Kritiken

Hugely ambitious and boldly farsighted, Things to Come coolly charts the fall (war, plague, tribalism) and rebirth (rationality, a Space Gun) of one "Everytown" into an utopian, all-conquering World State, a vision of progress that perhaps only H.G. Wells, its screenwriter, could cheer... Things to Come is visionary and audacious, the present (now past) making the case that it's as interesting as the future it so astoundingly envisions.

Even on a Criterion Blu-ray, William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) proves to be more of a wheezing soporific to me than it used to be. But in some ways the extras prove to be more interesting than the film itself, especially when it comes to explaining how and why the film is so boring. (Basically, it's the arrogant, untrammeled will of H.G. Wells as auteur that's responsible.)

[The visual quality is] disappointingly soft, without the strong contrast and bristling detail that once might have brought these images to life. And yet, "Things to Come" continues to fascinate, most immediately because of its bold design.

For a film that decries the senseless brutality of mankind's bellicose tendencies, it's strangely enough dominated by images of armament—from the antiaircraft guns blasting away at an unseen enemy in an opening scene that portends imminent worldwide warfare to the massive "space gun" that blasts a manned spacecraft toward its rendezvous with the moon in the film's star-struck finale.