Things to Come

Things to Come (1936) is a British science-fiction drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by William Cameron Menzies from a screenplay H.G. Wells wrote himself, adapting his own novel. Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, and Edward Chapman head the cast.

The film spans a full century, opening in 1940 as the fictional city of Everytown is drawn into a decades-long war that dismantles civilisation. Plague follows the fighting. Warlords fill the vacuum. Then a new technocratic order gradually rebuilds the world from scratch — leading, by 2036, to an underground city and a project to fire the first humans into space. At every stage, someone argues that humanity should stop where it is.

Wells wrote the script as a direct warning aimed at 1930s Europe, and the anxious newsreel energy of the opening sequences lands differently knowing what came three years later. For its time, the production was ambitious on a large scale: elaborate sets, disciplined crowd work, and effects that still read as purposeful rather than quaint. Stream Things to Come (1936) online on iFILM.