Year: 1936
Director: William Cameron Menzies
Country: UK
Language: English
From A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Melancholia (2011), world cinema has been filled with thought provoking, exciting and audacious Science fiction films. Though I would claim that the greatest of these is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a fantastic epic filled with enticing visual imagery, William Cameron Menzies' apocalyptic Things to Come is definitely in the top ten. Strangely under-rated, I had not even heard of this film until I stumbled upon it on Hulu+.
Based on a novel by H.G Wells, Things to Come consists of a global war that begins in 1940. This war drags out over many decades until most of the people still alive (mostly those born after the war started) do not even know who started it or why. Nothing is being manufactured at all any more and society has broken down into primitive localized communities. In 1966 a great plague wipes out most of what people are left but small numbers still survive. One day a strange aircraft lands at one of these communities and its pilot tells of an organization which is rebuilding civilization and slowly moving across the world re-civilizing these groups of survivors.
Things to Come started with the great science fiction writer known as H.G Wells claiming Metropolis to be "quite the silliest film". Metropolis is, of course, one of the most acclaimed sci-fi films ever made. Directed by German Director Fritz Lang, it is quite unusual for one to claim the film is "silly". A decade later Alexander Korda (The Private Life of Don Juan) would give Wells enormous creative freedom to write a movie version of his novel The Shape of Things to Come.
The film is not only better than Metropolis, but it's a new landmark in the genre. It is a spectacular production, visually stimulating and filled with great detail of its apocalyptic universe. It presents opposing points of view on the issues it raises, examining the nature of progress. However, while most films like this would degrade into either a chatty or action-filled mess, Things to Come remains provocative the whole way through.
In conclusion, while some of Wells dialogue is not very convincing and a bit too heavy, William Cameron Menzies is quite skillful in his direction and the acting is excellent overall. It is absolutely fascinating to watch a film from 1935 that predicted another World War by 1940. It is also remarkable to realize that war was definitely weighing heavily on the minds of the English. While World War Two wasn't the end of the world, it was certainly the end of an empire. Praise it! 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment