In tandem with “making-of” DVDs often more puff than anything else, Directors’ Cuts are a fast vogue, if frequently nothing more than a recycling. Frames restored here or there, these remastered enhanced originals, the defects of which escape memory, add little of value and sometimes actually expose shortcomings unnoticed the first go-round.

Of historical and technical importance for mature moviegoers is the latest, that of “the influential . . . prescient science-fiction adventure” that launched a career, THX 1138. Following lung damage in an accident that ended his racing aspirations, young George Lucas enrolled in USC’s Cinema School. There, from his own story he made his awkwardly titled fifth student effort, THX-1138: 4EB/Electronic Labyrinth, a prize-winner that helped earn him a scholarship-internship at Warner Bros., where he was taken under the wing of Francis Ford Coppola, only five years his senior. Along with other work, and rewriting by Walter Murch, after a general advance loan from the studio and a $777,777 budget through Coppola, a total based on his lucky number but too modest to allow filming in Japan, Lucas began a thirty-five-day shoot on American Zeotrope’s initial project, the feature THX 1138. Now restored, “digitally enhanced” for over two years by Lucasfilm Ltd. and its visual arts Industrial Light & Magic, The George Lucas Director’s Cut is set for theatrical and Home Video release.

Though in any case none of the three will in the least excite today’s jaded young viewers, Lucas’ film impresses the eye in ways different from Willis H. O’Brien’s King Kong animation or the Ray Harryhausen stop motion Dynamation of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Rather than in-camera or computer effects, these other-era movies rely on mechanical effects, Lucas’ in particular tantalizing or fooling the viewer’s vision via lighting in BART underground stations and in-progress tunnels, telling macro-close-ups that underscore individual imperfection and vulnerability, sharp basic color contrasts and an ingenious “white void” prison that, reversing Richee’s 1928 Louise Brooks-with-pearls photo, looms infinitely dislocated against a portrait photographer’s seamless backdrop. The Lalo Schifrin “Muzak of the future” dissonance grates heavy-handed today, but glacier-grinding sounds and fruity HAL-ish voices are helpful in establishing the requisite disembodied tone.

The plot, however, is a quadruped of a different color, unremarkable and derivative of volumes of cautionary science fiction and anti-utopias: Verne, Samuel Butler, Wells, Čapek, Wyndham, Bradbury, Walter M. Miller, Heinlein, Crichton and, directly, Huxley, Orwell and Eugene Zamiatin (Wells’s Russian translator whose 1920 We was borrowed for Nineteen Eighty-Four). After brief old “Buck Rogers in the 21st Century,” Lucas’ picture of that same period emerges. Governed by unknown leaders who have illegalized sex and love and other emotions, crop-headed similarly dressed mankind lives underground -- not unequivocally clear until the fiery sunset finale -- kept in line by tall robot police in black with empty chrome heads.

To slogans such as “Buy more now and be happy,” state-supplied sedative drugs are dispensed, complemented by soporific “hologram” nudity and violence, canned laughter and no-news news. Reproduction occurs artificially, with pure living-mates assigned according to computerized compatibility. “Unichapel” religious confession made to an Orthodox-image OMM (voice of James Wheaton), this civilization is ringed by smelly simian shell dwellers -- the eighty-eight-minute film wastes them -- and stripped of individual-choice finery and names. Her motives unclarified, LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) tries to gain the high of emotion by tampering with the Huxleian soma of herself and platonic roommate THX 1138 (Robert Duvall). Feeling unnatural, he reacts by being attracted and making love with her, which prompts authorities to penetrate his mind, almost producing a fatal nuclear accident at his police-automaton assembly pant.

Both partners are accused of drug evasion and sexual perversity, she sentenced to liquidation following transfer of her identity to an artificial fetus, he to a brutal prison-asylum stylized out of a bare Beckett stage. The film’s sole soundstage shoot, the prison effectively images the individual’s self-confinement within his or her own mind, although there THX re-encounters semi-alter-ego SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence), “in violation” for manipulation of roommate assignments, who would foment a revolution of “non-contributors [who] only need one idea to get us out of here.”

Simply wandering out at choice, with SEN loaded with food resembling bars of soap, and soon joined by misfit hologram SRT (Don Pedro Colley), uncomprehending THX searches for his female, piloting a Matchbox Samor-3 and pursued by Keystone cops.

Passing through darkness and heat, he will gravitate upwards, toward the light. Like the story, the symbolism is hackneyed. Improved or not from its 1971 release print, 1977 re-issue and 1983 VHS, THX 1138 is valuable in illustrating what stylish imagination without much cash can accomplish for starters, even in California. 

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated “R” for some sexuality and nudity.)