HG Wells was awful in every way | Locklin on science
HG Wells is one of those figures who loomed large over my childhood. His stuff was popular with previous generations: he was given the title of prophetic by my grandparents, a fair achievement in early marketing and public relations. This is intensely silly as most of his science fiction was ridiculous fairy story tier stuff, and his near future “prophetic” stuff was along the lines of “there will be a war with Hitler in Europe and airplanes will be important.” Something blindingly obvious to anybody in 1933. A lot of his work was made into movies in the 1950s, some of which are quite charming; Time Machine, Earth to the Moon and War of the Worlds. These films from that era are better than the books. The reason they’re so much better: they are only very loose adaptations. Most of the reason they succeed as science fiction films is due to the work of the screenwriters; men like Nigel Kneale (unsung genius; everything he did was good), David Duncan and Barre Lyndon. Also producer-director George Pal. If Wells had written them, nobody would have seen them.
I recently rewatched “Shape of things to come” 1936 edition. It’s a reasonably close adaptation of his book of the same name: he wrote the screenplay. It is touted by various kinds of art-poufs as being important as a film somehow. It is insanely bad. This was supposed to be muh hard science, yet people are running around with ridiculous capes and useless giant helmets. The movie is a series of speeches given by the same couple of actors, portraying different characters and their descendants through history. The connecting material is 1935 era special effects set pieces. There’s no dramatic arc. The smarty pants guy makes smug remarks about war, the dorky guy makes dumb remarks about war, then the same actors do it again in a post apocalyptic future, then again in their totalitarian “utopia.” Some “bad” man who hates progress (played by post apocalyptic warlord actor) gives a speech about how we should stop all this progress nonsense, foments a riot, then they shoot a couple of kids into space in a big gun, wiping out the evil rioters. Then the father of one of the kids (a totalitarian Klaus Schwab dictator who probably wants you to eat the bugs) gives a rousing speech about how progress is good, actually. I wanted to kill all the characters in this movie. I watched it as a kid, figuring it would be like all the cool 50s HG Wells movies, but it wasn’t: those took enough liberties with Wells stories to make them halfway decent. This was the pure, unadulterated Wells, and it sucked.
