Wars), a stratified society, and an oppressed enslaved race of underground industrial workers. Even today, the film is acclaimed for its original, futuristic sets, mechanized society themes and a gigantic subterranean flood - it appeared to accurately project the nature of society in the year 2000. [It was re-released in 1984 with a stirring, hard-rock score featuring Giorgio Moroder's music and songs by Pat Benatar and Queen.]

Another Lang film, his last silent film, was one of the first space travel films, The Woman in the Moon (1929) (aka By Rocket to the Moon). It was about a blastoff to the moon where explorers discovered a mountainous landscape littered with raw diamonds and chunks of gold. [The film introduced NASA's backward count to a launch - 5-4-3-2-1 to futurereal-life space shots, and the effects of centrifugal force to future space travel films.]

Alexander Korda's epic view of the future Things to Come (1936) was directed by visual imagist William Cameron Menzies and starred Raymond Massey (as pacifist pilot John Cabal). The imaginative English film was based on an adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1933 The Shape of Things to Come and set during the years from 1940 to 2036 in 'Everytown.' It included a lengthy global world war (WW II!), a prophetic Brave New World-view, a despotic tyrant named Rudolph (Ralph Richardson), the dawn of the space age, and the attempt of social-engineering scientists to save the world with technology. An attempt to prevent scientific progress - and the launch of the first Moon rocket - was