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For those of you who haven't seen it, THX 1138 is George Luca's other science-fiction world, first appearing as a short student film made when he was at UCLA, and then expanded into a feature film starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance. Duvall play THX, a worker in an underground dystopia, where everyone is bald, most of them are drugged out of their minds, and laws are enforced by silver faced androids dressed like motorcycle cops.
There isn't much plot to the film. THX's roommate sabotages his supply of sedative pills, and shortly she's killed (offscreen) and THX finds himself in a white void of a prison, until he escapes with Pleasance, and eventually reaches the outside world at the climax. Not very different from a hundred similar films, except in the rather unique way Lucas films it.
If you're not young enough to remember when Star Wars came out for the first time, back when it wasn't even A New Hope, back when this single film was all that we knew of the Star Wars universe, it's hard to understand how weird this film was. Aside from the opening crawl nothing is established, and there's none of the "lore" which nerds like me spend entirely too much time arguing over. After the attack on Princess Leia's cruiser, for a good quarter hour the movie focuses on two robots, plopped into the middle of a desert, and coming upon Luke and his family. And we know next to nothing about the world. Who are those weird short people in the brown robes collecting junk? No idea. What's a moisture farmer? Ain't got a clue. Why is the milk blue? I'd rather not think about that one. But it sucks us in, because while we don't understand how this world works, the characters in it do, and we are willing to go along for the ride until makes sense.
THX 1138 works on the same principle, but it's for a 90 minute movie. Nothing is explained, no empires are toppled, there is no "Big Bad," but it's plainly obvious from the start that something has gone wrong in this place, and it's holding together only by inertia and the fact that everyone is too numb to do anything about it. Indeed, the one time a character physically confronts one of the cop androids, it topples right over without a fight. We're drawn in by the extraordinary sound and image montages, overwhelming the audience with information but offering no context, so all becomes a blur and we're swept along in film like THX is swept along by his circumstances.
And if For Your Safety ever became a film, I'd like it to be something like THX 1138. Explain nothing. Just show one character going through their day in a world that sorta makes sense, but is obviously alien in a way the character can't recognize but the audience can. Think how amazing it would be the first time a character casually walks outside, and the camera just pans past the Earth hanging nine times as large as the Moon in the sky, and no one but the audience realizes how wrong that is.
