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This should prove enlightening. Some time ago, either when Star Wars was remastered, or the prequels came out, someone found and released THX 1138, George Lucas' obscure pre-Star Wars movie. This is the director's cut of it even. Now, this is significant because with regards to how much sucking he has recently done, and after seeing some behind the scenes stuff on what he wanted to do with every Indiana Jones film, I am largely willing to jump on board with the theory that George Lucas has, in fact, always kinda sucked, and that Star Wars was only decent because honestly, a lot of other people deserve more credit than Lucas did. I prefer unsung heroes to fallen ones is my point. Or, you know, writer/directors in this case.
OK, we are starting out Pretty Frelling Pretentious here. We've got the original Buck Rogers intro, then some green credits scrolling, then some alienating random garbledness on flickery blue monitors. Anyway, we're starting to kinda throw some conceptual info out here now. It's the Horribly Dystopian Future, where all of humanity are shaved-headed doped up zombies wearing matching white outfits and working jobs monitoring security footage or building robots on assembly lines. You know, it immediately strikes me that monotonous assembly line work is something that shouldn't need doing by humans if you have robots. Oh and now here is, I suppose, our main character, going to robo-confessional after work. Seriously, this is a straight up catholic confessional here, but he's talking to a big picture of Jesus with a pre-recorded robo-voice that pretty much just goes I see, go on. So... it's Eudora. Flat out. Oh, and as far as can tell, his name is THX, which is pronounced "Thex." Also, someone just threw a giant d20 into a garbage disposal and... bald naked holographic dancing girl out of nowhere! What the hell movie? You just went from stark dystopian 1984 land to porn when I'd barely identified the main character! There's even this freaky vacuum cleaner extension hooked to the holo-TV to head down crotch-ward while watching porn. Seriously, what the hell? So yeah, after a bit of that, he flips over to the police brutality channel for a while, then eventually he ends up going to robo-confessional again, and some future nuns walk by, and... yeah, the last time I saw anyone so blatantly attacking the church in a painfully allegorical sci-fi setting was Pastel Defender Heliotrope.
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Anyway, now we jump ahead to later that night when uh... like 60 people are sitting around watching blurry spy camera footage of Tex here having sex with his bald bloodless wife. Which I guess is against the law. So uh... yeah. We're maybe 10 minutes in and it is abundantly clear why nobody ever heard of this movie for a couple decades. It's like someone through 1984, Clockwork Orange, Logan's Run, and one of Isaac Asimov's more blatantly sex-obsessed stories in a blender, then tossed the result of that into a centrifuge to make sure you pull all the visually interesting or generally crazy bits out. Anyway, apparently when I said wife before, I really meant room mate. Thanks misleading movie-slang! Anyway, this random guy is kinda stalking Tex now and reprogramming the computer that controls everything to reassign his illegal girlfriend to work and live somewhere else and himself to be his new roomie.
Also, apparently the reason everyone has to be so dull and lifeless is because having any emotional stimulation makes you likely to screw up at your delicate and dangerous robot building tasks. Which, again, should really be handled by other robots. I mean, what the heck? Apparently robots are for being cops though, and only cops. At least they can get up and down stairs, presumably. And yeah, this is a pretty frelling unwatchable movie. I get how Tex and Roomie here are going off their lobotodrugs and going all Forbidden Love, but you're not giving me any frelling reason to care. Even in a horrible dystopian future, you need to give your characters some personality. Hobbies, idiosyncracies, fears, passionate speeches about how great/horrible Big Brother is. We're at what should really be the dark downer ending where they get brainwashed again and there's over an hour left to go. This is interesting though, two people are watching Tex in... prison I guess, and commenting on technical weirdness. They're just voice overs, and I'm pretty sure one is George Lucas. So... now I'm just picturing George Lucas in this futuristic world torturing people and obsessing over the stats being fed into a computer. Fits well enough.
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This definitely strikes me as something that was not written by the same person as Star Wars, but yeah, I can see how it could be by the same person as the Star Wars prequels. Oh and here's another gratuitous sex scene. Which has now turned into a gratuitous naked wrestling scene. You know, I was really expecting a complete lack of anything approaching nudity from this movie. Also, here's Itsuki showing up again in prison. Apparently Tex reported him for stalking and he was arrested, then after being arrested himself, tada, meeting up again. Also, according to the DVD sleeve here, Itsuki is played by Donald Pleasance. I wouldn't have realized otherwise. Aside from the whole lack of individuality visuals, he's pretty low-key here. I'm not used to seeing him this subdued. Usually he's a bit of an over the top cartoon character. Oh, and here's something else, this entire movie is so freaking WHITE. White clothes, white featureless background, overly intense lighting, I'm actually really getting a headache watching it. By the way, have I mentioned that the main character in this movie never actually does or says anything? He's just kinda spent this whole movie just... loafing around and spacing out. Itsuki is rambling aimlessly to himself, but if he wasn't there, we'd just have total dead air. Well, OK, dead air punctuated by the periodic random appearance of an overlit naked girl with a shaved head getting roughed up a bit.
