What if I told you a movie about World War II was released three years before the war began? And that it was written by H.G. Wells himself?

That movie is Things to Come (1936), adapted from Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. It had a huge budget, daring special effects, and an unusual experiment: the score by Arthur Bliss was written before filming, forcing the film to march to its music. The result is ambitious in scope but stiff in execution.

Wells fills the story with his obsession for technocracy. He believed scientists would guide humanity into utopia if given absolute authority. Yet history went the opposite way. World War II ended not with salvation through progress but with nuclear weapons, a discovery capable of ending civilization.

The production history is as strange as the film itself. Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy created avant-garde sequences that were mostly cut. Ernest Thesiger was cast as Theotocopulos before Wells rejected him and reshot with Cedric Hardwicke. Even the sets were built at Denham Studios while the studio itself was unfinished. The futuristic city looks striking but sterile, like a world made for machines rather than people.

As drama, the film fails. Characters lecture more than they speak. The dialogue is so didactic I half-expected Richard Dawkins to appear with a guitar. The finale, where humanity blasts itself into space with a giant cannon, feels baffling. Arthur C. Clarke even pointed out how absurd it was, given Wells’ earlier stories of anti-gravity.

Technically, there are moments worth praising. The costumes remain sharp. Some effects staff later became legends, including Wally Veevers who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet the sound mix is dreadful. Dialogue is so muffled I needed subtitles just to follow it.

Watching Things to Come is like debating with Wells himself. The film preaches, scolds, and dreams far beyond what history allowed. But its ambition and scale remain undeniable. It stands as both a monument to Wells’ hubris and a milestone in early science fiction cinema.