Before he became a full-time businessman, George Lucas earned his beard as a goddamn art filmmaker. He started out pessimistic and mean. He started out daring half of the audience to walk out on his slow-moving science-fiction. He started out contradicting old Buck Rogers visions of the future. He started out with a box office bomb. He started out with full frontal nudity, masturbation, rape and misery. He started out with THX-1138. It’s still pretty good today. The first half-hour is an icy depiction of an icy future, where all pleasures, including sex, are outlawed and people are treated like machines, fueled by drugs, used for production, constantly watched and thoroughly expendable. Once Robert Duvall gets thrown into prison (which is merely a vast, featureless white room populated by other enemies of the state) for violations against strict rules about basic human urges though, this becomes a kick-ass flick about a renegade on the run. In science-fiction literature, every idea here was old hat by 1971, but in movies it was all fresh meat at the time. As a filmmaker, Lucas vibrates with the thrill of it all. He luxuriates in close-ups and carefully composed shots of humanity dwarfed by flickering, glittering technology. It’s a beautiful film, if cold as a motherfucker.