Things to Come: Wells's Blueprint for the Future Film

In 1936 a British film opened with a war starting on Christmas Day, in a city called Everytown that is unmistakably London, delivered by aircraft dropping bombs on civilians. The war in the film begins in 1940. The real one began in September 1939, and the aerial bombardment of British cities began the following year.

Things to Come got that right, and the getting-it-right is only the third or fourth most interesting thing about it. This is the film that decided what the future looks like — the white towers, the glass, the clean geometry, the people in tunics moving through vast bright volumes — and every future city since has been either agreeing with it or arguing with it.

It is also, and there is no polite way around this, a lecture. H.G. Wells wrote it, Wells was sixty-nine and certain, and he had opinions about human destiny that he intended you to receive.

Korda bought Wells and got Wells

Alexander Korda had made The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 and it had done what no British film had managed — it made real money in America. London Films was suddenly a studio with ambition, and Korda spent that ambition on the most prestigious author in Britain.

Wells was given control of a kind almost no novelist has ever had over a film adaptation. The screenplay is his, adapted from his 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come, and he was on set, and he issued instructions. He wanted the film to be an argument for a specific proposition: that nationalism and war would destroy civilisation, that the technicians and the engineers would rebuild it, and that humanity’s purpose is to keep going outward forever.

He got the argument. The film is structured as three acts across a hundred years. Everytown in 1940, prosperous and complacent, is bombed into rubble. Everytown in 1970 is a medieval ruin — the war has ground on for decades, a plague called the wandering sickness has finished what the bombs started, and a warlord called The Boss rules a few streets from a smashed town hall. Then Wings Over the World arrives: airmen, technocrats, a supranational order of engineers who have kept aviation alive and now propose to run the planet. They put the warlord’s people to sleep with a gas and take over. Everytown in 2036 is a gleaming subterranean city of white terraces and glass, and its central project is to fire two young people at the moon out of a Space Gun.

Menzies is the reason it survived

The director is William Cameron Menzies, and this is the film’s secret. Menzies was a designer first — he had designed The Thief of Bagdad in 1924, and a few years after this he would be the man for whom David O. Selznick coined the credit “production designer” on Gone with the Wind, because no existing title described what he did.

He directs Things to Come as a designer, which means he thinks in volumes and scale relationships rather than in performances. Vincent Korda’s sets and Menzies’s staging give you an Everytown of 2036 that is enormous, and the enormity is achieved through composition — figures placed small at the bottom of frames dominated by white space, galleries receding into depth, the eye pulled up. Georges Périnal photographs it with a high-key clarity that was uncommon for the period; the future is over-lit on purpose, because Wells’s future has nothing to hide.

The reconstruction montage is the film’s technical peak and the sequence to isolate. Everytown is rebuilt from ruin to metropolis in a passage of pure cinema — machines, cutting, dissolves, scale, the score driving it — and it has no dialogue and needs none. It is the most exhilarating stretch in the picture, and it is exhilarating precisely because Wells has temporarily stopped talking and Menzies has been left alone with a camera and a budget.

The other thing to look at is the 1970 ruin. Menzies gets a genuine idea across without a line: the survivors are living in the wreckage of 1940 Everytown, wearing scavenged clothes, and the streets are the same streets. The film shows you a familiar place with the civilisation stripped out of it, and it does it by dressing its own first act as an archaeological site. That is design as argument.

Bliss wrote the score first

Arthur Bliss composed the music, and the circumstance is the point: he wrote substantial portions of it before and during production rather than after the cut, and sequences were then edited to the music. That inversion was close to unheard of in 1936, and it is why the reconstruction montage has the shape it does — the images are following the score.

Bliss was a serious concert composer, and the Things to Come suite is still performed as a concert work, which almost nothing from the era’s film music can claim. What it supplies to the film is a kind of civic grandeur — brass, march, forward motion — that carries Wells’s optimism when the dialogue is busy strangling it. When the film soars, Bliss is usually the one lifting it.

