H.G. Wells-written 1930s futurist take on what the next hundred years might be like. It predicts World War II, but is wrong about everything else. That only makes it more offbeat, though. It was made in a time before The Bomb. Here, WWII lasts decades and leads to years of chaotic re-structuring in a civilization that looks like it got smacked with the apocalypse.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, instead of trying on bell bottoms and listening to Sly and the Family Stone, people here are wearing rags and puttering around ruins from the 1930s. Instead of having lively conversations about Richard Nixon, Miles Davis, Norman Mailer, Jean-Luc Godard, Kent State or The Match Game, the sad souls of Things to Come are mostly illiterate and under the rule of shabby despots (as portrayed by a foaming Ralph Richardson). Instead of trying LSD, these poor fucks are worried about coming down with the dreaded “Wandering Sickness”.
It’s not all bleak, though. Humanity eventually gets it together, lives in spaces that look they’re made entirely of glass and ascends to a culture that celebrates knowledge above all else. This film tells the strange path of how they got there. Directed by seminal movie art director William Cameron Menzies, whose characters are mere pawns in the game, warm bodies to populate the art deco Flash Gordon production design. It’s a genuine movie antique in that it’s not very useful today, but still qualifies as a crazy curiosity worth a look.