THX 1138 (1971)
Directed by George Lucas
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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What critics compared THX 1138 to
Director Drake Doremus ("Like Crazy," Breathe In"), whose story was written by Nathan Parker ("Moon"), revisits ideas well known from films like George Lucas‘s "THX 1138" and the recent YA adaptation "The Giver" without adding anything new.
You’ve seen this brand of sterile, monochrome fascist compound before, in movies such as George Lucas’ “THX 1138” and Michael Bay’s “The Island,” which at least had the wisdom to spike the formula with motorbike chases, dead bodies and regular surges of adrenaline.
The characters all live in clinical white environments that recall the George Lucas pre-Star Wars effort THX 1138 (1971); they dress and look like catwalk models.
"Equals" is what I call "jumpsuit science fiction," not because everyone in it wears a jumpsuit (they wear white suits with jackets and trousers here) but because the movie worships the sort of 1970s future-vision showcased in films like " THX 1138 ," " Logan's Run " and " Star Trek: The Motion Picture ."
It is based on a little-seen 1979 feature called The Clonus Horror, in which citizens are promised a paradise called "America" rather than The Island, but it comes across as a compendium of dystopian visions that has echoes of The Matrix, Logan's Run, Blade Runner, Gattaca and THX 1138 plus a few reprises of some moments from Bay's own repertoire.
Lincoln Six Echo (McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Johansson) live in a sterile THX 1138 dystopia where everyone has the education of a fifteen-year-old (which, for Bay, means they're just cracking that Dick & Jane primer), meaningless assembly-line jobs, no concept of sex or sexuality, and letters/numbers for names.
The result is a sci-fier with roots in such films as "Logan's Run," "THX 1138," "Looker" and "Coma," that devolves into one big chase scene after another with lots of explosions.
The picture is an unabashed pastiche, clapping together elements of such earlier sci-fi films as "THX 1138," "Logan's Run," "Minority Report" and, of course, "Blade Runner."
Even by the standard of paranormal teen romances, The Host is ridiculous stuff, and derivative too: In addition to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it draws liberally on Red Dawn, THX 1138 (the emotionless aliens love their white-on-white duds, though they do have an endearing weakness for very shiny sports cars) and Robert Silverberg's award-winning 1970 sci-fi story "Passengers"…minus the sex, of course, because this is Meyer-land.
It calls to mind Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas’ THX 1138, but those meticulously crafted visuals contrast sharply with the guerrilla immediacy of the pick-up sequences.
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Except for the gung ho Star Wars crew, film spacemen were suddenly a lonely breed: Robert Duvall's character in THX 1138 (1970), Bruce Dern's plant-watering loner in Silent Running (1971), the fantasy-prone cosmonaut in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), and David Bowie's morose alcoholic in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) all slept unhappily or alone.
But to draw another comparison that works only loosely yet is still valid, it’s like “THX 1138,” not “Star Wars.”
From Harlan Ellison's classic short story "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" to George Lucas' "THX 1138," it's all been done before and better.
His work on THX 1138 and Apocalypse Now is legendary.
He’d previously made only small, personal films (THX 1138 and American Graffiti) and was allied with Francis Coppola, who seemed at the time to be a rebel shaking the film industry from within.
The difference is that THX 1138, Lucas' 1971 debut, was meant as a warning call, a vision of the world we could expect if we allowed hardware to govern the heart.
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Lucas’s earlier foray into sci-fi, THX 1138 (1971), a standard-model cautionary tale about a benumbing future of shiny white surfaces and mandatory sedative consumption, had been a bit of a chore.