George Lucas’ student film. Of course, not the actual student film, this was the theatrical release version. It was a real movie, not some poorly edited student film like I was half expecting. The theme in the film is one I find recurring in a lot of my favorite movies.
We open into a bland world where every person is reduced to numbers and letters. They are required to be on drugs that inhibit emotions. They do their jobs, they consume and they even watch television, all without any emotion at all. We meet THX’s mate, LUH. There is something different about her, she behaves just a bit unusual compared to the other citizens of this antiseptic world. We find out that she has stopped taking her medications and began having feelings. She has also been placing placebo pills in THX’s daily regimen too. He goes through withdrawals and eventually comes out of the emotional coma. The two fall in love and THX decides he is no longer going to take the pills. The two of them will escape and live in the “superstructure”.
They are discovered. He is detained, put on trial and experimented upon. After enduring the most punishing trial, the inane chatter of his fellow prisoners, THX escapes his prison and finds that LUH has been terminated and recycled. He makes a break for it and runs to escape the “perfect” society. As he runs, we see that he is climbing levels. He is approaching “Level 1″ and after making a climb up a chasm, he emerges onto the surface, seeing the sun for the first time.
I know this is a played-out concept but it was 1971. It was a stepping-stone in the line of movies of that theme. Lucas borrowed heavily from ’1984″ and fed future films like ‘Equilibrium’. As much as I like to rip George Luca$ for his “Re-Directing”, I can’t rip him on this one at all. It was a good movie. I especially liked that THX eventually realized that the prison was his. It was a prison created in his mind. There were no walls, the guards were only making suggestions, and they were not going to hurt him. He could simply walk away. He walked away from the prison in his mind, he walked away from the only society he knew, and he walked away from the status-quo. This movie says something for “perceived power” and suggestion. The religious over-lord figure didn’t really exist. You have to love a movie about an electronics-heavy future where everyone worships the god “Ohm”. Everyone obeyed the officers because they were officers. Large, tall, uniformed and robotic. They were there to be obeyed and no one ever questioned that; until they stopped taking their sedation pills. Open your eyes and you just might find that those things holding you down have no real power over you.
At least, that’s what I got out of it…
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