THX 1138

Director: George Lucas

1971 / 88min / 35mm

Lucas’s visually stunning debut feature, co-written by Walter Murch—who also oversaw its dazzlingly dense sound montage, mixed on a state-of-the-art KEM deck freshly imported from Germany by Francis Ford Coppola—takes place in a bleak galaxy that’s far, far, far away from that of Star Wars and all its swashbuckling brio, an oppressively pristine 25th-century future where humanity has been medicated into submission and chemically neutered to maximize work output. (Sound familiar?) With Robert Duvall as the titular dissident who goes off his meds and promptly becomes a love vigilante… much to the dismay of the android police programmed to keep the rabble in line.