Perhaps a case of too many cooks - its authors included HG Wells, producer Alexander Korda and director William Cameron Menzies, with costumes by the Marchioness of Queensbury - Things to Come remains a striking attempt by the British film industry of the early sound years to do something on a scale comparable to its American and European cousins. Most surprising of all is how it takes the form of an almanac: Wells's (gloomy) prediction, from the perspective of the mid-1930s, of how the next hundred years would pan out, and affect the residents of Everytown (which, with its department stores and domed cathedral, can't help but remind you this is a production of Korda's London Film). From the outbreak of war in 1940 - an inevitability, seemingly - society descends into a feudal state before the arrival of extraterrestrial life (well, Raymond Massey as a Canadian in a spacesuit) sometime in the early 1970s.As an attempt at seeing the future, it's way off; as sociological sci-fi, it's nothing Metropolis hadn't done ten years before. Nonetheless, whole stretches are fascinating. The opening scenes - with a warmongering press driving large crowds out onto Vincent Korda's vast studio sets - now look like the missing link between Potemkin and Alphaville, while the closing section, set in 2036, offers a truly bizarre Star Trek-meets-I, Claudius aesthetic. If the second act - detailing the struggle for supremacy between a Richard III-like philistine king and Massey's intergalactic ambassador for enlightenment, representing a warrior race and a nation of thinkers, respectively - seems dramatically stunted and prone to didacticism, the film retains some value for historians, suggesting how its producer, hot off the back of The Private Life of Henry VIII, could turn even the future into some kind of period piece.
Things to Come is available on DVD through Network.
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