The real ancestors

Metropolis is unavoidable, and the relationship is a quarrel. Lang’s 1927 city and Korda’s 2036 Everytown are built on the same principle — the future is a design problem, and the design carries the meaning — and they reach opposite verdicts. Lang’s towers are a machine for eating workers. Wells’s towers are a machine for freeing them. Lang put the proletariat underground as a hell; Wells puts everyone underground as a triumph of engineering. Two films, one aesthetic, incompatible politics.

The deeper ancestor is the cannon. The Space Gun that ends Things to Come is Jules Verne’s cannon from From the Earth to the Moon, fired at the moon, exactly as it was in A Trip to the Moon thirty-four years earlier. Méliès staged that cannon as a joke — a chorus line, a pompous professor, a moon that winces. Wells stages the same device as a cathedral, and the two films together are the neatest possible demonstration of what happened to science fiction in three decades: the same image, played first as farce and then as scripture.

Downstream, the debt is enormous and rarely paid. Forbidden Planet’s clean bright futurism, the whole design language of mid-century screen tomorrow, and eventually 2001 — which shares this film’s conviction that humanity’s story ends with a launch and a question — all run through Everytown.

The honest case against it

The film is didactic to a degree that would be unbearable if it were less beautiful. Wells’s characters do not converse; they orate. Raymond Massey plays both John Cabal and his descendant Oswald as a man delivering a manifesto, and Cedric Hardwicke’s Theotocopulos — the artist who leads a mob against progress — exists purely so that Wells can have someone lose an argument on camera.

And the politics are worse than dated. Wings Over the World is a self-appointed elite of technicians who gas a population into unconsciousness and then rule it without an election, and the film regards this as the happy turn. Wells means it. The airmen are the heroes, the democratic question is never raised, and the film’s proposed cure for authoritarianism is a better class of authoritarian. Watching it now, the most chilling scene is meant to be the most triumphant.

Ralph Richardson gets the best of it as The Boss, and it is telling that the film’s most alive performance belongs to its warlord — Richardson plays him as a strutting, insecure, entirely recognisable small man, and he has more human texture than every technocrat combined. Wells wrote him as a demonstration of what to sweep away. Richardson turned him into the only person in the film.

Where to find it

The BFI and Criterion restorations are both good, and it matters here because Périnal’s whites are the film — a poor copy turns Menzies’s luminous future into grey mush. Various cuts circulate; the film was trimmed after its premiere and the longer restorations are the ones to seek. It runs around a hundred minutes.

The verdict: Things to Come is the most beautiful lecture in cinema, and the century has answered it. Wells got the Blitz right and the cure wrong, and the film’s design has outlived its argument so completely that most people who have absorbed its images have no idea they came with a sermon attached. Watch it for Menzies. Argue with it afterwards. Both are the point.

Spoilers below

The Space Gun sequence is where everything the film is comes to a head. Cabal’s granddaughter and Passworthy’s son are to be fired at the moon, and Theotocopulos raises a mob to stop the launch — his case being that humanity needs rest, that progress is a treadmill, that enough is enough. The mob runs at the gun. The launch beats them by minutes.

Read it straight and it is a triumph. Read it honestly and the film has just shown you an unelected government ignoring a popular uprising in order to complete a prestige project, and framed the crowd as vandals. Wells’s contempt for the objectors is total, and Hardwicke plays Theotocopulos as a poseur precisely so that his argument — which is a reasonable argument — arrives discredited by its messenger.

Then the final scene, which is genuinely great and largely undoes my complaints. Cabal and Passworthy stand at a telescope watching the capsule cross the sky, and Passworthy, whose son is in it, asks the obvious human question: when does it stop? And Cabal gives the film’s closing speech — the choice between the whole universe and nothing, all the stars or the dust — and Massey plays it with an absolutism that is thrilling and frightening in equal measure.

The last shot is two men looking up, and Wells declines to resolve the question. The film has spent a hundred minutes insisting it has the answers and closes on an interrogative, with Bliss’s brass underneath. Whatever else is wrong with it, that ending has the nerve of a genuine work of art, and it is the moment where the lecture becomes a film.