There’s a section in Megadoc wherein director Mike Figgis interviews Star Wars creator George Lucas about his early career partnership with Francis Ford Coppola, and he discusses Coppola having served as producer on Lucas’s first film, THX-1138. My viewing companion and I realized we had both never seen it, so with the weather in flux and nothing to do in the dwindling days of the holiday season, we checked it out. To our delight, we found that it was actually a fantastic film … mostly. The only readily available version at this time is Lucas’s 2004 director’s cut, and if you saw the director’s name next to the year and panicked, you probably know what I’m about to say. Other than rare VHS and Laserdisc releases that might be floating around at a flea market out there, there’s never been a release of this film that didn’t feature Lucas’s late nineties/early aughts CGI meddling. It’s as intrusive as it is unnecessary, which is particularly frustrating when the restoration of Lucas’s actual seventies footage looks fantastic. 

THX-1138 (Robert Duvall) is a worker on an android assembly line, putting small, volatile pieces into place via remote control from behind a radiation shield. Of late, he’s started to lose focus, and the consequences are dire, as there have been over 150 deaths at the plant that year alone. His is a dystopian world where the police have been replaced by chrome faced robots that are just as likely to dole out unnecessary violence as their flesh forebears, and other than the robed priests of state-enforced religious figure OHM-0000, everyone is dressed in identical white clothing and have their head shaved or buzzed to the scalp. OHM’s automated confessional booths are, of course, linked directly to the center of the city’s Orwellian panopticon, so all confessions are recorded and monitored to ensure that no citizens are engaged in criminal drug evasion, as the populace is completely controlled in every facet of their lives, down to being assigned roommates for companionship despite strict provisions against sex. THX’s recent disaffection is the result of his withdrawal from one of the state’s main mind control drugs, as his mate LUH-3417 (Maggie McOmie) has secretly been removing them from his provided supplements. 

Although he loves the physical intimacy that the two can suddenly share since she’s removed the veil from his eyes as it has been removed from hers, their changes are observed by SEN-5241 (Donald Pleasence), who has figured out how to make small changes of his own using the computer access that his position allows. He attempts to use this to blackmail THX into becoming his roommate as LUH has already been taken away upon discovery that she’s pregnant, but this backfires when THX reports him for his activity. After an industrial accident caused by an ill-timed application of a “mind lock” by the authorities while THX is in the middle of a delicate moment at work, he’s tried for being an “erotic” and put into a white void of a prison, where SEN is already imprisoned himself. After there’s a lot of puttering around in this space, THX sets out to walk to the edge and get out so that he can find LUH, with SEN following him. The two manage to get to the outside world with relative ease after meeting another escapee named SRT-5752 (Don Pedro Colley), but the not altogether lucid SEN is found fairly quickly. THX eventually manages to escape to the “outer shell” after a car chase with the police in a nifty jet car based on the Lola T70 as the cost of pursuing him eventually becomes higher than the cash value he adds to society, crawling out into the sunlight at the end after learning that LUH’s designation has been “recycled” and applied to her fetus, implying her death. 

It’s a dark ending, and this is a surprisingly bleak film for a filmmaker whose career has never really been marked by (and I mean this with kindness in my heart) much in the way of depth. THX-1138 is surprisingly experimental and surreal. It’s cribbing from a long list of dystopian sources for its narrative and thematic inspiration, notably the aspects of Big Brother’s state-enforced belief systems of 1984 and the drugged populace and sexual taboos of Brave New World. Interestingly, the presence of an automated recording of a confessor in the form of OHM (who is represented visually by a backlit poster of Hans Memling’s 1478 painting Christ Giving His Blessing) presages the current “race for an AI Jesus,” which is so inherently heretical in concept alone that I expect its completion to be heralded by a pillar of fire of a type unseen since the melting of the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Visually, the film incorporates a lot of shots of computer monitors and readouts that are shot with such extreme closeup that their meaning is lost, while recordings of THX and LUH are played over and over again in command centers while being illustrated on an oscilloscope. The film’s climactic car chase scene takes place in the BART underground system, which was still under construction at the time, and it looks fantastic. That is to say, it looks fantastic once it gets there. 

Beforehand, in the available edition, there’s a poorly rendered sequence of THX’s stolen jet car zooming around on the streets. Everything about it looks cheap and tawdry, like a low-effort Speed Racer sequence thrown in because that was what Lucas imagined thirty years prior and couldn’t pull off, but now he “can,” so he will have his way come hell or high water. Every time some stupid updated special effect appeared on screen, it looked dated and awful, genuinely worse than the gorgeously shot film surrounding it. It’s as if Lucas was so focused on communicating the literal vision that he had (or remembered having after decades of having time to dwell on it) that he lost sight of the fact that he had a good movie already, and he did the revisionist equivalent of smearing feces on it. There is an upload of the Laserdisc edition online—it’s not hard to find—and I went back and watched the sequences where I remembered the CGI standing out, and it’s all completely unnecessary. Bad CGI is used to transition through several floors of workers milling about before descending to the lower level where SEN confronts THX in the director’s cut, whereas the original version just starts the scene there, and it’s infinitely better for not having garbage digital effects added in for no narrative purpose. There’s a scene where THX has almost made it to the outer shell and his potential freedom where he must fend off a “shell dweller,” a kind of simian monkey we had seen a previous specimen of in the white void prison. If you watch Lucas’s preferred version, they’re represented by what are basically hairy Gungans with no believable screen presence; in the original, we see what could perhaps be described as children in Planet of the Apes Halloween costumes, and yet that still looks better and would be preferable to the updated edition. 

There’s nothing narratively groundbreaking about THX-1138, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s a bold outing for a first time director whose reputation would diminish as his career went on. This may be the equal of Star Wars in just how good it is, minus Lucas’s ill-advised fudging of his early career work. It won’t have the same broad appeal, and it definitely sags a bit in the middle as we dwell a little too long on SEN’s meaningless babbling during imprisonment, but as a cerebral, artistic oddity, it’s worth checking out. At the same time, it’s also worth waiting to see if we ever get a restored version without the extraneous and distracting VFX. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond