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Things to ComeThings To Come; it's the one all the fantasy film reference books have in the dreary opening chapter, along with that robot woman from Metropolis's and Le Voyage Dans La Lune's big, grumpy lunar face. You feel you know these movies, but most of us are only familiar with the stills, and then skim on to read about the 1950s giant insect and UFO bonanzas. Korda's film now exists in audience's minds merely as a reputation and a bunch of familiar, gee-whiz photos.
It's not difficult to see why it's fallen out of favour. While the original King Kong still has an action-filled plot and a love story amongst all the effects, Things To Come feels more like a lecture, sweeping through 100 years of future-history rather than giving audiences any characters to engage with.
Kicking off in 1940, the residents of 'Everytown' are too busy getting ready for Christmas to bother with rumours of an approaching war. Said war of course happens, demolishing the city with aerial bombardment and leaving survivors to face the 'Wandering Sickness', a ghastly form of germ warfare that makes its victims, well, wander about aimlessly. After 30 years of this, the situation stabilises but the population has taken a backward step into feudal living, with local warlord The Boss (Ralph Richardson) calling the shots, even if he seems to be legless much of the time, which may explain his habit of ruling while dressed in a sheepskin rug.
Enter John Cabal (Raymond Massey), landing in his snazzy plane and wearing a natty S&M vacuum suit. Cabal represents 'Wings Over The World', a benign version of SPECTRE from the Bond movies, who hope to use technology and co-operation to build a new order, albeit a really nice, friendly sort of new order.
From here we leapfrog into tomorrow, specifically 2036 where togas are this season's black and there's much excitement about using a whopping great gun to fire people in a rocket at the moon. But should they? That's right, there's dissension in the ranks with Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke) raising a stink and inexplicably calling for everyone to stop making the world a better place because he hates technology, unless it's the sort that allows him to appear live on a colossal floating TV screen so he can address hundreds of enthusiastic supporters.
The temptation is to judge the film on how accurate its predictions were, to which the answer is 'not very'. In fact the only one it gets spot-on is that in 1966, the man about town did indeed sport a mop-top hair-do, though not while riding in a car pulled along by a horse. But Wells was here less interested in predicting iPods and DVDs than he was in offering arguments for how humans should approach the future. The film presents a simple choice between remaining in an ignorant, destructive state, living in fear of change, or embracing progress.
Admittedly its unusual structure, melodramatic acting style and necessary decision to ditch recurring characters in favour of a string of briefly-glimpsed descendents may make it an unusual ride for modern audiences but it's well worth checking out, not just for the imaginative model effects work, but also as a reminder that, at its best, science fiction is concerned with exploring ideas and possibilities rather than just piling fancy hardware onto a goodies v baddies plot.
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