Synopsis
People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make puppets out of people. As THX is without drugs for the first time he has feelings for a woman and they start a secret relationship.
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Recommendations
- 100
Film Threat
Enough about the CGI tweaking, is this film really Lucas's unloved masterpiece? The film that got lost in the shadow of "American Graffitti" and "Star Wars" while, actually, being a better film? - 80
Washington Post
Testament to the emergence of a visually masterful filmmaker, capable of ingenious, low-tech special effects. - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie's strength is not in its story but in its unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style. (Review of Original Release) - 75
Boston Globe
For someone wanting to get noticed as a filmmaker, George Lucas couldn't have done much better than THX 1138, his 1971 feature debut that starts a limited run today in a new director's cut. - 75
San Francisco Chronicle
A nice gift for science fiction fans. - 70
Chicago Reader
The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies. - 67
Portland Oregonian
It's not a question of Lucas' right to revamp his own work -- the movie simply was much better without these absurd additions. - 50
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.
