Which brings us to Canada and its schlocky contribution to the Star Wars knock-off parade, H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, which, title notwithstanding, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Wells’s 1933 politically minded history-of-the-future novel, which he had previously adapted as Things to Come in 1936 for producer Alexander Korda (it was not a very good film, either, but for entirely different reasons). The Shape of Things to Come was the brainchild of prolific low-budget producer Harry Alan Towers, whose previous credits included an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1965) and nine films by the notorious Jess Franco. Towers was looking to take advantage of Canada’s immense tax incentives for feature film production, and The Shape of Things to Come was one of three productions he packaged together, the other two being the adventure film King Solomon’s Treasure (1979) and the Jack London biopic Klondike Fever (1980).

Screenwriter Martin Lager, a veteran of documentary and television who had written three episodes of the ill-fated Canadian sci-fi series The Starlost (1973), worked from an adaptation by Mike Cheda and Joseph Glazner that jettisoned pretty much everything from Wells’s novel, except the character name Dr. John Cabal, which in the film gains an extra “l” in its spelling. Instead, the film imagines a near future—“tomorrow after tomorrow,” as the grammatically challenged opening scroll tells us (there’s a difference between its and it’s, people)—in which the Earth has become a radioactive wasteland after the “robot wars” and humankind has left in a mass diaspora to populate the moon in a giant colony protected by a geodesic dome. To continue surviving, humanity requires a special anti-radiation drug that is manufactured on the distant planet Delta III.

Unfortunately, Delta III has been taken over by a mad roboticist named Omus (a paycheck-cashing, scenery-chewing Jack Palance), who sends a robot-piloted cargo ship on a crash course toward the moon colony. This spurs Dr. John Caball (Barry Morse) to take matters into his own hands, launching his experimental deep-space ship the Starstreak along with his son Jason (Nicholas Campbell) and his girlfriend Kim (Anne-Marie Martin), who is the daughter of a senator (John Ireland) with whom Dr. Caball disagrees politically. No matter—the goal is to make it to Delta III to stop Omus from sending more destruction toward the moon colony, although it first requires a stop-off on Earth for repairs (which, in one of the film’s most egregious plot holes, never actually happen), where they meet the planet’s remaining mutant children. Meanwhile, on Delta III, the deposed President Niki (Carol Lynley) is trying to wage her own revolt against Omus, who, in one of the film’s more laughable moments, appears as a giant, building-sized hologram that slowly and inexplicably rotates.

Plot aside, The Shape of Things to Come is pretty much a big ol’ mess, although not one that isn’t enjoyable at times in a sloppy, cheesy kind of way. The special effects are a mixed bag, with some of the miniature work looking half-decent (including the opening shot of the cargo ship flying over the camera, a visual grab from Star Wars that was common among all of Lucas’s copycats), while others are embarrassingly amateurish. There is some good use of existing locations, particularly Toronto’s Cinesphere Dome (home to the world’s first permanent IMAX movie theater) as a stand-in for the futuristic moon colony, although other locations seem woefully inadequate to depict the intended environment (just because all the grass in a forest is brown doesn’t necessarily make it look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland).

Director George McCowan, a television veteran who had previously helmed the revenge-of-nature thriller Frogs (1972) and the western sequel The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972), does an adequate job managing the action, although there is little he can do given the resources at hand; visually and aesthetically the film has much in common with various sci-fi television series of the era, includingSpace: 1999 (1975–78), Battlestar Galactica (1978–80), and Buck Rogers in the 21st Century (1979–81), which shouldn’t be surprising given McCowan’s television background and Harry Alan Towers’s stated hope that it would spin off into a TV series (not surprisingly, that did not happen). Most of the acting is either flat or over the top, and the attempts to create a memorable artificial intelligence computer named Lomax (voiced by William Hutt) and an endearingly clunky robot named Sparks (voiced by Greg Swanson) have little impact. And, while it is hardly the worst of the Star Wars knockoffs, The Shape of the Things to Come is memorable primarily for its various failings, which at best will carry some nostalgic power for those who grew up in that era and perhaps even saw it during its brief theatrical release.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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