Do we want a future like this?
A world where everyone has a job, everyone has a room mate who is perfectly matched and everyone is useful, with no real crime like violence, no disease...
Where we are controlled in every way, with drug usage to stop our natural urges to love, and to keep us sedated so we don't rebel? Where love is a crime, as is not taking drugs (the medication that everyone must take), and where life has no fun, no meaning and there is no love.
George Lucas gives us here a great vision of what the future would be like if we let is be so, if we forget who and what we are, and where we came from.
This is not just a science fiction film about people living in a world that is strange to us, but is, rather, what the world would be like without all the things we love so much today, the things which mean the most to us, such as family, marriage, love, romance, fun, outdoors, countryside, freedom. But in a world where the state has ultimate control and everything is run by computer, where you go see a psychiatrist which is nothing more than a photo of the great "leader" or founder of the society (whoever he was, in whose image we are told we are made, the image of a man), and the voice you hear in response to your concerns is just played from a tape in some hidden room.
Definite undertones of a world without God, a world where darkness rules but it pretends we are all in the light, hence everything is white. Where people bow down to worship a holographic image, and are told they are made in the image of man. Where economics and finance are the new religion, where everything has a budget, and if you exceed that budget you must terminate the project.
"Buy more, buy more now", the booth tells you as you leave. Not only was George Lucas a great visionary with Star Wars, but in THX 1138 we see another view of what is really a warning to mankind not to go the wrong way. A kind of call to repentance before it is too late, otherwise we create a world for ourselves in which we never see the true light. Only at the end, when THX 1138 left the city did he see the true light of the sun, rather than the artificial bright white lights underground.
All very symbolic of something greater and reminiscent of prophecies in the Bible.
Also, in regards to ideas in the movie, I see George Lucas using ideas that he later used in Star Wars, such as the holographic TV viewing, and the holographic man who was worshipped, who looked very much like Darth Sidius/Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies with his hooded cloak.
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