For George Lucas, the boundless success of Star Wars came years after his dystopian sci-fi drama/thriller THX 1138 (1971). The movie’s depiction of a world where men and women of the working class live like pre-programmed automatons recreates key elements of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The science and semantics in THX 1138 outlive its time of release and show a different mode of human control.

The plot of THX 1138 starts remarkably similar to that of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The eponymous protagonist is Lucas’s version of Orwell’s Winston who works for the government in a highly watchful and mechanized society. Compartmentalized and controlled, the setting of THX 1138 in an unspecified but visibly closed territory whose screen p...

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