THX 1138
Short description
In a future society, people live under strict state control, their lives reduced to work and the mandatory consumption of drugs that suppress emotion and keep everyone obedient. A technician known only as THX 1138 leads this routine existence until he stops taking the medication, and feelings he has never experienced begin to surface. He becomes involved with a woman, LUH, and their secret relationship puts them at odds with a system that treats any deviation as an illness to be corrected.
George Lucas directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Walter Murch. It was his second feature, following the short Herbie and arriving before American Graffiti and the Star Wars films. Robert Duvall plays THX, with Donald Pleasence as SEN, Don Pedro Colley as SRT, Maggie McOmie as LUH, Ian Wolfe as PTO, and Marshall Efron as TWA. The production, from Warner Bros. Pictures and American Zoetrope, took in about 2 million dollars worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 6.8 from 66 reviews, while on TMDB its audience rating is 6.4 from over a thousand votes, a modest gap suggesting the two groups judged it fairly similarly.
What's left behind the scenes
- Fragments of the film's soundtrack (an episode of a man being beaten by prison guards) were used by musician Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in the album The Downward Spiral, the track “Mr Self Destruct.”
- The heads of "Warner Brothers" studio disliked the finished version of the film, and a decision was made to reduce the film's runtime and decrease the marketing budget.
- George Lucas subsequently made several references to his first film in his later works. For example, the car number "THX 138" appears in "American Graffiti" (1973).
- This film is an expanded version of the director's 15-minute student graduation work, “THX 1138 4EB,” which received high praise and the opportunity to make a full-length version at Francis Ford Coppola's “American Zoetrope” studio, for which this film was the first.
- Shaved-headed commoners in the film were played by patients from the Synanon drug rehabilitation center in California.
- The film was shot in San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Rafael – cities in the state of California.
- The scene of the android police officers chasing the fugitives was filmed in the machine room of a large telephone exchange, meaning the endless rows of electronic equipment were telephone systems.
- In 2004, an updated director's cut of the film was released on DVD with additional scenes and digital special effects, with a runtime of 88 minutes.
- The final scene of the film uses music from the first part of Johann Sebastian Bach's “St Matthew Passion.”
- According to George Lucas's vision, the characters embody the concepts of sex and love, which is reflected in the names of the main characters – THX and LUH, which respectively sound similar to the words 'sex' and 'love'.
- In the film, the image of Christ blessing from Hans Memling's painting "Christ Blessing" (1478) is used as an image of divinity in special confession booths.
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