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Mark Kermode reviews Things to Come (1936) | BFI Player
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2018
- Mark revists William Cameron Menzies' pioneering sci-fi film, based on H.G. Wells' novel, which postulates a dark and destructive century for an imagined Britain.
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I keep meaning to watch this - huge Wells fan, not to mention Ken Russell fan!
I just watched this film. It was fantastic!
The special effects in this film are great for its day. The story hasn't aged too well, and neither has the stilted acting and staccato dialogue, but it's interesting nonetheless. The best scene is the montage of the machines working set to imposing music.
Arthur C Clarke recommended this movie to Stanley Kubrick when they were making 2001. Kubrick said he was never going to watch another film again that Clarke suggested.
Yeah, it's kind of boring isn't it?
Great FX for the time
It is one of my favourite sci fi films of all time. Frighteningly fortelling World War 2 and machinery that would transpire in decades to come.
A must see film and an excellent review
This is a fascinating movie but for all the wrong reasons. You might want to read some biographies of Wells or his latter-day works in the '40s. He was a huge proponent of eugenics and Social Darwinism and believed the world should be run by a scientific elite unanswerable anyone but themselves and that it would take massive culls to get to the promised utopia. Just about the same as any empire ancient or modern or tin pot dictator. And of course, none of these leaders would ever abuse their power or turn into Caligulas. His best SF work was over a ten year period 1885 - 1905, after which he coasted on his reputation and was hectoring lecturing ass-hole with delusions of granduer. He is diametrically the opposite of Orwell, who actually liked people of all classes and warned of the Wellisian nightmare in '1984', just as E.M. Forster did in 'The Machine Stops'. The film was a financial disaster and ruined Korda's London Films and led to their retrenchment. Kubrick, on seeing the film after Clarke's recommendation found it risible. And as for Kermode's idea that it was the first SF cinema classic, Frankenstein (1931), King Kong (1933, lost world genre), The Invisible Man (1933, Wells at his peak) and 'The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) are far better candidates. The ending is by far the best part of this stilted lecture.
And let's not forget Metropolis (1927) or Melies' Voyage to the Moon (1902) if we want to talk earlier SF cinematic classics!
Those are not necessarily bad ideas, and the movie is fantastic.
@@shelbyseelbach9568Eugenics "not necessarily a bad idea." Gtfoh.
@@heidiedelweiss5952 Exactly, not a bad idea at all. Survival of the fittest made us modern humans. Now there are billions of us, but our gene pool is pure crap.
Orwell didn't like "people of all classes". Though I'm sure he did not have personal animosity to the upper class, he was a lifelong socialist who believed in a society without classes. He was on the side of the working class.
Is anyone watching this in 2020 during the pandemic, & seeing some parallels between the wandering sickness, & the coronavirus?
Wells based it on the Spanish Influenza outbreak that followed the First World War, so there are some parallels with Covid-19 but our situation is quite different.
I would’ve watched this film… if the Omni viewer hadn’t already torn it to shreds in an atomic roast
I watched it two days ago on Amazon, somehow I'd got to 54 without ever seeing it. My own "review" is that while it may be stylistically significant or groundbreaking, as a movie it's bloody awful. The first section- a full half hour of virtually uninterrupted montage accompanied by that kind of music that is deafening however quietly you play it, is like being yelled at by a drunk in the street. In the middle section, society has collapsed into barbarism. Only two things survive- the clipped RP accents of RADA and an obsession with aeroplanes. Ralph Richardson slurs his way from scene to scene, bellowing about aeroplanes, surrounded by a motley of aero-nerds, discussing aeroplanes. A man from the first section arrives, by aeroplane, and the aeroplane debates turn up a notch, before finally the misery ends when everyone is put to sleep by gas dropped by aeroplanes. Never has a movie been more about aeroplanes. Aeroplanes are the solution to the problem. Every problem. Ever.
The third section shows the Utopian future created by men with aeroplanes. Everyone wears shorts, demonstrating why most men should not wear shorts, and live in cities where sunlight is considered old fashioned under a benign dictatorship, declaiming about progress as if on stage at the Old Vic. Aeroplanes are good, but people don't like the idea of going into space (maybe because aeroplanes don't work there) and a riot breaks out, which the benign dictator solves by firing the space gun and killing all the dissenters, which would be an interesting solution to the current BLM riots.
The message of the movie seems to be that the ideal human society is a dictatorship by men in shorts who fly aeroplanes. The whole thing is like being slapped in the face for an hour and a half. Its like an Ayn Rand for socialists. You've already got the message but it just rants on and on.
Good special effects for its time though.
What a tedious, philistine take.
A wonderfully entertaining review sir.
@@jonkallas7326 Thank you :)
This is a fascinating movie. To criticize it based on modern production techniques is to do it a serious injustice. To NOT look at this movie from the point of view of a post WWI movie audience, some of whom were no doubt actually exposed to poison gas in that terrible war and who are on the precipice of yet ANOTHER war is just sad. Not seeing "The Boss" as how Governments the world over operate? Sadder still. All the while, missing the point of competition for oil, oil being converted into synthetic fuel by an obviously nationized industry under a dictatorship as EXACTLY the Nazis did? Yes sadder still. Sure, you can call this film a dinosaur. But if you missed the absurdity of World Powers TODAY that are defending ACCESS TO DINOSAUR BLUBBER WITH WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, you obviously don't reside in "Everytown". The political statement of the futility of war as opposed to industry and socialism was CERTAINLY on the minds of the post WWI Audience! It must NOT be forgotten that there were mutinies on the front that went way past "the Criistmas Truce" and that socialism was on the rise in Germany, even as the die was cast for Russia and the Czar. ALL of these things HAPPENED. And the UK moved TOWARDS and not away from Socialism immediately after the war. These are predictions that HG Wells made and they are FACTS that indeed did come to be! This film is an underappreciated GEM. Setting ASIDE the film? Missing the lessons of History? Saddest yet: And we keep getting "The Boss", over and over again. Movies that make you think don't need super special effects or top notch acting. 73 DE W8LV BILL
HG Wells was himself a socialist (at least, he considered himself to be a socialist).
why does this remind me of brexit
This film has been so heavily mutilated that it can never be appreciated as its creators intended. The strange errors in continuity which pepper the film, particularly the second half, are both puzzling and annoying. Some of the sets are wonderful, others laughable and the same applies to the perfomances of the actors. Edward Chapman is particularly good as Passworthy, Ralph Richardson is odd as The Chief and Margaretta Scott is very good although half her performance was cut out. Raymond Massey dominates the film with his marvelous voice although he has to deliver some terrible lines. For a film that was so prestigious and expensive one would have thought that more care would be lavished on it, but there are too many errors. Even the credits at the beginning look amateur (just look at the G on the word Things). All in all this looks like the promise of things to come which never actually arrived. Although, the city at the end does have a passing similarity to Milton Keynes.
Agreed
We do, though, have a cutting script for a version of the film somewhere between the premiere length of 108m 41s and the general UK release of 98m 07s, but closer to the former than the latter. This means we do actually have a pretty good idea of what the premiere actually looked like, and thus most of the-now lost dialogue is known. A "Virtual Extended Version" - using the extant footage, script extracts, and production photographs - reflecting is included on the Network DVD and BD releases.
Korda did have the chance to preserve a longer version, but instead donated a copy of the 96m 31s US version to the BFI/NFA in 1936, although it is the best quality extant copy.
I loved the chief in particular.
A truly important and groundbreaking film but a silted bore and a woeful roadmap to a technocratic Totalitarian super-state. Fingers crossed that for once, the inbreeding and moral collapse at the top wouldn't lead to a Caligula in a one world state. Wells had long ago left his classic period, a 5 year hot streak that produced his four great SF novels, and was more interested in eugenics and world policy, alas. It's the type of SF film to put off people from SF.
The first 30 mins are great then hg wells ruins it
Thie aesthetic of this film has a fascist grandeur to it, which is quite unBritish. A butchered masterpiece.