Modernism was a radical style, but it was gradually gaining acceptance.  Wells shared many of the ideals of Modernism.  Modernism was known as the International Style because it tried to transcend national boundaries.  Wells was anti-nationalistic because he felt that national boundaries were holding humanity back.  He warned of the ‘spasm of nationalism which has contracted men’s minds.’  Wells believed in transcending national boundaries to create one great world unity, and he said, ‘We are a world people and we belong to the world.’  This echoes the international spirit of Modernism. 

The film is divided into three parts.  The first dramatises the World War that breaks out and last for several decades.  The second chronicles the state of anarchy that follows.  The third section surveys the rebuilding of society and the creation of a technological utopia. 

How does the film depict British society in the 1930s?

During the 1930s the threat of war was ever present.  In the opening sequence people are celebrating Christmas, but there are signs in the background warning of impending war.  Everyone ignores them.  Wells is suggesting that society is complacent.  John Cabal’s son is seen playing with a toy gun; this is another indication that the world is on the brink of war. 

Wells successfully predicted the Second World War and he was remarkably accurate in his depiction of it.  This set resembles London, with the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background.  London was bombed during the Blitz and people sheltered in tube stations, as they do in the film.  At one point a cinema is attacked, which would have been very unnerving for the audience of the film.  This was a case of Wells warning his audience, trying to shock them out of their complacency. 

What effect does the war have on society?

To begin with technology advances quickly, which suggests that all technology has been diverted into the war effort.  The armed forces start with recognisable weapons; then we suddenly see streamlined tanks.  The tanks were based on contemporary design.  They resemble 1932 streamlined ocean linersby the American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes.  But as the decades pass by the weaponry becomes more and more primitive, until finally they’re using wooden carts and spears.  Society has been bombed back into the pre-modern era.  Ultimately, war impedes progress.

This section looks like the Middle Ages and the people are even infected with a plague.  Plagues were rife in the Middle Ages and killed thousands of people.  Some people have the ‘wandering sickness’ and stagger about like zombies.  This sequence is reminiscent of post-apocalyptic horror films like 28 Days Later. 

A character called the Boss takes over; he is a petty warlord.  This character can be seen as a parody of Mussolini, the Fascist leader who ruled Italy in this period.  In fact Mussolini was outraged by the portrayal and banned the film in Italy.  This is the Boss in the ruins of the town hall.  Fascist regimes tended to use Classical architecture to symbolise their authority.  The classical architecture makes him look like a Roman emperor, but we see him as a petty dictator.

The character John Cabal represents an organisation called Wings over the World – they are the last vestige of technology and progress.  They seize control and rebuild society, which is shown in a very impressive montage sequence.  John Cabal is a messianic figure, a prophet of the new age.  He even has the same initials as Christ.  They build a Utopian society on Modernist lines.  Technology has liberated mankind; there’s no war, crime or disorder.  Religion has been dispensed with (Wells was a committed atheist).  A new class of technocrats rule – a Freemasonry of Science. 

The world of the future is a Modernist utopia and Modernist designers were hired to envisage it.  The former Bauhaus designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had come to Britain to escape the Nazis.  He settled in London in 1935, initially in Lawn Road Flats.  He was hired to design the sets.  Some of them are his, but Wells rejected many of his designs, so Vincent Korda (the producer’s brother) did much of the design work. 

The French painter Fernand Légerwas initially hired to design costumes.  Léger specialised in a mechanistic form of Cubism.  Unfortunately, Wells rejected his designs and they don’t appear in the film.  Le Corbusier was also approached to provide designs, but he said that the people of 2036 were too old-fashioned in their lifestyles. 

Instead, Vincent Korda began ransacking books on avant-garde design so he could piece together the look of the future.  This means it is possible to trace the sources of inspiration for the film’s production design.  The Basra Bombers represent the superior technology of Wings Over the World.  The Basra Bombers with their twin fuselages were based on Norman Bel Geddes’s designs in his book Horizons (1932), especially the chapter ‘By Air Tomorrow’. 

The underground city of Everytown in 2036has flying walkways, lifts in transparent ducts and elevated terraces.  It also has motorised pavements and transit tubes.  These were ideas invented by Antonio Sant ‘Elia, the Italian Futurist. 

These terraces resemble the semicircular cantilevered terraces of the De La Warr Pavilion.  The city square of Everytown may have come from Bel Geddes’s book Horizons.  In particular, the giant TV screen was based on his designs for a modern amphitheatre.  It is a grandiose fusion of Le Corbusier and American streamlining, which is to say European and American Modernism.

Christopher Frayling argues that the underground piazza anticipates the huge American superhotels designed by John Portman in the 1960s and 70s, for example the Inforum in Atlanta, Georgia and the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco (1971).

Cabal’s villa was based on Bel Geddes’s aerial restaurant.  The interior echoes the clean, white volumes of Modernism.  There is a huge glazed wall that reveals the city in the distance.  The city is planned on a geometric basis, like a lot of utopian planning in the 20th century.  It resembles the geometrically laid out cities from Le Corbusier’s manifesto Towards a New Architecture (1927).  The radial plan is particularly reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse.  Modernists believed that rational planning would eradicate society’s problems.

There is a scene where an old man is giving his granddaughter a history lesson using a video of New York in the 20th century.  He criticises the irrational and disordered society of the past.  This interior has transparent furniture.  This was based on Oliver Hill’s designs for the Exhibition of British Industrial Art in 1933. 

The most influential science fiction film ever made was Metropolis (1927).  Metropolis is a dystopian vision of the future in which humans are enslaved to technology.  Wells hated Metropolis, its politics and its view of technology.  His vision of the future is a Utopia: people are not subjugated by technology; instead technology has solved all of humanity’s problems.  Again, this is not just a fantasy of the future; it’s the future that Wells wanted to see.

However, in this future society there’s an ideological feud between technology and art.  Progress is held back by an artist called Theotocopoulos.  Theotocopoulos was the name of the actual Greek painter known as El Greco.  He represents the irrational, emotional and superstitious.  He says, ‘Stop this progress before it’s too late.’  There are people today who feel that technology is advancing too quickly.  Robotics and genetic engineering provoke a lot of anxiety, and raise difficult questions like what does it mean to be human in this context?  Theotocopoulos represents the fear of technology.

All of this technological progress culminates in the moon mission, which is achieved by using the Space Gun.  This is one thing that Wells got spectacularly wrong.  It has been argued that the force generated would crush the astronauts flat.  This image shows a high-speed monorail in the foreground, with the aerodynamic vehicles that shoot round it; an efficient, safe transportation system was a dream of Modernist planners.  This also anticipates the Japanese bullet train of the late 20th century.

The film ends with a choice: should we reach for the stars or should we hang our heads to the earth?  The original title for the film was Whither Mankind?

Things to Come was Modernist in its analysis of the future as well as its aesthetic.  It was released when a small group of English architects were promoting European Modernism.  The film deals with politics and philosophy of science and envisages the hardware of the future.  Wells’s vision of the future is a Utopia.  The human race has been saved by benevolent technocrats and liberated by technology.  The film optimistically states that technology will solve all our problems.