Oh, and apparently Tex and Itsuki here are now escaping from prison... by which I mean they're walking to the left against the featureless white background instead of just pacing back and forth in front of the featureless white background. See, after I'm done writing, I need to go and grab screen shots for this movie, and since I have a policy against tossing up nudity, all you're going to get is a d20 being thrown away and a bunch of 2 bald heads on a white field. Oh hey, they're finally out of white featureless prison and back out on the white marginally less featureless streets. Itsuki is even wandering around in a subway tunnel. It's mercifully dark. Tex meanwhile is wandering off uh... elsewhere. Yeah, movie? I'm not sure if you're aware of it or anything, but none of your non-characters have any clear goals or motivations or enemies or anything. You're literally just showing me people walking around aimlessly at this point. Oh hey, some funky scorpion thing just walked past Itsuki's foot. That's... at least noticeable enough to get my eyes to focus again. If I weren't keeping myself stimulated by typing, I'm pretty sure this movie would literally have put me to sleep by now. By the way, we have another non-character here that just kinda showed up out of nowhere. I mean, literally. Tex and Itsuki were wandering around the prison where they forgot to draw a background, and this random nameless black guy just kinda wandered up from the other direction and is now hanging out with Tex.
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Heck, even with this typing to keep me focused I'm in danger of falling asleep here. I need to stop and take a break, get some fresh air or something. And back. So... Black Guy doesn't believe he actually exists, assuming himself to just be "a hologram" who got bored and wandered off. Presumably what we're saying here is that he's an actor, and also mentally deficient. Also the computer sez Roomie has been killed and her name recycled for her illegal fetus they stuck in a freezer bag. No real response to this, but oh! Now Tex and Black Guy have stolen some sort of Future Car! It uh... looks pretty much like a regular car, which is pretty rare for future cars. They kinda proceed to immediately wrap it around a cement pole, because Black Guy is driving and he's uh... special like that. Itsuki meanwhile we keep cutting away to as he just kinda aimlessly wanders about. As far as I can tell he has no further role in the movie but uh...
Oh! Here's something! OK, apparently Tex got in a different car, and now he's speeding dangerously away, weaving in and out of the dense traffic of the uh... giant parking garage or something? And we keep cutting back and forth between that and a couple faceless people wearing headphones in a control room. Yeah, I've totally seen this movie before! Eventually he drives under the big car wash castle thing and on the other side we've just got him and Roomie doing this nude lesbian street luge thing, right? Then we just roll credits over that, right?Please? Oh, apparently he just has the engine overhear and some robocops on motocycles start catching up. Then he really noisily peels out and... now the car turns back into Roomie? OK, I know I'm kinda milking the gag here, but this scene goes on for a while, and if you watched it, you'd havee to agree that it totally resembles the end of the Utena movie here. Not that I'd recommend anyone watch this movie, ever. It's not entertaining, it's too dull to even really make fun of it. Wouldn't particularly recommend the Utena movie either honestly. The series, sure, but the movie is one of those weird retelling of the series in way less coherent fashion sorts of things. It's just all weird artistic visual metaphors, the lesbian overtones way over-emphasized, and the last third or so is the infamous random car scene where even the director can't remember what he was going for.
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Also... what the heck? At the end of our overly long car chase scene, Tex flees up a ladder, while the pursuing cops find some weird... monkey-rat-people hanging out by his car. None claim that they usssed to be a man though. Anyway, at this point it's officially announced that this chase scene has gone over budget, so the robocops go home, and Tex finishes climbing up to be... standing in an out of focus scene watching the sunset. Real quick credits and that's it. Uh... wow. What the hell was that? It was incoherent enough to come off like a student film, but it didn't have any overwrought attempts to be artsy backing that up. Oh and this is eerie. As I turn the movie off, my TV snaps back to life showing me George Lucas being interviewed on The Daily Show. It's like, "HERE! HERE IS THE MONSTER RESPONSIBLE FOR THE TORTURE YOU HAVE ENDURED!" Seriously. We have no real characters, no real plot, no weird artsiness for its own sake. We just have a bright white light being shined in our face for a full 90 minutes, and the closest thing to a semblance of a plot we do have is... Guy and girl are in love. Guy and girl are therefore arrested. Girl kinda falls completely out of the movie never to really be referenced again. Guy escapes from prison with other guy. These two guys wander around aimlessly in different locations from each other for another hour or so. Movie stops. This is not the person who went on to write Star Wars. Period. This is no longer up for debate. Friends of his "helped" write the one usable draft of that thing's script, the first several drafts being incoherent messes, and the sequels were written by... Lawrence Kasdan apparently. Heck, The Empire Strikes Back doesn't even have a co-credit for George Lucas on writing or directing. He's just some horrible monster who's mistakenly given credit for creating some of the most beloved movies of all time... and then later desecrating them. Oh, and he tried to turn Indiana Jones into a pedophile. Seriously. "He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time." "Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he..."
