My gonzo patron Mescaline Franklin mailed me two movies that he included with the following: “As a science-fiction writer I would like your take—a comparative take—on these two movies. Metropolis was a big budget science-fiction film made in Germany in 1927. Hitler supposedly liked it a lot. Things to Come is an H.G. Wells movie that is basically an answer to Metroplis. Wells was a futurist that could not stand Metropolis and put forth this. This movie was from 1936 and correctly predicted World War Two—which did not exactly take a genius—but goes much farther. Supposedly Wells wanted a lot more speeches in the film but the director cut them.”

Metropolis is a surreal dystopian fantasy with a lot of huge stage sets but a very simple message that is clear from beginning to end, with the middle merely the illustration. The message is that the hands [the underclass] and the mind [the upper class] cannot function together without a “heart” or passionate emotive leader. The owner of this giant factory city plays the reluctantly inclusive ‘mind,’ with the ‘heart’ represented by his son who sees the hellish lives of the underclass firsthand, and intercedes. This could have been a three page short story.

Things to Come is the type of science-fiction I watched as a kid on late night TV and liked. Seeing it now is like watching a spoof on liberal ideals and the type of behaviorally bankrupt futurism that comes from a belief in social engineering and an obsession with technology as Man’s salvation. The funny things is, where Metropolis barely served to illustrate in allegory Hitler’s [which, according to Spangler, he shared with a half dozen other would-be tyrants at this time] bankrupt egomaniacal dream [an industrial society governed along emotional lines], Things to Come shows what that would look like in the end. Basically Wells sketches a fascist tribal post-apocalypse with a Hitler type barbarian jingoist lord.

Some actors were reused across the ages. The focus though was the generation after a World War that had no victors. As the tribal leader of a technologically decaying southern English city wages war on the Cornish I think, an advanced airplane touches down. The pilot is quickly held prisoner in order to extort his know how and get the old bi-plane fleet flying against the ‘hill tribes’.

The pilot however, declares himself to be a member of a worldwide brotherhood of airmen flying around mopping up post-apocalyptic pockets of resistance into a global hive society of peace love and plenty. His rescuers end up dropping sleep bombs on the primitives and parachute down to humanely revive them. The dictator dies accidentally from the sleep gas, and is declared best gone by the pacifist airman.

The final act is the only redeeming aspect of the film in which a far future sees a revolt of the people against benign world government. Just as the ignorant savages storm the central government/space agency—as, sci-fi writers of Well’s time envisioned something like NASA as a world government—an interstellar Adam and Eve are launched at the last moment to give humanity a chance of survival.

As prophecy these two films together don’t fair too badly. Metropolis can be seen as the attempt to maintain independent industrial nations in a kind of emotional utopia, which of course failed disastrously against the global powers in WWII when Germany, Italy and Japan tried their various versions of it in three part disharmony.

The world depicted in the mid portion of Things to Come is recognizably a U.S. dominated global system, and while wide of the mark in many areas, gets petty Cold War dictatorship and global intervention down pretty concisely.

The last part, where the mass of people believe that space travel is folly and all energy should be devoted to either making Garden Earth or being the victor of a battle over a depleted earth, well, we are already there. Last week, when I viewed these films, the only thing I saw that made the news that would have interested Wells, was news of a salt water ocean on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. But in the winter of 2015 at the hub of our One World System, that was not news, but trivia, because Man is not going to the moon, the planets, and certainly not the stars, if the people alive today have anything to say about it.