#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…
- - -
(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.😂
Here's a cool WP article on the moon in science fiction...
@mc
Yeah, Jules Verne is the most influential and just about everything after him was derivative of his work.
I have a vague memory of From the Earth to the Moon (film), about there being some kind of device that compensated for the tremendous G-forces -- some kind of centrifugal device or suspended-animation camber or something like that. I'll try to find the film and watch it again.
Also, I just (re)discovered Franz Lang's Woman in the Moon (1929) which is just incredible. I can't believe all the technical details he put into that film. It even demonstrates zero-G, which was rare even for films made as late as the 1950s.