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THX 1138 Review

did not realize i was watching the 2004 remaster until all of the insanely bad CGI cut-ins made it impossible not to notice it. George really fucking lost it in the 2000s dude.

anyway if i squint and look past that, this is... interesting. it's not altogether amazing, i don't think. it is very much a young, white, straight guys take on social oppression, and it's kind of charmingly amateurish in the way a lot of those stories tend to be.

I suppose you could read the film as anticommunist, though I think that's honestly a stretch -- it's too clearly targeting consumerism for that read to hold much water. george himself is on the record at least saying that he was no fan of the behavior of the united states during the vietnam war, so i don't think the man would have ever been that much of an ardent anticommunist.

honestly, the most potent critique here is just of "control" in a very broad and vaguely defined sense. control of labor, control of sex, control of populace.

there is a recognizance of the inhumanity of scientific management, consumerism, and even what i could see as a pretty eagle-eyed link being drawn between religion, sexual puritanism, and capitalism -- but it all sort of flops listlessly around in the films second and third acts, culminating in a bland treatise on the value of individualism or whatever. it's not a particularly interesting takeaway, which is a bummer after the film's genuinely inventive & eye-catching first act.

Aside from the godawful added CGI of the 2004 cut, this is a worthwhile example of a sci-fi from the time when sci-fi meant "weird psychosexual, philosophical deep-dive". It's slow and textually sparse, I found myself somewhat lost in what the exact logic of the story was supposed to be, but it's pretty strong in visual storytelling. I feel like there is some sort of message here about how films and media are themselves a form of observation/control, but I'm not really sure it ever really congeals to anything.

really that's the core of all my criticisms here: thx 1138 just never really "goes" anywhere. It has some interesting ideas, a lot of very gorgeous set design on a clear budget, and a fair (if basic) critique of policing and consumerist control, but it just sort of limply becomes an escape narrative halfway through with little to grasp onto. A thoroughly "eh" movie overall.

also, unrelated but very funny that George managed to wriggle a scene for the Car Guys into his philosophical sci-fi dystopia movie. at the end of the day, you gotta respect the man's willpower to insert his fixations into his work


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