Spine 660: Things to Come

What this episode covers

A few months ago we were surprised to learn that HG Wells, the famed 19th century science fiction writer, survived long enough to comment on film adaptations of his work. This is a silly thing for us to be surprised by, because the man was only 66 when Island of Lost Souls, the movie that he commented on, came out. Just a few years later Alexander Korda hired Wells himself to adapt Wells' futurism work into Things to Come (1936), working with a crack team of art directors and artists including William Cameron Menzies as director, Vincent Korda officially acting as art designer, and a cadre of others including a mostly cut sequence by Hungarian experimental filmmaker László Moholy-Nagy. It's a beautiful film that looks at a future that Wells imagines is not a technocratic dystopia even though that's what he portrays.

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