The Shape of Things to Come

Somewhere deep in hype-space, the crew of the spaceship Starstreak ponder over the fact that once they were almost stars, and continue the seemingly never-ending search for their script, lost in the black hole of the Star Wars boom. 'Man's future is limited only by his imagination', the scientist says; and films only by his greed, the audience sighs. HG Wells' novel was filmed in 1936 as Things to Come, with brilliant set designs by William Cameron Menzies and a script in part by Wells himself, full of (admittedly often half-digested) ideas. Masquerading under the original title, but set 50 years later and providing its own risibly inept plot, this is the unacceptable face of exploitation.