THX 1138

THX 1138 (1971) is a science-fiction drama you can watch online on iFILM. It marks the feature debut of George Lucas, made years before Star Wars. The setting is a sterile underground city of the future, where citizens carry numbers instead of names and mandatory drugs keep every feeling switched off.

Robert Duvall plays a factory worker known only as THX 1138. One day he stops taking his medication, and emotion floods back. A forbidden bond grows between him and his roommate, LUH. The State treats such deviation as a sickness to cure: constant surveillance, blank white prison voids, faceless android police. The harder the system squeezes, the more he longs to break for the surface and the open sky above.

Lucas expanded the film from his award-winning student short, with Francis Ford Coppola producing and editor Walter Murch building its cold, layered soundscape. Those white voids and shaved heads shaped the look of dystopian sci-fi for decades. Stream THX 1138 (1971) online on iFILM.