#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #warlords #aeroplane #spaceflight #WWII #future #culottes #kulaks #War #moon #PeaceGas #BiologicalWarfare #pompous
Retro SciFi Film of the Week…
Things to Come (1936)
H. G. Wells wrote The Shape of Things to Come in 1933 when he predicted WWII and many other events and inventions that would come true. He even predicted that men would wear culotte miniskirts and shave their legs. (Actually, predicting WWII wasn’t that extraordinary of a feat, everybody saw it coming.)
This big-budget British-made adaptation is one of the classics of science fiction. The story covers the future from 1940 to 2036. I think it comes across as pompous and bombastic, but apparently audiences at the time liked it.
This film is available for free download and is in the public domain, even though the Supreme Court says it isn't.
I’ll include more in this thread under a spoiler warning…
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(Note: This gif clip is silent, but the film is a talkie.)
movie spoiler - Things to Come (1936)
Besides the war, Wells’ story predicted biological warfare, a zombie apocalypse, sleeping gas used for crowd control (deadly gas was used in WWII, but harmless “Peace Gas” as he called it was not yet a thing), very large aircraft, spaceflight to the moon (Ok, Jules Verne did that story 65 years earlier and Georges Méliès did a film on that when Wells wrote The First Men In the Moon in 1901), men and women wearing the same clothing, sky trams, people movers, glass elevators, a long twenty-year war (Afghanistan) ...
movie spoiler - Things to Come (1936)
Here’s a pic of the giant ballistic cannon used to shoot people to the moon in the film. Fritz Lang's German scifi pic Woman in the Moon (1929), used multi-stage rockets to send people to the moon, but apparently Wells didn’t know about that film, or he thought people could withstand 20,000 Gs.
This cannon looks exactly like a gun barrel pointing straight up, complete with an iron front sight on the barrel.😂
To really appreciate what this film is about, you need to understand the explosive technical innovation that was happening at the time. Most of the contemporary audience for this film had seen the following in their lifetimes…
- rapid transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles
- moving pictures - the first movie theaters were built, silent films and then talkies
- invention and commercialization of the airplane
- beginning of the installation of refrigerators in homes (prior to this people relied on ice delivery or just used canning techniques to preserve food)
- electrification of most homes happened during this time
- introduction of the disk phonograph and widespread availability of gramophone players
- rapid adoption of radio – the first broadcast station went on the air in 1919, by the early thirties most homes had a radio
- rapid adoption of the telephone – at the turn of the century only about one percent of households had phones, by the time this film was released most homes had them.
- the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched
Most of these inventions were highly disruptive and even though people enjoyed these new devices, society had a difficult time absorbing the change, which was likely a major contributor to the two world wars. (The main antagonist in this film is a neoluddite.)
