THX 1138 (2004, DVD)

Before there was "Star Wars" or even "American Graffitti", there was "THX-1138." During the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a popular genre of film and literature (and to some extent TV as well) that explored the condition of things after the fall of civilization. The fall tended to be from nuclear war but not always, sometimes the disaster was environmental ("Soylent Green" or "Silent Running", or possibly economic and cultural ( "Rollerball") Often the reasons were left nebulously unspecified as is the case with "THX-1138". This genera king of petered out along with the Cold War but movies like"The Day After Tomorrow," shows the fire is still alive.

THX-1138 is both the title of the movie and the "name" of the title character of the movie. Robert Duvall plays THX (pronounce it "Thex", if you want). He lives in an unnamed city, presumably underground sometime in the future a few hundred years from now. The place is cold as an icebox and antiseptic like the hospital in Hell. Everything is done in cold white, everybody is shaved bald, women too. Lit by cold, brutal overhead lighting and drowned in electronic cross-talk and PA babble the white jumpsuit clad inhabitants hustle back and forth on unimaginable errands without interacting with each other. Sex is a crime and so is Drug Evasion, evasion of the regimen of sedatives and other drugs everyone takes on a daily basis to prevent insanity. Technology is everywhere but nobody seems very happy about anything.

THX has a big pressure job putting radioactive do-hickies into the innards of some kind of robot with remote manipulator Waldos. His section has only had 169 casualties this month against the other guys' 219... Everything is OK in THX's life, well, as OK as anything gets in the White City. But then his mate (roommate, only please!) LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), say it "lugh", is having problems with her meds and then her boss SEN 5241 (played by Donald Donald Pleasence, the only other "name" in the cast, pronounced like it's spelled or maybe, sometimes, "SIN"... Hmmm.) wants THX for his "mate", the implication is more than "room" mate. Soon everything goes to hell for our hero and he's on the run from the law, symbolized by silver-faced robots that look suspiciously like the CHP cops who were the banes of young road racer Lucas's existence.

George Lucas has been accused of being more interested in gadgets and equipment in his movies than the characters. This has never been more true than in "THX-1138". Everything is mechanical, including the characters. The dialog is fulled with either irrelevant banalities or inane and impenetrable jargon. Lucas is clearly fascinated by communications devices, the chatter of radios and intercoms, you see this in other Lucas movies, especially "Star Wars". The majority of this chatter is of little relevance but occasionally it intrudes on the needs of the plot. Lucas's fascination with fast cars also comes into play late in the movie with a chase scene where the young director gets a bit of revenge on his police nemeses.

To my mind the central theme of "THX-1138" is de-humanization. This movie very much puts me in mind of the work of Stanley Kubrick, particularly "2001: A Space Odyssey." The look is has the same stark antiscepsis and there is the same dearth of important direct dialog. Lucas grew away from this stark vision as things went on, probably because of the less-than-spectacular reception the film got from the Hollywood studio solons but you can still see some of it's residue in his later, more commercial, work.

All of the above features can conspire to make THX-1138 a difficult film to watch. The bright white-on-white-on-white design can be hard on the eyes. The low-key, low-passion dialog can be hard to follow. The new DVD version has some revised scenes, mostly some SFX stuff inserted in the background in the manner of the cloud city scenes in "Empire Strikes Back". These were put in by Lucas's ILM SFX outfit now that he's got all the money in the world. I believe there were also some more sexually explicit scenes that were excised for rating and TV purposes from previous cuts. Most of these additions are of no great consequence either way (the new freeway chase scene is kinda' cool, though). The tone of the movie is rather grim and along with the confusing aspects, can conspire to make "THX-1138" a difficult movie to watch casually.

Lucas made good use of the limited resources he had. Gizmos were obliviously scrounged from "off-the-shelf" sources and locations such as then-under-construction BART stations in San Francisco were used to good effect.

There is an expanded 2-disc DVD set that contains the film school short "THX-1138:4EB" on which this movie was based among other things. The one-disc edition (which this review is derived from) has a few trailers and commentary track by Lucas and the co-writer/sound designer Walter Murch.