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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.

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