Classic Movie Reviews: THX 1138
By Josh Spiegel
May 22, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The presentation doesn't change with the 1971 science fiction drama THX 1138. You're probably familiar with that title, or at least the first word, THX, as it's the name of a famous sound system that often signifies the beginning of a movie and the end of your hearing. The system was spearheaded by none other than George Lucas, he of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises. Not many people, though, may realize that before Lucas directed Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, before even American Graffiti, he went behind the camera for THX 1138, his debut picture.
Now, don't worry too much; unlike his 21st century attempts to ruin everything he ever created, Lucas hasn't tampered much with his original creation, with the exception of adding two minutes to a director's cut; since the extended version is only 88 minutes long, I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two versions. I'd also be hard-pressed to tell if the original version is markedly better than the director's cut. Right now, THX 1138 is an interesting-looking movie in search of a good idea. For me, the reason why THX 1138 doesn't work has nothing to do with special-effects tampering or groaningly cheesy lines. No, Lucas just doesn't seem to have a good bead on what he wants to do with his title character.
As THX 1138, Robert Duvall (yes, Robert Duvall) is quite good, but I'm not really sure what he's doing here. This is one of the more unique roles he's ever played, much different than his later work, the movies that typified him as an elder cowboy of the Old West. Here, he's a relatively quiet drone in the world of the future (although the future of the film seems to only be taking place a few years after 1971), working in a nuclear plant by day, and going to his sterile apartment by night. In this future, the majority of humans are drones, living underground, kept docile because of some seriously strong drugs.
THX 1138 lives with a female worker named LUH. For relatively inexplicable reasons (one of the first problems with the whole film), LUH decides to get off her drugs and take THX with her. This is successful, in that THX and LUH consummate their previously platonic relationship with passionate love-making. Unfortunately, one of the many things that the mysterious people who run this underground world ban is...well, sex. Sex is bad, the gravest sin of all in this future, so LUH and THX are taken separately into custody. THX, though he's not particularly sure how, decides to break out of his whitewalled prison and break free to the top, to the real world.
Most futuristic movies have many common attributes, and THX 1138, one of the first '70s-era films of the ilk, has those in spades. Sterile environments? Check. Workers treated like cogs in a system? Check. At least one drone hoping to break free from his prison? Check. Romantic subplot? Check, check. Movies such as Brazil and even the execrable 2005 action thriller The Island have some similar traits, the latter film even more so.
But the question from the beginning of this review remains: why are we, or filmmakers, so damn scared of the future? Plenty of films set in the near future took place before 2009, yet they still paint a very grim picture of what life could be like. Robots haven't become nearly as true as we might fear. I wouldn't argue that this fear of the future isn't simply because we don't know what the future holds, but perhaps it's the filmmakers' view of the worst aspects of the human race. Take THX 1138. Here's a film where presumably all of the human race now lives underground for unspecified reasons. We're never completely certain who is controlling humans now, who's been able to provide mood-altering medications; the assumption is that the government is behind this, but at all times, we're talking about a faceless villain.
Lucas takes that idea to a far too literal point by making the main adversaries that THX has to worry about be police who wear masks to obscure their real faces. We hear them talk, but never do we see what they look like. Obviously, there is a tiny parallel to Lucas' next major villainous creation, Darth Vader, but we saw what Vader looked like by the end of the earlier trilogy. I don't imagine the faceless police officers in THX 1138 are as weak on the inside as Vader turned out to be; it's scarier to assume that, behind the masks, they're just as normal as the rest of the humans living underground.
It's the vagueness of the threat that THX has to run up against (especially when you take the final scenes into consideration) that makes the film fall a bit flat. Duvall, as always, is very strong here; his performance works all the more because he has very little dialogue in the film and rarely raises his voice. He's able to project intensity through his character without making it clearly obvious how he's feeling. The only performance of note here comes from Donald Pleasence, best known as the original Dr. Loomis in John Carpenter's Halloween. As SEN, a fellow drone who ends up in prison with THX, Pleasence is an intriguing parallel to THX, someone who's full of bluster but can't actually match it with action.
However, with every good thing THX 1138 has to offer, there's a negative right behind it. Something else Lucas chooses to obscure from the audience is whether it is those drugs that make all the human drones docile. SEN appears to have strayed away from the company line, so to speak. Another drone that THX meets, SRT, is seen running away simply because he was tired of his current job. If it's that easy to run away from this kind of horrible place, why is there any kind of conflict? How can this world be so labyrinthine yet so easy to get out of? Why is the world above this underground place restricted...kind of? Obviously, it's not a bad thing that Lucas chooses not to answer all of the questions surrounding this story, but it'd be nice if he focused on some of the common-sense problems that most audience members might run into.
Then, there's the ending, which I've been hinting at throughout this review. THX winds up climbing a very long ladder, literally, a ladder that will presumably lead him to the outside world. Some of the faceless cops are chasing him when they are informed by one of the drones watching the chase that the project to recapture THX and bring him back into the society is over budget. So...they tell him he's got one more chance and then they're leaving. THX ignores them, keeps climbing, and they leave. And that's it.
THX climbs to the top, sees a sunset-filled evening and the credits roll. That's the movie. Now, I'm all for ambiguous endings (it's better that we don't see what's going on outside and whether or not THX could survive up here), but seriously? Lucas attempts his strongest jab at satire at the worst possible moment. The climactic sequence has already featured a fast-paced, but completely wrongheaded, car chase, and now THX gets out because a project is over budget? The joke may have worked earlier in the film, or even if the satire in the film was much stronger. Instead, all I felt at the end was a creeping urge to throw something at my television screen. It's funny how everything George Lucas does these days (or, in this case, everything of his that I see these days) makes a person want to do that, isn't it?
Now, compared with the most recent set of Star Wars films, THX 1138 is a masterpiece. At the very least, it's a great film to look at, as long as you can roll with all white backgrounds. Duvall and Pleasence, strong actors in general, give great performances in a film that doesn't deserve it. Weirdly enough, I'm not sure that you could recognize this film as a Lucas-style story if you weren't already aware. Unfortunately for him, that doesn't work in his favor. George Lucas just can't get an even break these days, even when working in a dystopian future.