Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Written by H.G. Wells, Accurately Predicts the World’s Very Dark Future

“We live in inter­est­ing, excit­ing, and anx­ious times,” declares the boom­ing nar­ra­tion that opens the movie trail­er above. Truer words were nev­er spo­ken about our age — or about the mid-1930s, the times to which the nar­ra­tor actu­al­ly refers. But the pic­ture itself tells a sto­ry about the future, one extend­ing deep into the 21st cen­tu­ry: a hun­dred-year saga of decades-long war, a new Dark Age, and, by the mid-2050s, a rebuild­ing of soci­ety as a kind of indus­tri­al Utopia run by a tech­no­crat­ic world gov­ern­ment. It will sur­prise no one famil­iar with his sen­si­bil­i­ty that the screen­play for the film, Things to Come, came from the mind of H.G. Wells. Watch it in full on YouTube or Archive.org.

Welles had made his name long before with imag­i­na­tive nov­els like The Time MachineThe Island of Doc­tor More­auThe Invis­i­ble Man, and The War of the Worlds (find them in our list of Free eBooks), all pub­lished in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry. By the time the oppor­tu­ni­ty came around to make a big-bud­get cin­e­ma spec­ta­cle with pro­duc­er Alexan­der Kor­da and direc­tor William Cameron Men­zies, con­ceived in part as a rebuke to Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, the writer had set­tled into his role as a kind of “emi­nent for­tune teller,” as New York Times crit­ic Frank Nugent described him in his review of the col­lab­o­ra­tion’s final prod­uct.

“Typ­i­cal Well­sian con­jec­ture,” Nugent con­tin­ues, “it ranges from the rea­son­ably pos­si­ble to the rea­son­ably fan­tas­tic; but true or false, fan­ci­ful or log­i­cal, it is an absorb­ing, provoca­tive and impres­sive­ly staged pro­duc­tion.” It includ­ed work from not just impor­tant fig­ures in the his­to­ry of film­mak­ing (Men­zies, for instance, invent­ed the job of pro­duc­tion design­er) but the his­to­ry of art as well, such as the Bauhaus’ Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy. You can watch and judge for your­self the free ver­sion of Things to Come avail­able on YouTube or, much prefer­able to the cinephile, the restored and much-sup­ple­ment­ed Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion edi­tion, whose extras include unused footage that more ful­ly shows Moholy-Nagy’s con­tri­bu­tions.

At the time, this much-bal­ly­hooed spec­ta­cle-prophe­cy drew respons­es not just from movie crit­ics, but from oth­er emi­nent writ­ers as well. In his Cri­te­ri­on essay “Whith­er Mankind?”, Geof­frey O’Brien quotes those of both Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell. “The heav­en of Wells and Alexan­der Kor­da, like that of so many oth­er escha­tol­o­gists and set design­ers, is not much dif­fer­ent than their hell, though even less charm­ing,” Borges com­plained of the envi­sioned near-per­fec­tion of its dis­tant future. Wells, like many 19th-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies, instinc­tive­ly asso­ci­at­ed tech­no­log­i­cal progress with the moral vari­ety, but Borges saw a dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion in the present, when “the pow­er of almost all tyrants aris­es from their con­trol of tech­nol­o­gy.”

Things to Come has, how­ev­er, received ret­ro­spec­tive cred­it for pre­dict­ing glob­al war just ahead. In its first act, the Lon­don-like Every­town suf­fers an aer­i­al bomb­ing raid which sets the whole civ­i­liza­tion-destroy­ing con­flict in motion. Not long after the real Blitz came, Orwell looked back at the film and wrote, omi­nous­ly, that “much of what Wells has imag­ined and worked for is phys­i­cal­ly there in Nazi Ger­many. The order, the plan­ning, the State encour­age­ment of sci­ence, the steel, the con­crete, the air­planes, are all there, but all in the ser­vice of ideas appro­pri­ate to the Stone Age.” Or, in Nugen­t’s chill­ing words of 1936, “There’s noth­ing we can do now but sit back and wait for the holo­caust. If Mr. Wells is right, we are in for an inter­est­ing cen­tu­ry.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Sem­i­nal Sci-Fi Nov­el The War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells Inter­views Joseph Stal­in in 1934; Declares “I Am More to The Left Than You, Mr. Stal­in”

The Dead Authors Pod­cast: H.G. Wells Com­i­cal­ly Revives Lit­er­ary Greats with His Time Machine

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.


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