Review of THX 1138 (1971) by Rem R — 08 Apr 2010

THX 1138 transports you into an unforgettable vision of the future where you lose all your sense of reality.

The future has its own language, symbols, culture, way of living. It's a world quite similar with dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984 mixed with some contemporary ideological capitalism and communism.

Religion is still all important to people but it has become more impersonal and robotic-like. As their religion, citizens have become zombies: walking dead. They lost touch with their emotions. People are actually disconnected with their identity. Sometime they suffocate like the hero of this story. People are also taking drugs all the time because it's the law that requires it and these are very strict. People are being monitored all the time by hidden cameras and by their comrades. They are living in a fake world. The drugs help them forget their emptiness. People simply don't look real.

Now let's talk about the environment. The environment is too clean to be believable. The continuous electronic lights, strange sounds and monitoring of people are very oppressing and also alien. Throughout the movie we can find a lot of white everywhere: on the walls, the clothes, etc. All this lack of color is makes the environment very lifeless. Everything just seems so unnatural.

I noticed some scenes were inspired by samurai flicks such as the prison scene where the prison guards tunes up or tortures the main character.

So it's a totally alien world where your senses are disoriented and your grasp of reality is shattered into pieces. It's like discovering a complete opposite culture such as when America discovered Japan for the first time. Overall, it's a nice trip into the unknown.