THX 1138 [1971]

REVIEW

"You have nowhere to go."

Seven years before revitalizing the genre with the pantomime histrionics of Star Wars [1977], Lucas tried his hand at a very different kind of science fiction in this cautionary tale of life in a sterile, authoritarian future already overly familiar to regular consumers of SF. Expanded from his award winning short student film Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB [1967], TXH 1138 begins with a brief clip from the 1939 Buck Rogers serial, a sign, perhaps, of things to come.

The film proper begins with a series of arcane images, snatches of video from surveillance cameras and the like. Bald headed drones are seen at work, including the eponymous THX 1138 [Robert Duvall], engaged in a series of monotonous and seemingly meaningless tasks. His world is a bland and colourless place, an apparently underground society run by computers where failure to take the daily dose of prescribed drugs is punishable as "illegal drug evasion" and where rigid conformity in both appearance and attitude is rigorously enforced. Sex is outlawed and citizens visit cybernetic 'psychiatrists' who advise them to "work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy."

But all is not well in this supposedly regulated and well ordered world a lizard crawls through a maze of electrical wiring; a robot policeman repeatedly walks into the same wall; and THX's 'mate' LUH 3417 [Maggie McOmie] begins to tamper with his drug intake. Accordingly, the couple discover forbidden sexual acts [no one adequately explains quite why sex is forbidden, why a supposedly sexless society encourages its citizens to take mates, nor how this most primal of human urges is successfully repressed] and are soon picked up by the robot cops and placed on trial. Found guilty, a pregnant LUH is 'consumed', her code name re assigned for use by a bottled embryo, while THX is consigned to a blank, featureless prison.

In this hi tech clink, THX meets SEN [Donald Pleasence], a former workmate of LUH's, an idealistic rebel with grand plans to manipulate the master computer that controls the city. Together they attempt to escape the dazzling white prison, teaming up with an unnamed black man who claims not to be human at all, but an escapee from the "entertainment circuits", a runaway hologram. Soon separated from the others, SEN finds his way to the city limits but is so appalled by the prospect of life on the outside that he returns and surrenders. The hologram is 'killed' in a car crash and only THX survives to claw his way to the surface as the robot police their mission cancelled because the hunt for THX has exceeded the budget limit beg him to "please come back, you have nothing to be afraid of." The film ends with THX silhouetted against a fiery sunset facing an uncertain future.

THX 1138 was never going to win any awards for originality. Like Star Wars, it mixes and matches SF tropes and clichés but in this earlier effort Lucas at least manages to do something intelligent and interesting with the well-worn ideas. Relentlessly grim but not entirely humourless [the almost constant drone of computerized voices urging the sedated masses to consume and ne happy are darkly comic], it's a far cry from the cheerful optimism of Star Wars. Like so many 70s pre-Star Wars American SF movies (Colossus the Forbin Project, The Andromeda Strain, The Stepford Wives) it viewed both the future and the technology it promised with suspicion. In Star Wars, technology had been tamed and domesticated - in THX 1138 it threatens to dominate humanity entirely.

Lucas clearly saw THX 1138 as an allegory, in part about the nature of human sexuality and personal identity THX=SEX, LUH=LOVE and SEN=SIN. Such thematic depth would be but a distant memory by the time he made Star Wars but adds a disturbing further layer of interest to a film that already has more going for it intellectually in its first ten minutes than the entire Star Wars series could muster.

Lucas fans coming to THX 1138 after Star Wars will be in for a shock. The slow pace, largely indistinguishable characters [Lucas insisted on his cast being shaved to create a society where no-one is distinguishable as an individual] and distrust of the technology and gadgetry that would be fetishised in the Star Wars films will look for all the world like the work on an entirely different film-maker. And in many ways that's exactly what it is. One can only imagine the alternate universe where Lucas failed to interest anyone in making Star Wars and went on to make more cerebral and challenging films like THX 1138 instead.

The original Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB won Lucas a clutch of awards and led to a prestigious scholarship with Warner Brothers where he was assigned to Coppola's Finian's Rainbow [1968]. A friendship was struck and Coppola promoted Lucas to assistant director on The Rain People [1969]. Coppola had long harboured dreams of being a movie mogul and to that end, he persuaded Warners to finance the setting up of American Zoetrope, a studio dedicated to low budget but high quality features.

Sadly, dreams of empire soon faltered when the company's first film, THX 1138, proved to be a commercial disaster. Warners had stumped up $777,777.77 [Lucas had based his budget on his belief that the number 7 was, in some way, lucky for him] and they were appalled by what they got for their money. Warner's then president, Ted Ashley, cancelled the Zoetrope deal. demanding the return of all materials and $300,000 of the $3.,5 million that the studio had given to Coppola. The film itself was extensively re edited by the studio and promptly tried to bury the whole sorry affair. Coppola's aspirations were given a boost by the massive successes of Apocalypse Now [1979] [the idea of a Vietnam war film was first floated by Lucas] and The Godfather [1972], while Lucas went on to bigger though sadly not necessarily better things with the spectacular but brainless Star Wars by way of the nostalgia trip American Graffiti [1973].
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 5 May, 2008