Review: THX-1138

[Steve Jordan]

THX-1138 is a college movie product-turned-cinematic release, due to the fact that it happened to be a project of a later-to-be-famous George Lucas. After the success of American Graffitti and Star Wars, Lucas enhanced the original work, and it was produced and released by Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope Studios. Versions available on DVD today have undergone further enhancements in 2004, with new cityscapes, computer-generated sets and imagery to enhance existing scenes, and computer-generated characters to replace human characters (mostly little people).

THX-1138 is the full name of the main character (Robert Duvall), who works a stressful assembly job in an underground city. We don't really know why they are down there, but we do know that its citizens are severely controlled and monitored, urged to take drugs to keep them docile, forbidden to have sex, and policed by robots. When the story begins, his roommate LUH (Maggie McOmie) has decided that she needs love... THX's love... but to get it, she must slip him placebos to restart his sex drives and get his attention. Unfortunately, this has the double-effect of leaving him too stressed to work, and getting him caught having sex, and NOT taking his meds. And meanwhile, another citizen, SEN (Donald Pleasence), has recently lost his mate, and he's just clever enough of a programmer to rig the system to get him a new roommate... and it's THX. This odd love triangle ends up getting THX, SEN and LUH arrested as sexual deviants. But THX decides being in detention for the rest of his life isn't good enough for him, so he sets out to escape. With the help of a hologram names SRT (Don Pedro Colley), he escapes detention, ditches SEN, and goes on the run, his only goal: To find LUH and get out of the city.

THX-1138 looks like a college project, even with Lucas' 2004 enhancements... everyone is bald, the sets are either empty white spaces or shot in famous modern architectural locations, the clothes are all white pajamas, the sound effects are largely synthesized, and much of the props and set elements can, surprisingly enough, be found all around a collegiate media department. But Lucas manages to use these to great effect, to create a stark, oppressive Orwellian nightmare of a world. The script is vague in spots, there are some errors, and the movie provides an ambiguous ending... but taken overall, it's a fascinating movie to watch.

Lucas' 2004 enhancements, as with the Star Wars movies, don't so much revise the story, they just enhance the visuals. The original movie had THX at an assembling job, but what he was assembling wasn't clear... in the 2004 version, we now clearly see that he's building robots. We see more of the city, mostly scenes of impossibly fast cars and trains zipping about... the city looks like one, big, multilevel parking garage more than anything else. And perhaps the oddest "enhancement" was substituting the little people that played the mutated "shell dwellers" with computer-generated characters that looked like baboons with clothing. Overall, the enhancements don't aid the story, but they don't detract from it, either.

On the other hand, there are some fascinating visual and thematic elements here, a very coherent vision from Lucas. It demands the viewer pay attention to everything, and probably due to his limited budget, little is wasted. THX-1138 gives us a glimpse into the visual inventiveness of Lucas, though the dark feel of this movie wouldn't be seen in his commercial works for quite some time afterward.

[MG1962]

Lucas' 2004 enhancements, as with the Star Wars movies, don't so much revise the story, they just enhance the visuals. The original movie had THX at an assembling job, but what he was assembling wasn't clear... in the 2004 version, we now clearly see that he's building robots.

Sorry to nitpick, but I thought it was fairly obvious they were building the power units for the police robots in the orginal film

[Circus Cranium]

I've always had a soft spot for that film, first saw it back in film class in college. I love the automated confessional, and the way the medicine cabinet says 'What's wrong?' every time you open it.