Artifact From The Future!

Long before Star Wars was no more than a potentiality there was THX 1138, a movie which its creators describe as an "artifact from the futre". The conciet here is that this is a flicker from another time and place with a host of cultural background details that are never explained just we don't expect films from say Japan or China or New Jersey to fill us (the audience) in on all the myriad details that inform the narrative. It's a cute notion and lets them get away with some vague nonsense but I'll bite.

This movie is the only movie ever produced by the original American  Zoetrope, a fledgling but hopeful film company wrought by Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and their film student friends as the Vietnam War was hotting up. They were bright eyed idealists who wanted to drink, smoke and create. (Not all of them did all of them it should be noted.) The peculiar movie THX 1138 is the one tangible flicker they made and it was mostly the work of George Lucas and Walter Murch.

 

It's based on a student film THX 11238 4B produced by Lucas which was highly regarded in its time by those who saw it -- a fifteen minute burst of avant-garde visual storytelling about a terrible future in which underground people allow themselves to be numbed to the truth of the world around them by various means and spend all their time participating in a mindless game of consumerism. Love is outlawed and  being sober is a crime, which alas doesn't stop the film from featuring some really weird and dangerous driving.

Lucas keeps saying this movie is a comedy and by that I think he means it's an example of an absurdist attitude, because a laugh riot it ain't. We see desperate people trying to make sense of a nigh hopeless existence and are rewarded in some instances with obliteration. Maybe my fun meter needs calibration because while I saw a few sequences in the movie that were ridiculous (a robot cop bouncing into a wall for instance) I never much felt like chuckling as this rather grim and ironically sobering effort moved forward.

I do like the movie, but like I find is often the case, it's creators don't seem to fully apprehend the effect of their little monster. This is a movie that makes me want to cry for our situation, and hope that I find something akin to the strength of purpose of the hero who just wants to face the truth. That's hard stuff.

Rip Off