"Things to Come" Is a Trip Back to the Retro-Future In 1936 it was the most expensive British film ever made, and one of the most ambitious. Based on a treatment originally called "Whither Mankind?" by its writer and prime mover, the novelist and social prophet H. G. Wells, the movie that eventually emerged, as produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies, bore the less-pretentious title "Things to Come," though this was still a film with a massive agenda. Wells and his collaborators meant to offer a stern, though ultimately hopeful, vision of humanity's halting progress across the century to come. The film begins in 1940, with an unnervingly accurate anticipation of the London Blitz: on Christmas Eve, the citizens of the Art Deco metropolis of Everytown find themselves under attack by waves of bombers from the Continent. It is the first strike in a conflict that, as a montage of dates and destruction tells us, will eventually wind down in the 1970s, with Everytown reduced to ruins and society to a feudal state dominated by a demented warlord (Ralph Richardson, in the film's most memorable characterization). Things are looking grim indeed, until a tiny, streamlined airplane arrives bearing an ambassador (Raymond Massey) from another part of the globe, where enlightened technocrats have come together to form a planetary government they poetically call Wings Over the World. The Hobbesian chaos of Everytown soon gives way, through another montage sequence, to a paternalistic new world order shaped by science and technology, where the citizens live underground in massive tiered structures that strongly resemble Hyatt Hotels of the 1980s and wear outfits that suggest beachwear built out with gigantic shoulder pads. The problems of life on earth thus solved, mankind prepares to take its first steps into space, thanks to a giant space gun that will fire a capsule containing a new Adam and Eve (Kenneth Villiers and Pearl Argyle) into the starry night (the Freudian overtones come at no extra charge). The only naysayer is a pesky artist (Cedric Hardwicke) who fears that so much progress poses a threat to human individuality. But happily, pesky artists prove to be no more influential in the film's 21st century than they actually are today. The flaws of "Things to Come" - the broken-backed structure, the pompous dialogue, the all-but-total lack of rounded characters and accessible emotion - were perfectly apparent at the time of the film's release, and it was not a success. In addition, questions about its copyright status condemned the film to the outer darkness of public domain distribution for many years, and only recently has it become available again in an authorized edition, which the Criterion Collection is bringing to North America. Though the visual quality of this version is far better than anything available to the home market before (and four minutes of footage cut from the original American release have been restored), it's still disappointingly soft, without the strong contrast and bristling detail that once might have brought these images to life. And yet, "Things to Come" continues to fascinate, most immediately because of its bold design. Menzies, whom Korda had brought from Hollywood for the occasion, was an original and unclassifiable talent whose work on several important films of the 1920s, including Douglas Fairbanks's "Thief of Bagdad," had led to the creation of a new job category, that of the production designer, concerned with the overall look of a film, as opposed to the art director, responsible for the construction of individual sets. Menzies's hand is perhaps most strongly visible in the opening Everytown sequence. It conjures a nighttime city out of elaborate interior sets constructed in forced perspectives, carefully storyboarded individual shots that approach the geometric abstraction of Fritz Lang, and rhythmic editing that owes much to the Soviet theorists of montage. But it's hard to assign credit for any individual images in "Things to Come," which also drew on the considerable gifts of Vincent Korda (Alexander's younger brother, and one of the most distinguished art directors of the 1930s), Frank Wells (the author's youngest son, reportedly responsible for the complex miniature effects that include a distinctly erotic sequence of construction machinery at work), and the Bauhaus refugee Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who created some abstract animations that were largely eliminated from the final film (though a few snippets of his footage, rediscovered in 1975, are included in a supplement). That's a lot of cooks laboring over the visual soup, and while "Things to Come" can't be accused of seamless stylistic consistency, its inventiveness never flags. Today, the most dated aspect of the film is its utopian vision of 2036, a decidedly pre-Orwellian fantasy of a benign totalitarian state where wise men of science rule over faceless masses. For viewers weaned on the postmodern hodgepodge of "Blade Runner," the antiseptic, shopping mall ambience of the perfected Everytown itself seems quaint, and the implied social policies of this technocracy are somewhat disturbing: As Richard Pryor observed of a similar future depicted in the 1976 "Logan's Run," this ideal world appears to have no place for minorities. But if "Things to Come" fails to predict the future of mankind, it does predict the future of popular entertainment with uncanny accuracy. The film's grim middle section - the Dark Age of Everytown - represents an early figuration of the post-apocalyptic landscape that has since become, in films from "Mad Max" to "The Hunger Games," perhaps the most heavily trafficked imaginative space in genre films since the decline of the mythical American West. This retro-future, where rusting automobiles are pulled by horses, colonnaded halls are heated by bonfires and ragged mobs march by torchlight, may have been a vision of hell to a progressive like Wells, but for the romantic neo-tribalists of the present generation of movie heroes, it looks like a land of opportunity, free from corporate oppression and technological tyranny. With her trusty bow and arrow, Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen would feel right at home: The future isn't what it used to be. Criterion Collection; Blu-ray, $39.95; DVD, $29.95; not rated THE HOUSE I LIVE IN Eugene Jarecki's documentary looks at the costs and consequences of America's "War on Drugs," as started by President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. "It's easy to take issue with a documentary like "The House I Live In," which tackles too much in too brief a time and glosses over complexities, yet this is also a model of the ambitious, vitalizing activist work that exists to stir the sleeping to wake," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in October. Virgil Films; DVD, $14.99; not rated 56 UP The latest installment of Michael Apted's "Up" series finds him checking in with the same small group of Britons he's been following since 1964, when its members were 7. Last seen seven years ago at age 49, they're now plunging deep into middle age. "Today people expect their 15 seconds, but not these souls," Ms. Dargis wrote in The Times in January. And yet, for all their reservations, they opened their mouths, hearts, homes, veins. They've shown that class is alive and well in Britain, even as the documentaries have also exposed that sharing your life with the public, receiving its love and its criticism, can itself be a profoundly complex leveler. First Run Features; DVD, $29.95; not rated THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU Andrei Ujica's 2011 documentary examines the life of the rigidly Stalinist dictator through three hours of footage drawn from the National Archives of Romania. Kino Lorber; DVD, $29.95; not rated LAST RESORT: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON All 13 episodes of the ABC series set aboard an American submarine armed with nuclear missiles. Andre Braugher is the commanding officer who defies an order to attack Pakistan; with Scott Speedman, Daisy Betts and Robert Patrick. "It's a nifty Tom Clancy-ish premise, and the pilot of "Last Resort" is exciting and has a lot of panache, including a great shot of an inflatable rescue boat being rocked by the sudden emergence of the submarine - it's like watching a whale surface under a floating beach hat," Alessandra Stanley wrote in The Times in September. Sony; DVD, $38.99; not rated