The story begins in 1940, a mere four years into the future when the film was being made, with an impressive montage that cuts back and forth between the Christmas festivities of the fictional Everytown and ominous headlines and sandwich boards portending a coming war. The increasingly rapid juxtaposition of holiday imagery in which citizens happily, even blithely, go about their lives, and the bold, all-caps warnings of imminent war is a potent summation of our best-of-times tunnel vision; it is also, as it turns out, one of the first instances of Wells’s ham-handedness with exposition and director William Cameron Menzies’s awkwardness with any scene not involving complex special effects, as he insists on stating outright what was clearly implied in the montage by inserting a flat, expository sequence in which several characters debate the likelihood of the coming war, a conversation that is cut short by air raid sirens and dire loud-speaker warnings. Soon bombs are falling, anti-aircraft guns are firing away from the city square, and Everytown is reduced to rubble.

From there, the film takes us through several decades of war, as the entirety of human civilization is effectively blasted back to a medieval state of disparate warring clans, lack of communication, and primitive lifestyles. Wells’s idea is that, for humanity to truly move forward, our current state of affairs must be fundamentally obliterated, which is accomplished by the thirty-year world war depicted in the film and a purposefully released plague called the Wandering Sickness that turns people into stumbling, infectious automatons (and the film, temporarily at least, into an intriguing forerunner of modern zombie narratives). From the rubble emerges a new form of civilization based on science and reason that creates a one-world order by eliminating all the warring nation-states and bringing everyone together under a singular authority guided by the wisdom of science and technology. The film’s final third takes us to a new and improved Everytown (at least from Wells’s perspective) in which humanity has built a shining, modern beacon of civilization underground (Wells detested the idea of skyscrapers being the vision of the future, which is why he held Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in such low regard). Having somehow solved all of the problems afflicting previous iterations of human society—include poverty, hunger, and violence—this new utopian society can only look onward and upward, its only real problem being a group of dissenters who feel it is unwise to send people into outer space, which in Wells’s terms represents the ultimate in scientific accomplishment.

As the film’s narrative covers nearly 100 years of an alternate future, from 1940 to 2036, it is not surprising that the most impressive aspect of Things to Come is its detailed visualization of that which its title promises. Overseen by production designer Vincent Kora (brother of producer Alexander Korda), who would later win an Oscar for his exceptional work on The Thief of Bagdad (1940), the film’s imagery is consistently stunning, conveying with an impressive sense of realism everything from a postwar wasteland in which humanity survives amid teetering rubble, to a 21st-century future of massive, gleaming white interiors that resemble either an immense airport terminal or a shopping mall (interestingly, one predictive detail they get absolutely right is the use of flat-screen televisions in a rectangular aspect ratio). All of this imagery is accomplished via an often seamless mixture of virtually every special effects trick available at the time: miniatures, forced perspective, gargantuan sets, and various optical effects. As far as imagery goes, Things to Come is a masterpiece.

Everything else, however, is a something of a disaster. Wells was a brilliant man—his voluminous output of science fiction, history, and political and social writing attests to both his vast intellect and his wide-ranging interests—but that brilliance came at the expense of grand ego, which he inflicted on virtually every aspect of Things to Come (a few years earlier he had been incensed at the changes made to his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau for the 1933 film Island of Lost Souls, and we might speculate that his complete control here was partially to balance out that perceived injustice). Believing that he knew cinema as well as he knew the written word, he insisted on overseeing every aspect of the film, giving his approval to the smallest details of set design and costume and contractually requiring that not a single word of his screenplay, which was based on his prophetic books The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), be changed. Unfortunately, Wells proved to have a tin ear for both dialogue and the incorporation of ideas into the narrative flow, as he often grinds the story to a halt so that a character or characters can pontificate, delivering long-winded speeches that, while full of fascinating, if sometimes unsettling, ideas, feel pretentious and out-of-place.

The problem was further compounded by the hiring of William Cameron Menzies as director. A gifted production designer and art director whose most notable work includes the silent version of The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Gone With the Wind (1939), he was notorious for his inability (or disinclation) to work with actors, favoring instead a hyper-focus on the film’s look (while Alfred Hitchcock famously referred to actors as cattle, as least he recognized their presence). Thus, Wells’s leaden screenplay is further weighted down by flat performances from otherwise good actors, which renders the film inert at exactly the times when it should be drawing us in (the only real exception is Ralph Richardson, who brings wonderfully theatrical flair to his portrayal of an opportunistic warlord).

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film of comparably epic aspirations, provides an interesting counterpoint here, as it would seem to have some of the same flaws (grand visual design, lack of characterization). Yet, 2001 transcends that potential flaw because its uninteresting human characters are a crucial part of Kubrick’s depiction of a dehumanized future run by technology. Wells, on the other hand, viewed technology as the liberator of humanity, yet his denizens of the future are so painfully dull that we feel the need to cheer on the rebel force trying to stop the march of progress, the very opposite response we’re intended to have. The supposed wonders of the film’s utopian vision of a World State run by benevolent, reasonable, incorruptible technocrats is undermined by the flattening of human emotion (Wells’s more radical ideas about the elimination of religion, capitalism, and individual rights, which are present in his writings, are implied, rather than stated). Where Kubrick merges ideas and imagery to emphasize the story’s underlying themes, Wells puts them at odds with each other, making us yearn for the messiness of an earlier age. Had he and the filmmakers at his beck and call managed to integrate the scope of his ideas with the film’s detailed vision of a future that takes us from a war-torn dystopia to a socialist utopia, Things to Come might have been a true science fiction classic, rather than a disappointing lesson learned about the limitations of amazing imagery bereft of interesting characters and narrative.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection