If not exactly by name, or for the middle Fabian social or later utopian novels or the once immensely popular history, or for even the original screen adaptations of the three ultra-famous early science-fantasy novels, H. G. Wells is known to today’s generation for big film reincarnations of the latter. This situation will not change with the Museum of Modern Art’s two showings of Things to Come, for the sold-out audience was white-haired or bald.

The success of the film in 1936, and its reputation since as “a genre landmark,” cannot have come from the stagey acting and stereotyped characterizations. Admittedly, even the best would have been hard-pressed to give life to the script done by Wells himself -- a coup that enhanced the reputation of producer Alexander Korda -- three years after his novel The Shape of Things to Come. Then at the apex of his lifetime’s public figurehood, the author-biologist-social thinker penned dialogue and, indeed, stopped narrative flow for declamations, to pound a pet art vs. science thesis and pontificate solutions for modern ills.

Opening sequences on a second Great War against an unnamed foe that decimates the species, are not so much prescient -- foreseeing September 1, 1939, did not require rocket science -- as effective in angled chiaroscuro of aerial warfare carried to the population of London as “Everytown, 1940 Christmas.” Combat continues over decades and, figured in a few brush strokes, is of the Low Countries trench style spiced with modernistic streamlined tanks.

Not only in the early depictions of attacks on urban centers, but also in those of the squalor that shelters survivors, the sets are most effective. More impressive still, with title-indicated stops every couple decades along the way, are the backdrops, architecture, gadgets and clothing of last stop “2036 Everytown.” Director William Cameron Menzies had been among the first set designers to be called “production designer,” i.e., in charge of the whole look, and he was seconded in this by Korda’s younger brother Vincent, by special effects from Ned Mann, and by the lighting camerawork of Georges Périnal.

The generations of man, the message runs, is what is endangered unless he changes his ways. And so the story traces a few men through three generations. First is John Cabal (Raymond Massey), a realist whom Pollyanna friend Pippa Passworthy (Edward Chapman) chides as a pessimist amidst the Noel cheer, carols and shoppers against newsvendors hawking the imminence of hostilities.

Blitz pilots wonder “Why has it come to this? Why do we have to murder each other?” but war goes on. It is 1945, 1955, 1960, 1966, while deprived survivors live among ruins and shoot those who exhibit symptoms of the filmically gratuitous plague Wandering Sickness. 1967, then 1970, and the buffoon Mussolini-like Chief (Ralph Richardson) seeks total dictatorship in defeating the guerrilla hill people, for which he needs wrecked biplanes repaired and, in this petrol-challenged The Road Warrior world, a source of fuel. In one of the outsiders’ Flash Gordon retro-skyships, now-grey-haired Cabal returns, bearing a The Day the Earth Stood Still admonition to “law and sanity.” The message unheeded, the messenger imprisoned, and no electricity anyway for this Klaatu to stop for half an hour, World Communications has no choice but to drop “peace gas,” putting belligerents into a good mood following a brief nap and, collaterally, killing only the unrepentant unmourned Chief.

In 2036, underground Everytown seems a whiter Metropolis -- though Wells had called that “quite the silliest film” -- and looks forward to Star Trek and Star Wars, denizens costumed out of Hollywoodian Golden Age Greece, under the enlightened leadership of Oswald Cabal (Massey, dark-haired again) and his advisor Raymond Passworthy (Chapman). The easy-living population, however, is rabble-roused by a demagogic Luddite (Richardson) who decries technological progress as the root of all evil.

Speechifying on the cosmos and the nobility of man’s curiosity and willingness to confront danger, Cabal allows his daughter and Passworthy’s son to make a trip into space. As the mob swarms in to destroy, the two fathers rush their heaven-bound offspring to the capsule to be fired from a Space Gun not all that removed from that of Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon.

Its lecture-dialogue stilted and ideas simplistic, Things to Come is nevertheless a worthy visual experience. 

(Released by United Artists; not rated by MPAA.)