George Lucas has had an…interesting career. Star Wars is one of my all-time favorite movies, the first one I actually remember seeing in a theater, and that is basically what the man is known for as a director. True, he produced Indiana Jones, and his attention to special effects technology has been a real benefit to what can be done in movies, but as a director, what has he done beyond anything involving Jedi Knights? You know, beyond American Graffiti?
He has one other, the dystopian film THX 1138, and right now, I can watch it off Hulu. I know it mostly for its name and the fact it was Lucas’s professional debut feature. Will it stand out in any way?
Set in a dystopian future, the movie follows THX 1138 (Robert Duvall). At this point in time, humanity lives underground, sex and romance is outlawed, everyone wears the same white jumpsuit and shaves their heads, emotion-suppressing medications are a reqirement, and everyone has a three letter code followed by a four digit number for a name. There’s still Jesus, sort of, as booths exist to confess to, and law enforcement is handled by clumsy cop robots that seem to be less-than-optimal. THX 1138 works in a robot cop factory where the occasional large scale accident is seen as not too bad if less people die than they do for the competitor.
However, THX has something happen he wasn’t expecting: his female roommate LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) switched out his meds. Computers determine roommates, and since there’s no sex, there’s no reason not to let men and women share a place. However, without his medication, THX soon discovers sex is rather fun and he and LUH fall in love.
And from there, their problems begin as that puts them on trial, sent to prison to possibly be recycled. THX does know another prisoner, a similar rule-breaker named SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence), but he mostly wants to get out, find LUH, and go…somewhere. There may be a place outside the city, but no one ever goes there. Instead, people are encouraged to buy things and feel nothing. Is it possible to be free from a society like this?
As dystopias go, there isn’t a whole lot original to Lucas’s vision here. It seems to be made up of equal parts Nineteen Eight-Four, Brave New World, and the Russian novel We. However, that isn’t what makes or breaks THX 1138. Given his reputation for a rather bland directorial style and how much Lucas reportedly did not work much with his actors on his Star Wars films, there’s some really creative work here. Most of the sets seem to be blank voids with little to no anything anywhere. How big are these rooms? It’s hard to say. That’s probably the point. Lucas almost certainly didn’t have much of a budget for his first feature, so he went as minimalist as possible to great effect. Duvall and the other actors, for the most part, express themselves more through facial expression than actual dialogue. This is a strange world, but not an overly talkative one.
If anything, it seems weird to watch a George Lucas movie that centers so much around sexuality. Sex is more or less absent in the Star Wars universe, and even if the teenage boys of American Graffiti are off looking for a good time, they don’t get much further than a first date in most cases–Ron Howard and Cindy Williams’s characters are a bit different since they were already a couple at the start and end of the movie, but their plot deals with whether or not they’ll break up when he goes off to college the next day. If anything, movies like this produce a big “what if?” from me. If this was what Lucas was doing before he got sucked into the world of his best-known creation, it sure does seem like the phrase “victim of his own success” never resonated more it does for Mr. Lucas.
Grade: B+
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