THX 1138

THX 1138. 1970 Warner Bros. Pictures & American Zoetrope.
Starring: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie, Ian Wolfe, Marshall Efron, Sid Haig, James Wheaton
Executive Producer: Francis Ford Coppola
Director: George Lucas
Buy THX 1138, two-disc special edition, from Amazon.

This is the first feature length film directed by George Lucas, and it took some time before its DVD release in 2004. Lucas wanted to upgrade portions of the movie, not unlike what he did with the first three Star Wars films, but not as extensive in this case.

In a dystopian future, we are taken to an underground society where omnipresent, faceless, android police officers control the population, all human activity is monitored at all times, and special drugs to supress all emotion (that includes sexual desire) are mandatory to take. THX 1138 (Duvall) works on a nuclear production line. His roommate LUH 3417 (McOmie) has grown disillusioned, and consciously decides to stop taking her pills, breaking the law. She substitute inactive pills for THX's medications. As the drug's effect wears off, THX starts feeling genuine emotion and sexual desire for the first time, and he and LUH become lovers, planning to escape the "superstructure" where they can live in freedom. Before these plans go anywhere, they're both arrested and charged with having unauthorized sexual activity, and not taking the state-prescribed drugs.

THX is imprisoned in a white, limbo-like area along with notable inmates as technician SEN 5241 (Pleasence), who used his programming skills to try to replace LUH as THX's roommate, but ended up imprisoned after THX reported him. Eventually, THX and SEN decide to escape limbo, encountering a renegade hologram called SRT (Colley), who has also decided to escape. After leaving prison, THX tries to find LUH, only to find that her identity is now belonging to a fetus in a growth chamber, suggesting that she was considered "incurable" and killed. SEN breaks off to explore deeper into the city's underground, and is eventually captured, leaving THX and SRT to steal vehicles, and managing to elude capture by the android police officers (whose budget will dictate whether or not THX will be taken back into custody).

Lucas would subsequently insert references, and some not subtle at all, to this movie in every one of his subsequent projects. Recommended cult movie.