Blitzkrieg Lindy
Things to Come (1936)
directed by William Cameron Menzies
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
A British Christmas begins with its complacent citizens completely unprepared for the totality of modern warfare, and as civil servants toast one another with no thought to the impending perils outside, all of London (and then the world, or Europe-as-the-world, anyway) is blown to bits in a violent fury of bombs, bombs, bombs. Chris Marker watched Things to Come, I’d bet. And why not? Ol’ H. G. Wells wrote it, and all of them – from Wells to Marker to Hitchcock to the other Welles - were obsessed with our numbered days, and our memories and dreams of life that was. Here, the survivors are brought to heel beneath local warlords, but even that takes time, so rag-tag and ruined is the populace.
Decades pass; grass grows. It’s the 1970s before the burned-out skeleton of a single fighter plane might make a difference in regional domination, but there isn’t fuel or spare parts, and zombies show up every now and again to remind their families of past horrors. But Wells had faith in science, and gets the remaining minds together to lord their visions of peace over a mob of increasingly bored kids who didn’t know London from Munich. He means well, but utopian futures inevitably demand the same assertion of control as any unified plan, good or bad. As the protagonist’s offspring race for the stars in a ship as white as a washed-out print, one assumes that they will end their days wishing for the world they left behind, mobs and warlords and all, only to find that the past eludes them.
directed by William Cameron Menzies
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
A British Christmas begins with its complacent citizens completely unprepared for the totality of modern warfare, and as civil servants toast one another with no thought to the impending perils outside, all of London (and then the world, or Europe-as-the-world, anyway) is blown to bits in a violent fury of bombs, bombs, bombs. Chris Marker watched Things to Come, I’d bet. And why not? Ol’ H. G. Wells wrote it, and all of them – from Wells to Marker to Hitchcock to the other Welles - were obsessed with our numbered days, and our memories and dreams of life that was. Here, the survivors are brought to heel beneath local warlords, but even that takes time, so rag-tag and ruined is the populace.
Decades pass; grass grows. It’s the 1970s before the burned-out skeleton of a single fighter plane might make a difference in regional domination, but there isn’t fuel or spare parts, and zombies show up every now and again to remind their families of past horrors. But Wells had faith in science, and gets the remaining minds together to lord their visions of peace over a mob of increasingly bored kids who didn’t know London from Munich. He means well, but utopian futures inevitably demand the same assertion of control as any unified plan, good or bad. As the protagonist’s offspring race for the stars in a ship as white as a washed-out print, one assumes that they will end their days wishing for the world they left behind, mobs and warlords and all, only to find that the past eludes them.
posted by NPK at 7:20 AM
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