Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 57
Fresh: 51 | Rotten: 6
George Lucas' feature debut presents a spare, bleak, dystopian future, and features evocatively minimal set design and creepy sound effects.
Average Rating: 6.9/10
Critic Reviews: 10
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 1
George Lucas' feature debut presents a spare, bleak, dystopian future, and features evocatively minimal set design and creepy sound effects.
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Based on his award-winning student short, George Lucas's debut feature cerebrally celebrates the possibility for individual freedom against all odds. In a 1984-esque white-washed future underground dystopia where sexuality is banned, all humans sport shaved heads and the same shapeless outfits as they go about their work in a mandated state of sedation, listening to exhortations to "Buy and Be Happy." Black-clad robot cops chant a mantra to their victims that "everything will be all right" and
Mar 11, 1971 Wide
Sep 14, 2004
Warner Bros. Pictures
All Critics (59) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (56) | Rotten (7) | DVD (33)
With political paternalism rampant at both extremes of the spectrum, Lucas is onto something. In any case, we'll know for sure in about a generation.
I have a good many reservations about the film's ideas, but they are greatly outweighed by my admiration for a technical virtuosity that by fair means and foul achieves exceptional emotional intensity at the same time.
Lucas described THX as 'an artifact from the future,' and we're supposed to struggle for understanding. That's part of its hypnotic undertow.
The whole thing feels like a hypnotic dreamscape, so luminously stark, from its white-on-white abstract sets to the wide-eyed, bald, near catatonic residents of this world.
It's an impressively unified vision, with sterile set design, a wonderfully crisp and creepy sound design by Walter Murch.
This new, highly polished upgrade is a nice gift for science fiction fans.
Slow sci-fi drama for die hard Lucas fans only.
Tedious pacing contributes to the confusing nature of the movie, but George Lucas' restored "THX-1138" is essential viewing to distinguish his artistic vision before he transformed Hollywood.
Meditative and downbeat rather than crowd-pleasing, the film includes a few sequences that suggest the direction Lucas career later took.
Enhancing the film with special effects and a clearer presentation, Lucas has turned something that was relatively unwatchable into something that can endure as a sci-fi classic.
Visually it is often extraordinary, with Lucas playing on perspectives and dislocations throughout, nowhere more brilliantly than in the 'prison' represented by a limbo of whiteness that seems to stretch as far as the eye can see.
Masterpiece? I'd hazard to say so, for as much of what it says to what it leaves to the viewer.
A high concept window in on the direction George Lucas could have gone.
The general bleakness of the film, its themes and the author's youthful anger could not be erased with digital technology.
A modest, somber vision of the future.
This is George Lucas's feature film debut: a startling feature length remake of a short film he made as a student in film school.The story is a futuristic sci-fi dystopia sort of thing in the vein of Orwell or Huxley, with some Kafka thrown in for good measure. Everything is very bland, cold, clinical, and dominated by
April 16, 2007Super Reviewer
This George Lucas breakthrough film is an interesting take on an Orwellian future, especially for its visual and aural boldness. Unfortunately, its story is as sterilized as its scenery.
July 31, 2011Super Reviewer
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