Metacritic Film

THX 1138: The George Lucas Director's Cut

Starring Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence, Don Pedro Colley, Maggie McOmie, Ian Wolfe, Marshall Efron, Sid Haig, and John Pearce

MPAA RATING: R for some sexuality/nudity

Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.
Drama  |  Sci-fi
88 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters September 10, 2004

A complete digital restoration and remastering of THX 1138 -- the first feature film by George Lucas -- a nightmare impression of a world in which a man is trying to escape a computerized world which constantly tracks his movements.

WRITTEN BY
George Lucas (also story and earlier screenplay)
Walter Murch

DIRECTED BY
George Lucas

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

75 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 Film Threat Mark Bell
Enough about the CGI tweaking, is this film really Lucas's unloved masterpiece? The film that got lost in the shadow of "American Graffitti" and "Star Wars" while, actually, being a better film?
80 Washington Post
Testament to the emergence of a visually masterful filmmaker, capable of ingenious, low-tech special effects.
75 Chicago Sun-Times
The movie's strength is not in its story but in its unsettling and weirdly effective visual and sound style. (Review of Original Release)
75 Boston Globe Leighton Klein
For someone wanting to get noticed as a filmmaker, George Lucas couldn't have done much better than THX 1138, his 1971 feature debut that starts a limited run today in a new director's cut.
75 San Francisco Chronicle Peter Hartlaub
A nice gift for science fiction fans.
70 Chicago Reader
The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.
67 Portland Oregonian
It's not a question of Lucas' right to revamp his own work -- the movie simply was much better without these absurd additions.
50 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW

©2009 CNET Networks Inc. All rights reserved.