Westworld, 1973.
Directed by Michael Crichton.
Starring Richard Benjamin, Yul Brynner, James Brolin, Alan Oppenheimer, Victoria Shaw, Linda Gaye Scott.
SYNOPSIS:
At a holiday amusement park in the future, the robotic creations malfunction and start to operate on their own.
Isn’t it great that we now live in an era where a lot of the sci-fi predictions of previous decades are coming true? Okay, we haven’t quite had the robotic takeover that 1973s Westworld warned us about, but watching the movie in 2026 you can’t help but think that writer/director Michael Crichton – he of Jurassic Park fame, that other notable story of mankind meddling with things it shouldn’t, with disastrous results – was onto something.
Set in the future of 1983, Delos is a holiday resort where guests get the opportunity to have a stay either in a Roman, medieval or wild west setting where they can fully interact with the humanoid robots that inhabit each ‘world’. Peter (Richard Benjamin) and his friend John (James Brolin) are holidaying in ‘Westworld’, where Peter can live out his fantasies of being a cowboy, complete with bar fights, quick-drawing pistols and voluptuous sex workers all for the taking.
John has been before and knows what to expect, but Peter is a city banker and not entirely sure how Delos operates, although after a confrontation with a black-clad gunslinger (Yul Brynner) ends with Peter using his .45 Colt to take down the android villain, he gets the feel for how it all operates. However, when said gunslinger returns after being repaired it takes more than a bullet to put it down, and the two men end up fighting for their lives against the malfunctioning robots.
A fantastic setup and, for 1973 at least, Westworld delivers a tight and exciting sci-fi/Western mash-up. Yes, it looks dated these days by having the 1970s version of the future basically looking like the 1970s but with faster vehicles and flashing battery indicators, but the themes are still relevant and if ever there was a pre-Terminator robot that was just as terrifying then Yul Brynner is it. Wearing a black Stetson – because the villains in classic Westerns always wore black – Brynner stalks Peter and John without breaking a sweat or barely blinking, always a few steps behind and managing to be intimidating without having to do much, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine that Arnold Schwarzenegger took some inspiration from Brynner when it came to making the T-800 a fully-functioning cyborg menace a decade later.
Coming in at under 90 minutes – which is always a good thing – Westworld doesn’t have time to get too deep with its main characters, and both Peter and John are written in a way that gives us all the exposition we need in an economical fashion, as John has been to Delos before and drops in nuggets of information, both for Peter and for us. Richard Benjamin is a fairly unassuming lead, an everyman who looks pretty much like you would expect if someone described his character to you, so you would expect the more heroic James Brolin to take the lead, but Brolin is more the supporting actor here, with John coming across as a bit obnoxious at first as he mocks Peter’s naivety. However, once the action starts both men step up and make a pretty decent team, likeable if nothing else.
There are some plot inconsistencies, such as how The Gunslinger can sit at the bar and drink whiskey but another robot is forced to drink water and explodes into a shower of sparks (and don’t even mention the morality of not only sleeping with one of the exhibits, but paying to sleep with them!), but this is 1970s sci-fi logic we are dealing with so don’t go overanalysing every piece of technical babble. Otherwise, Westworld is a solidly enjoyable action romp with a bit of social commentary behind it, and this new 4K print gives it a crisp and clean image that make the beiges and browns of the 1970s scrub up very well.
There was a TV series developed in 2016 that was inspired by this movie, which shows you how potent its ideas still are, but if you haven’t got the patience to sit through several series and just want a quick fix of robots going rogue then this 1973 original still has the ability to make the takeover quite scary, more than any Terminator sequel since 1991 has anyway.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
