The beginning of this movie is very choppy, it's a series of scenes that are pretty low on the dialogue spectrum. It illustrates this society that is mostly ran by faceless tall drones wearing black cop like outfits. The drones constantly tell the citizens that they should relax and everything will be fine. The pray to an automated god that they can talk to in little telephone like booths. The people in this society take drugs that suppress their emotions and sex is forbidden, they live with roommates that are chosen for them. The main male character THX 1138 lives with female character LUH 3417, she starts to stop using her drugs and then starts to replace her roommates drugs with harmless drugs that do nothing. So he starts to feel weird and is getting sick like a pill popper coming off cold turkey. He eventually gets over that and starts to see LUH for what she is, a female that he can runaway with. THX and LUH start to take their relationship on the more sexual side of things and THX ends up messing up at work where he puts drones together with radioactive little bars. He drops a radioactive bar and it almost blows the whole place up or something terrible is going to happen. The drones now know that something is up with THX, they find THX and LUH post sex act and arrest them, through them into weird white jail. But not before THX submitted a complaint against SEN 5241, this creepy guy who altered the computer roommate selection to get paired with THX. So of course SEN in also in jail in the creepy white place. Drones take control in the jail place and we find out that they are actually really easy to defeat, you just have to push them over and beat their faces in. LUH finds THX and tells him she is pregnant. She gets caught up in the terrible truth about what can happen to oppressed people in jail and is killed by the system. THX is escaping the white jail with SEN and they meet a new character who is a hologram, SRT, a tall black man who is definitely more positive than THX but not creepy like SEN. They escape into a crazy people freeway type place where people are all walking so fast, THX, SEN and SRT are getting pushed around and SEN gets separated, the other two are not really that upset. Which shows their true feelings about SEN, or the lack of. SEN wanders off into the city space and finds the picture of their god, a clergy man comes to see what SEN is doing and all hell breaks loose. The clergy man sees SEN doesn't have a name badge and tries to go call the drones on him, SEN attacks the man and flees. He eventually is found by the drones while he is playing with some little kids by an escalator. He gives himself up basically, his character wants someone else to rely on and when he is alone he just can't be happy. When he is playing with those kids the viewer can see how important interaction is for him, he was so unhappy while he was alone in the film but when he is with people he just lights up. Which makes the viewer feel a little sympathetic towards creepy SEN. THX and SRT are doing a pretty good job escaping the drones and then the drones close in on them, they are running away towards the parking garage and for some stupid reason SRT gets into the smallest car ever for one glimpse of comedy in one of the characters. Also to play into the stereotype of having one character of another race being the comedic relief. THX gets into this nice big car and takes off leaving SRT behind, just when you think he is going to get caught he figures out how to drive and takes off, he is stoked but right off the bat he smashes into a pillar, game over for SRT. THX looks back, he knows SRT didn't make it. So he takes off all alone now, but he has this sweet car so he zooms past everyone on the roads in a car chase that ends in some pretty sweet action shots of the drones crashing on motorcycles. Ultimately THX escapes narrowly and has a brief meeting with the shell people and some monkeys, the shell people are hairy midgets, I can't really tell if this is offensive to midgets, or that the only two shell people we have seen just happen to also be midgets. THX is escaping up a ladder with the drones behind him and then the drones decide to abort mission and the final scene is THX emerging into the outside world with a giant red sun sending the image of his hazy lone figure as the only thing in the scene. He is finally out but he is alone in this new place with no plan as what to do next.
So it may be apparent now that the lack of actual love story in the film and as much as it was advertised to be are very different. I did not see it as a love story at all, after further discussion about the characters it seemed more that LUH's character was pushed under the rug too soon in the film. In the beginning it was all LUH who stopped taking the drugs and secretly took the drugs away from THX, it was her idea to escape and she manipulated THX into feeling. LUH simply was just erased after she told THX she was pregnant, no real explanation to what happened to her. The drones just destroyed her. She is hardly mentioned throughout the rest of the movie, the whole other half of the movie is basically dedicated to action scenes and explosions. Moving us forward in the spectacle spectrum of sci-fi movies that border line with action films.
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