1971
DIRECTOR: GEORGE LUCAS PRODUCER: LAWRENCE STURHAHN SCREENPLAY: GEORGE LUCAS AND WALTER MURCH STARRING: ROBERT DUVALL (THX), DONALD PLEASENCE (SEN), DON PEDRO COLLEY (SRT), MAGGIE MCOMIE (LUH), IAN WOLFE (PTO), MARSHALL EFRON (TWA), SID HAIG (NCH)
THX 1138
AMERICAN ZOETROPE/WARNER BROS. • COLOR, 86 MINUTES
A factory worker in a dystopian future illegally falls in love and tries to escape his totalitarian society.
“A film from the future rather than about the future” is cowriter Walter Murch’s description of THX 1138, the dystopian drama that marked the directorial debut of George Lucas. Though Lucas intended the film as more of a metaphor for the present than a prediction of things to come, it could easily be released to theaters today, nearly fifty years later, and still feel cutting-edge. From its rapid-fire editing to its vision of a technology-driven society where life is captured on video, THX 1138 is a prescient look ahead, and essential sci-fi viewing.
The movie’s first incarnation was Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967), a fifteen-minute film Lucas made while studying cinema at the University of Southern California. In 1969, up-and-coming director Francis Ford Coppola formed his American Zoetrope studio and secured a deal with Warner Bros. to produce a feature version of Lucas’s student film. Lucas (who had directed several short documentaries) gives his first Hollywood effort something of a documentary feel, with minimal camera movement and a found-footage aesthetic. The quick, disjointed editing style was borrowed from the French New Wave.
After opening with a clip from an old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century serial, Lucas cuts to his version of the twenty-fifth century—grim, sterile, and homogenized. This is our first glimpse of the “used future” that would later appear in the Star Wars series. Machines and robots are well worn, and often dirty or broken. This advanced yet run-down world not only feels more realistic but, in this case, symbolizes a society that doesn’t function as smoothly as it should. How could it? Everyone is bald and dressed in the same shapeless white clothing. They have license-plate codes instead of names. Love is outlawed and sexual activity (except with mechanical devices) is forbidden. Sedated, observed by video cameras, and conditioned to conform, people trudge through life working, watching mindless television, and purchasing meaningless objects. “Buy more. Buy now. Buy and be happy,” instructs an automated voice.
Robotic law enforcement of the future
Robert Duvall as THX
In his first starring film role, Robert Duvall gives a lesson in powerfully understated screen acting as THX. With very little dialogue to establish his character, Duvall relies on pantomime and subtle facial expressions to create a passive, almost reluctant hero. His female roommate, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), sets the adventure in motion by tampering with his regular dose of sedatives, causing THX to feel emotions, fall in love with LUH, and have a meltdown at the robot factory. Donald Pleasence is edgy and shifty as SEN, THX’s new roommate, who talks incessantly but says nothing. (SEN’s dialogue is “total nonsense,” Lucas has said, and was culled from speeches given by Richard Nixon.) The vast white expanse that confines THX and SEN feels more like a prison of the mind than a literal one; like Dorothy in Oz, THX has the power to escape at any time—all he needs is the will to do so. When hologram SRT (played by Don Pedro Colley) appears, he leads THX to freedom via a high-speed car chase—the film’s only action-sequence—in which steel-faced robo-cops pursue the hero through the newly constructed Bay Area Rapid Transit tunnels beneath San Francisco.
Lucas spoon-feeds nothing to the audience. He allows the story to unfold in its own unique way, through an abstract montage of images and sounds. Instead of music, the film is “scored” with a chorus of distorted voices masterfully engineered by Walter Murch, who also acted as sound designer. At one point, a woman pronounces a series of words over a public loudspeaker: “Fluctuate… Undulate… Alternate… Plastic.” Like the confessional machines that ask, “What’s wrong?” these automated vocalizations sound alarmingly similar to the helpful voices that greet us from cell phones and laptops today.
An ahead-of-its-time visual and aural experience more than a traditional movie, THX 1138 portrays a technological world-within-a-world that only the courageous try to escape. In this respect, it is the seed that later sprouted The Matrix (1999). In its day, the film was neither a hit with the public nor with Warner Bros. executives, who nixed their deal with Coppola after screening it. Critics, however, sensed they were watching something significant. Variety’s 1971 review nailed the film’s legacy: “Likely not to be an artistic or commercial success in its own time, the American Zoetrope production just might in time become a classic of stylistic, abstract cinema…. We’ll know for sure in about a generation.”
FAR-OUT FACTS
MIND-BLOWING MOMENT
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