20/20 : Established, July 17, 2017.]
1973, d. Michael Crichton - TCM
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| What a poster though... |
I had this book as a kid about Science Fiction movies. It was a hardcover book with a slipcover that had E.T. on the front. It was a book that I don't think I ever read cover-to-cover, but I flipped through every page countless times. At one point, I started crossing out the films I had seen in the index at the back. I need to dig out that book, wherever it is, and have another look, because I must be getting pretty close to having seen every picture featured in there.
If there was one film in that book, though, that I had minimal desire to see, it was Westworld, if only because I didn't start really getting the appeal of westerns until I was in my early 30's. I mean a science fiction movie where people go on vacation in a western setting where the denizens are robots, but you know, not robot-looking-robots, but people who look like people but just play robots being people... nah, that wasn't for me.
Now days, obviously, the reinterpreted, thought provoking Westworld is not only awesome, but one of the best things on television (both David and I agree) so when I saw the original Westworld was coming up on one of Turner Classic Movies rare genre nights, I made sure to PVR that sucker and watched it the very next day.
What's most apparent about the vintage Westworld is how underdeveloped it is. That's not just in comparison to the rich emotional and complex philosophical layers not to mention the (SPOILER) multiple timelines (/SPOILER) that add a resonant depth to the first season of the HBO series, but compared to any halfway decent action/sci-fi movie. Old-timey Westworld is atrociously thin on character development, to the point that the "protagonists" (James Brolin and Richard Benjamin) are just two guys on vacation. There's no real personality, or backstory, or reason at all to give a crap about them as they explore the Westworld theme park and all the pleasures and excitement it represents. They have shootouts with robots, and they have fistfights with robots, and they have sex with robots, and they ride horses (are the horses robots?), but when the theme park's central computers start acting up, turning the robots homicidal, I mean, it's foreshadowed from minute 5 of the film when the advertising voice keeps telling us how perfectly safe it is.
We get glimpses as Medieval Land and Roman Land too, checking in with other passengers that came in on the same train as Brolin and Benjamin, but they're even more thinly developed. There's also most curious cutaways to Dick Van Patten, in a largely silent role, that I suppose are intended to be comic relief, of the schlubby guy trying to have fun but getting foiled by his own modest clumsiness. Take that dork!
The film takes us behind the scenes too, into the base of operations for the trio of theme parks, where we're made aware of the first signs that things aren't going right. Decisions are made as to whether to keep things going or shut down, and obviously they make the wrong decision, but things also escalate from zero to murder in the matter of one day, so they didn't really have a lot of time to act. When they get locked in their control room, which for some reason is air-tight, well, they all die, and again they have no personality, so we don't really care all that much.
This is more "proof of concept" than a film. It took almost 45 years, but eventually it yielded exceptional results (or rather, director-writer Crichton recycled the basic premise, but used dinosaurs instead in 1990 and that was a bit better realized...or Yul Brenner's gunslinger robot's influence on the Terminator franchise). One standout aspect of the film though is a rather incredible score (give or take the odd mis-cue, like the hackey bar brawl), which I think the Exploding Head Movies podcast should cover (if they haven't already).
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