Movie Notes: Westworld

September 30th, 2006

Westworld

= 3 stars

Starring Yul Brenner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin
Directed by Michael Crichton

Amazon link

This was a movie I foggily remembered from late night television as a child, struggling to stay awake while being scared of this relentless robot cowboy. The acid-in-the-face thing was pretty vivid.

Now I’ve seen Westworld after twenty-odd years, and it’s still fairly engaging. It’s yet another film in the 70s bizarro sci-fi vein. Some company has created three amusement parks populated entirely by robots with the intent to simulate three historical periods: The Roman empire, the dark ages, and the wild west. The idea is an immersive reality for grown ups. I didn’t see any kids in Westworld.

This being a movie, the technology starts going haywire resulting in a pre-Terminator style chase situation, with our human hero stalked by a robotic gunslinger (Yul Bryner).

Westworld starts off great, with a newsreel style interview with people who have just come back from the theme-parks and had a great time killing, bossing around, and having sex with robots. However, things take a bit too long to really get going, and a lot of potential themes are wasted, or things happen that make little sense (surprise).

For example, it’s never really explained why the robots start going nuts. Perhaps the robots should have been humanized story-wise in some way. Does the gunslinger have emotions? Is this a robot revolt? Another item: it seems like an awful waste to have the robots blown to bits every day and a staff of humans put them back together. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have the guns be harmless and simply simulate the damage? Lastly, the complete absence of cellphones in this future makes some of the latter scenes a bit hard to accept.

The largest failing is how the robotic technology can be limited to Westworld. We don’t get to see anything about the rest of this film’s society, but if technology were that advanced to create lifelike robots, I’m sure it would already be in wide use everywhere, and if that were the case, why would it be so novel to warrant a 1,000 a day trip to enjoy it? And even if this weren’t the case, I’m sure there are more cost effective ways to profit from advanced robotic technology than to create a theme park. How about robot cats, butlers, soldiers, or hospital workers?

Still, there is a goofy charm here, and enough sense of palpable danger in the latter scenes that it held my interest. I’d recommend it as a rental. I hear there’s also a really bad sequel called Futureworld.

IMDB: Westworld
Wikipedia: Westworld
Rotten Tomatoes: Westworld 89%