavian countries who were also the last to drop it only very recently for some of them. The film here proposes a vision of 2036 with a world government that is absolutely dictatorial in the fact that there is no election, no parliament, no really democratic institution, only peace imposed by military conquest, and the government is dominated by one man or at the most one man and his few councilors. And in that future world all, absolutely all human beings are Caucasians. Wells was able to imagine humanity being completely white by 2036. Amazing. Wells envisaged some kind of a rebellion but that would be short lived and lead to nothing at all. The last sentences are the vision of this white civilization conquering the whole universe when contemplating the sky and its stars and planets. Frightening. And that was produced in 1936. All the more frightening since nowhere the slightest mention of Hitlerism, fascism, Japanese imperialism or Stalinism can be found. But it is essential to have that film in a good restored edition because it is crucial to have a full vision of H.G. Wells. We are obviously very far away from the Brave New World of absolute "democratic" social selection, or the Animal Farm of the dictatorship of the porcine proletariat, or the 1984 of the abstract mediatic dictatorship of Big Brother. This vision is at least just as much frightening as the three others. And I only want to compare Wells with the British science fiction writers of his days. It would be unfair to go beyond. This reveals that in England in these first three decades of the 20th century there was a tremendous fear among intellectuals: the fear that the future would only be somber, bleak and in the form of an impasse of some kind.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
January 30, 2008

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