Luke
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CibbuanoTHX 1138
February 28th 2007 05:35
THX 1138 (1971)
For a long time while others wrote off George Lucas for his various abominations in the name of the ‘Star Wars’ franchise, I would defend him. I would say, ‘well, the first Star Wars films are great’… ahhh, but he only directed the first one, didn’t he? Someone else directed the grand masterpiece, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Well, I’d still defend him and I would say ‘but ‘American Graffiti’ is a great film, it’s fun and it’s entertaining, surely that’s worth something – and THX 1138 is meant to be awesome’. Mark those words, fellow film fans, ‘THX 1138 is meant to be awesome’. Where did I get this statement from? Various reviews, biographies of George Lucas, friends who had seen the film itself… and they were all WRONG!
I don’t really know where to start… Lucas-fan hyperbole had dubbed this film an Orwellian science fiction masterpiece and an early example of the golden era of 70s filmmaking. As the opening titles ominously fell down across the screen I could barely contain my excitement at what was to come… a clever piece of subversive science-fiction? A film utilizing the latest in directorial techniques to overcome a slender budget, and altogether brilliant in it’s forethinking?
Unfortunately, no.
Instead I got this self-consciously arty waste of acting talent and resourceful filmmaking they've been calling a 'forgotten gem'.
From what I can gather, THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) is a good citizen of society who does the unthinkable – he has sex with his ‘mate’ (Maggie McOmie) and stops taking the drugs that keep him unquestioning. He subsequently gets thrown into this empty white space with other political prisoners (including Donald Pleasance, the only remotely entertaining performance in the whole film), and – after sitting around for a while – some of them decide to escape. And so they walk out of this white space, just like that. The last half an hour of the film shows the three escapees trying to make their way ‘outside’ (outside of the city, which appears to be underground)… this sequence is probably the least annoying of the film’s main three parts.
The story itself is a garbled hodge-pode of Dystopian fiction – the talk of ‘erotics’ and the race/religious ideas, whilst interesting-sounding, were not sufficiently developed or even remotely explained. The back story seems to be a lazy mix of everything ‘bad’ – communism, consumerism, conformism. It sounds and looks like it has some kind of intellectual merit but there is no solid philosophical dissertation to support Lucas’s ‘vision’. It suggests depth, but there is nothing there – it’s a paint-by-numbers Orwellian nightmare that has none of the philosophical discussion that makes such scenarios relevant or interesting.
Look, I just have to say… like a lot of people, ever since the revised classic Star Wars films and the new Star Wars trilogy itself, I’ve had a few reservations about George Lucas’ artistic integrity. After seeing ‘THX 1138’ (the recent DVD-release has it’s own redux shit going on), I can confidently express my opinion that George Lucas is a fucking idiot. ‘THX 1138’ has some striking visuals… it’s all very stark, minimalist and surreal, which I can dig. The overly polite and earnest robot police officers are suitably sinister too, and are probably one of the more original aspects of the film. But my problem with these far and few good points is that I’m not sure how representative they even are of the original 1971 release of the film… how much has been re-done? Some of the impressive long shots of the cityscape are probably new additions that Lucas has made to the original print… it’s pretty seamlessly done, for the most part, so it’s hard to tell what’s original and what’s new, and this makes it kind of hard to review – the few good points of the film (it’s visuals) might not even be indicative of what the original 1971 release was like!
Anyway, I digress. I was hugely disappointed by this movie.
Lucas = no cred.
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