Film Chronicle: In Search of a Style

As time-tested values are discarded like yesterday’s newspapers, new values, some the embodiment of glorified valuelessness, compete for the attention of a rootless age suspended between the frozen rigidities of the past and the neologies of the with-it-grab-it-do-it future. Politics searches for new gimmickry, while the arts reflect the fragmentation of established patterns. The theater wheezes in the death throes of its enchantment with nudity, audience “participation” and other tedious diversions from the play, which is no longer the thing. Television opts for relevance while hoping still to entertain, but winds up with neither. The cinema frantically tries to be Meaningful but usually settles for reinforcing prejudices. Today’s film also reflects a stylistic, as well as thematic, vacuity: stylelessness or hideous, self-conscious Style, but very little easy stylishness.

THX 1138 (rated GP) is an almost unendurably dull movie by George Lucas and John Milius, both in their mid-twenties, both aching to Say Something without much conception of what to say or how to say it. Projecting a monstrous, computerized slave-state of the future, THX 1138 (the “name” of the protagonist, played without emotion by Robert Duvall) is little more than a flip-off from cutting room leavings out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the great science-fiction film of our time. One giggles at some of its crudities (robot cops with metal faces and very human bodies; a stupid Negro “hologram” come to life; everybody bald, dressed in white jumpsuits—echoes of Rudi Gernreich?; such-like silliness), but one yawns at the serious message. THX 1138 emerges neither as a good thriller nor as interesting social commentary. It lacks coherent style; it is a mishmash.

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David Brudnoy

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As time-tested values are discarded like yesterday’s newspapers, new values, some the embodiment of glorified valuelessness, compete for the attention of a rootless age suspended between the frozen rigidities of the past and the neologies of the with-it-grab-it-do-it future. Politics searches for new gimmickry, while the arts reflect the fragmentation of established patterns. The theater wheezes in the death throes of its enchantment with nudity, audience “participation” and other tedious diversions from the play, which is no longer the thing. Television opts for relevance while hoping still to entertain, but winds up with neither. The cinema frantically tries to be Meaningful but usually settles for reinforcing prejudices. Today’s film also reflects a stylistic, as well as thematic, vacuity: stylelessness or hideous, self-conscious Style, but very little easy stylishness.

THX 1138 (rated GP) is an almost unendurably dull movie by George Lucas and John Milius, both in their mid-twenties, both aching to Say Something without much conception of what to say or how to say it. Projecting a monstrous, computerized slave-state of the future, THX 1138 (the “name” of the protagonist, played without emotion by Robert Duvall) is little more than a flip-off from cutting room leavings out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the great science-fiction film of our time. One giggles at some of its crudities (robot cops with metal faces and very human bodies; a stupid Negro “hologram” come to life; everybody bald, dressed in white jumpsuits—echoes of Rudi Gernreich?; such-like silliness), but one yawns at the serious message. THX 1138 emerges neither as a good thriller nor as interesting social commentary. It lacks coherent style; it is a mishmash.