SoftInloveRox
Horrible, fascist and poorly acted
Moustroll
Good movie but grossly overrated
Rexanne
It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
marcosferatu
From nowhere to nowhere.
but maggie mcomie is a muse...
Michael_Elliott
THX 1138 (1971) ** (out of 4)Set in the future, George Lucas' feature-length debut as director tells the story of a man (RObert Duvall) and woman (Maggie McOmie) who decide to rebel against the rules of not experiencing love/sex. The two of them stop taking the drugs that they're supposed to take and set off to do what they want.THX 1138 is the type of movie I respect more than I actually enjoyed watching it. It's pretty clear from watching this that Lucas certainly had a talented eye as it's rather amazing what he was able to do with such a small budget. With that said, as much as I enjoyed certain aspects of this film, at the same time I'm not going to lie because it bored me pretty bad.On a visual level THX 1138 is quite amazing because you really do get the feeling that you're viewing something set in the future. The sets certainly give you a futuristic feel and there's no doubt that Lucas manages to build up a very thick atmosphere. I really liked the look of the film as well and especially how most of the film is done in long shots.I'd also say that Duvall and McOmie are very good in the lead roles and that Donald Pleasance is also very good. The cinematography is top-notch and there's no doubt that Lucas made a very believable and good looking film. Still, there's really no connection I had to the characters or the story, which is what made the film rather boring to get through.
cday129
In trying to think of the point of this movie I can only think of it as a vehicle to explore the nameless, featureless dystopian city they created. To say that anything is really explored is an exaggeration. The main character, which the movie is named after is even less interesting than his name. What little bursts of emotional change we see from him throughout the movie quickly give way to him continuing to sleepwalk his way through what scraps of a plot there are to glean here. I question whether he really needed the sedatives at all.The character interaction is god-awful. It's in all likelihood meant to be that way since the characters were all born in a lab and drugged from an early age to have suppressed emotions and social interaction(though the kids that are seen several times seem to be cheery enough), but this doesn't excuse a movie from being so devoid of substance from a human element point of view. After all is this movie made for people or robots? Don't think we're to that point yet when we're making movies for robots let alone back in the 70s. I think this will be a future classic for them though. The most interesting character is easily SEN 5241 because of his unexplained, but fervent interest in the main character. Why does he so badly want to be his roommate that he would break the law to arrange it? Why does he carry on this interest after this is no longer possible? The only clue that we get is a scene where he's the one watching THX 1138 and LUH 3417 having sex. So the only guess that I can make is that he wants to have dudesex or he's just crazy and took an interest in him for whatever reason.The most interesting aspects of this movie aren't explored. Who is in charge of this city? What function does it serve in the bigger picture? What is the bigger picture? How did things get this way? The city seems to be one big factory, which uses performance-drugged humans as slaves. The city itself seems to be the plot as the main character offers next to nothing of his thoughts or goals. If the movie warranted this kind of interest the most common question I would have asked is "what are you doing now and why?" As the movie wasn't invested in its characters, neither was I. The best example of this is at the end where the viewer is left wondering whether he is speeding toward "Reproduction Facility #3" to save LUH 3417(something might happen!) or is he merely trying to escape the city. I automatically assumed he was doing the former since it would have actually been something that was set up earlier and led to later events. You know some sort of event --> event --> conclusion like how a potentially good movie does things. Turns out he was just trying to escape the city and along the way overheats his car and causes a couple robot cops to crash their motorcycles. This was easily the most entertaining part and the concept of there being a "project budget" automatically assigned to his recapture and the budget going over 5% automatically causing him to be let off the hook was oddly interesting to me. Even though this falls apart when you consider that they let them simply walk out of confinement in the first place. Why they wouldn't just throw these "deviants" out, kill them, recycle their bodies for food cubes or use them for other means is not consistent with their indifference to regular human death and maiming by the hundreds due to unsafe work conditions. That blatant inconsistency is insignificant in the grand scheme of what's wrong with this movie. Something that would be but a nitpick in a good movie, but at this point I didn't care because it was finally over! Praise OMM.My main gripe is that there's little of interest here. Far too little to carry 88 minutes. The characters are not interesting. The vague plot is certainly not interesting. The world is only interesting in a mysterious sort of way that you have to begin to imagine from the ground up because the movie only explores things in the world, not the world itself. You can make excuses and call it an art movie. I can see how it could be considered one, but THX 1138 doesn't impress, interest or entertain me as a movie or an exploration of what it is to be human or whatever it's supposed to be.
Dalbert Pringle
Oh, no!! Here we go again with yet another preposterously bleak and suffocatingly stupid Sci-Fi tale that seems determined to tell us all just how horrible man's future is destined to be.... Spare me! Originally released in 1971, this particular version of THX-1138 was George Lucas's "Director's Cut" which, in 2004, was given something of a face-lift where new CGI footage was added to its storyline to give its claustrophobic settings and bleak backgrounds more pizazz.Unfortunately THX-1138's story was such an awful bore from start to finish that any visual improvements only proved to me what a hopeless dud this futuristic tale actually was without these modernizations.To me, THX-1138 was one of those super slow-paced movies whose story was so utterly absurd (and the dialogue so demented) that I swear they were actually making this idiotic nonsense up as they went along. Yes. It was really that bad.I certainly wish that I wasn't speaking so negatively about this picture (which I think had a lot of potential), but I'm certainly not going to tell you a pack of glowing lies about a movie that I thought was just a huge heap of pure Sci-Fi excrement.If nothing else - THX-1138 certainly proved to be an excellent sleeping pill for this disappointed viewer.
