Lambie Reviews Things to Come

Year: 1936
Accolades: One of 1001 films you must see before you die, and also just essential science fiction

Science fiction is a tricky business, particularly those stories that deal with the future. You have to make the audience believe that the future you are presenting is a possible future that could concievably happen. Films of the past have to hold up by portrayting a future that could have happened. Such films usually portray what the future is like by using design elements, and then using these elements to help tell the story. Classic films from Blade Runner to Star Wars use their look and feel to help tell the story.

Things to Come is different. In this film, the design of the future is the story. Written by none other than H. G. Wells, this is his and director William Menzies' attempt to explore what could happen to humanity in the future and how we would actually reach that point. The whole premise of this film is to examine what societies might be like in the future, and also to suggest how humanity might fall into these social structures.

The story begins in 1940, so from the point of view of the release date we are in the (albeit immediate) future, and spans a period of 100 years. It wasn't far off in suggesting another world war was looming, and almost predicted the London blitz to the letter, the portrayal of which is spookily reminiscent to what actually happened in London. This, though, is where the plausibility comes in but where the future diverges from what we know.

Instead of only lasting for a few years, this war rages on for about 25. The unnamed enemy uses chemical warfare amongst their weaponry, which eventually spreads a disease that wipes out half of humanity. When the disease is finally irradiated in the second half of the 60's, the world has descended into a sort of Mad Max style future, just with a whole lot more people and infrastructure. There's no petrol, which means no cars (that aren't pulled by horses) and no working planes. A sighting of a plane in the air leads to a united human race and a series of events that ends in the future, where people have become suspicious of the relentless progress that they themselves have been a part of.

The characters and characterisation in this film is noticeably weak. The episodic nature of progressing from time period to time period means that characters don't get the space to develop. They are introduced, they do their bit, and they either die, or just become irrelevant as their ancestors take over. But on the other hand, the characters are almost irrelevant anyway.

They are simply the tool by which Wells and Menzies explore the nature of human society and the human psyche. The film raises a whole slew of interesting questions. Is a forced peace really peace? What are the rules in chemical warfare, particularly in regards to compassion, ethics, and morale? Can you just shoot the infected in order to eradicate it and protect others? Should the leader of that anarchistic feudal town really have been so suspicious of the pilot of the plane, or was he right to distrust all outsiders in the state the world was in? Is the relentless march of progress a good thing if it is completely unrestricted and forced on everyone?

In the end, the film acts out more like some sort of Shakespearean drama than anything else. Lots of characters, death, and suspicion. No one is completely in the clear. Shooting the infected is played both as a good thing and a bad. The place the pilot comes from is certainly better than the oddball society that he is visiting, but forcing this better version of society onto the people is also not an entirely comfortable idea. Who is right? Who is wrong?

The fun is not so much in watching the film, but reading and thinking about it afterwards.