THX 1138

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STARRING: Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasance, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie, Ian Wolfe, Sid Haig

1971, 88 Minutes, Directed by: George Lucas

Description: George Lucas's enigmatic feature film debut expands on a student film he made at USC. Created under the wing of producer Francis Ford Coppola, this movie is a bleak vision of a world in which technology, not man, is the ultimate dictator. Efficiency overrides every other aspect of human life, as people are reduced to code names and their lives are contained, monitored, and manipulated for the sake of the system. — Amazon.com

George (Star Wars) Lucas's directorial debut - a psychedelic pic about a future dystopia in which the population is forced to live in  underground cities controlled by computers. Sex is forbidden, everybody looks the same and its human denizens are force fed drugs to keep them docile. A couple (Robert Duvall and Maggie McOmie) defies the system by not only starting an affair, but by trying to escape to the the outside world. 

Obviously a very bleak affair, the film draws heavily on Orwell's 1984. George Lucas expanded one of his student projects (a prize-winning featurette he made at USC) to make THX 1138, which is interesting to watch because of its almost hallucinogenic visual sense and off-beat sound effects. Dramatic interest do however waver at times because of this and a screenplay which, when you think about it, isn't too original.
 

• Read the script.

Sci-Fi Movie Page Pick: You worship the very ground George Lucas walks on and you've seen Return of the Jedi more times than you can be bothered with to count, but have you ever seen Lucas' directorial debut - a bleak 1984 type of affair?
 

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