People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make pupp...
WHAT I LIKED: Just like Star Wars, George Lucas' debut feature 'THX 1138,' drops you in the middle of a perfectly realised alternate world, explains very little, and has its audience simply catch up to what's going on. But, far more than a simple precursor to his big break, this film is a bold, singular, gut-punch of an epic in its own right.
Very unlike Star Wars, the world it drops us into is a sanitised dystopia full of bright white rooms and corridors where everyone is enslaved. People travel to work to build their robot oppressors, then head back to their austere apartments to spend time watching pornographic holograms and taking sedatives. All the while they're monitored on screens by other people in control rooms and are instructed via headphones and their talking medicine cabinets what to do and how to improve their productivity.
It's a disconcerting system, but it very clearly makes for an utterly joy-free existence, and our titular central character (Robert Duvall) is struggling with it; spiralling from complacency to downright desperation when attending a digital confession to a pixelated image of Jesus. He spirals and tries to deviate from his drug prescription and even starts a sexual relationship with his roommate (Maggie McOmie), but we soon learn that such expressions of free will have severe consequences.
How society got into this state, whether there's anyone ultimately in charge, and even whether there's such a thing as the "outside world," are never made clear. The film instead has you decode the mechanics of its world piece by piece; firstly introducing THX through the eyes of the control room screens where we also hear the mechanical voices repeating their standardised instructions to everyone. We then cut between that and the closer view of THX's existence, where he seems increasingly nervous about not conforming, then when he's prosecuted, we start to see more and more of the system that keeps everyone in their place.
The mechanics of oppression are a fascinating subject, and that's especially true here when the system we're shown parallels reality so scarily from its focus on productivity, and the way people are distracted and sedated. Lucas' world-building - from his slow unravelling of details, to his stark and claustrophobic set design - is the reason that all comes to life so well of course. But as well as understanding how this awful world functions, you also spend the film longing for THX to find some way out of the misery. He begins his own quiet rebellion from prison, and his final break for some unknown freedom is as tense as it is liberating.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It's a pretty bleak watch for the most part...
VERDICT: George Lucas' 'THX 1138,' slowly reveals a tale of one man's rebellion in a joyless dystopia where everyone is drugged and exploited. It's brilliantly bold, powerful filmmaking that deserves much more recognition than it gets.
