Years
before George Lucas became a household name with his Star Wars franchise and Francis
Ford Coppola unleashed his Godfather saga, the two collaborated on the science fiction film called 'THX 1138'.
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| "So what you're saying is that Lucas is gonna totally suck in a few years?" |
It's an American Zoetrope
company production of Lucas' first theatrical feature, and although it was
dispensed with at the time by Warner Brothers, the film found cult revival
showings over the years after the success of Star Wars and cineastes began
probing the lost films of American Zoetrope. It also provided an early acting
role for Robert Duvall as the film's hero, THX 1138.
Based
on a short student film directed by Lucas, “THX 1138 4EB,” the film is a
sterilized science fiction nightmare about a city-scape buried deep underground
where people are assigned serial numbers for names. Everyone is bald and
dressed in white, drugs keep people docile, sex is illegal (people are born in
glass jars via an assembly line), and there seems to be no escape. Android
police officers skulk the terrain daily as cameras mounted everywhere watch
your every move, and prison cells appear to be massive white voids with no end
in sight.
Enter
THX 1138, a city worker who builds police robots for a living, which is a
dangerous job with routine factory explosions claiming the lives of employees
on a daily basis. His roommate, LUH
3417, is a woman who develops feelings for THX. Soon, due to a difficult and
dangerous lifestyle change, THX reciprocates LUH's feelings. Before you know
it, THX and LUH are in a world of trouble due to activities considered beyond
inappropriate by the powers that be.
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| "....derp.....derpy....derp." |
The
oppressive totalitarian 1984 society envisioned by George Orwell is a common
theme in science fiction. THX 1138 takes a slightly different approach to
dystopia: This low-budget effort showcased a “Brave New World” never seen
before on film. The landscape is as clean as the spaceship Discovery in
Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It's a world of white walls and shopping
malls, with endless elevator music playing while people buy plastic objects,
simply to flush them down the drain when they return home. Television stations
are designed to satiate every human desire, from sexual urges to violent entertainment.
Religion
and church-going have been reduced to phone booth confessions that citizens
make to a tape recorded loop. Everyone speaks in a stultified high, leaving
them barely able to construct a coherent thought. THX and LUH noticeably stand
out, having real and engaging conversations.
Both
the the sound design and soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin (later famous for 'Dirty
Harry' and 'Enter the Dragon') paint a chorus of creepy electronic sounds and
unsettling ambient tones, evoking a sense of unfocused dread with a tinge of
doom. Incidentally, the sounds of a scene of THX watching a TV show of police
brutality would be sampled at the beginning of the Nine Inch Nails album 'The
Downward Spiral'.
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| "...and nothing compares 2 U...." |
For
anyone expecting another yarn in the vein of Star Wars, this is a block of
sharp edged ice in comparison, unfriendly and unyielding to audience
expectations. The film is virtually humorless, and in its own way, it was the
most uncompromising hunk of hard boiled science fiction until Ridley Scott's
eventual “Blade Runner.” In an experiential sense, we follow THX through the
maddening, intentionally lifeless dialogue his fellow members of society have
grown accustomed to.
Though
Lucas would inevitably retool the film with additional CGI effects shots and
subtle rearrangements of certain scenes, THX 1138 remains as unwavering and
unsettling a science fiction thriller as it did when it first premiered in
1971. Unlike the changes that had Greedo firing first in 'Star Wars Episode 4:
A New Hope', the impact of his consumerism as totalitarianism fable isn't
lessened by the changes. Only when Lucas and director Irvin Kershner embarked
on 'The Empire Stikes Back' did Lucas again come anywhere near making science
fiction storytelling this desperate, despairing, and hopeless.
-Andrew Kotwicki