Westworld (1973) - film review

In the throes of a messy divorce, Peter Martin agrees to accompany his friend John Blane on a visit to Delos, an adult amusement park where the guests can live out their wildest fantasies for a thousand dollars a day.  The park is divided into three zones: Western-World, Medieval-World and Roman-World.  Each zone is a near-perfect replica of a historical setting and is populated by androids that are virtually indistinguishable from human beings.  John and Peter have barely been in Western-World five minutes before a sinister gunslinger shows up and provokes Peter into shooting him dead.   The gunslinger is of course an android, since, as John confidently assures his friend, it is impossible for any human to suffer the slightest injury in Delos.  At least, that is what the company brochure says.  In reality, the technicians running the amusement park have recently observed some unexplained malfunctions in the androids’ circuitry, which appear to be spreading like a virus.  What is first diagnosed as a minor technical problem suddenly assumes greater significance when one of the visitors is eviscerated whilst duelling with an android knight in Medieval-World.  An attempt to shut the androids down by cutting off the power supply backfires, and merely results in the technicians being trapped in their control centre.   Meanwhile, the androids across the three pleasure zones go berserk and start killing all of the human guests.   This is one vacation that Peter Martin will not forget in a hurry, if he survives it...

A variant on the disaster movie theme that was so popular with audiences in the 1970s, Westworld probably has a greater resonance today than it did when it was first released and seems chillingly prescient in its depiction of what can happen to a society which is overly dependent on advanced technology.  The film’s writer-director Michael Crichton would effectively re-tell the same story, of a theme park gone bananas, in Jurassic Park, but the version with the psychopathic androids is infinitely more unsettling than the one with flesh-eating velociraptors.

Crichton’s direction is confident and effective but rarely as inspired as it needs to be for the film to be genuinely thrilling.  Indeed, with its jokey introduction and thick underbelly of dark humour, Westworld works better as a black comedy than a conventional sci-fi thriller.  Yul Brynner is superlative as the homicidal robot gunslinger, which is obviously modelled on the character he played in The Magnificent Seven (1960).  His is a performance that exudes spine-tingling menace in every shot, amply compensating for weaknesses in the script and the lacklustre contributions from Brynner’s co-stars.

The film was a surprising box office hit and inspired both a sequel, Futureworld (1976), and a television series Beyond Westworld, although the latter was so ill-received that it did not survive beyond a few episodes.  Trivia fans should note that the gardens belonging to the legendary comedian Harold Lloyd were used for some of the exterior locations seen in Westworld and that this was the first film to exploit digital image processing, for the android’s pixellated point-of-view shots.

A borderline classic of the sci-fi genre, Westworld is as much a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Hollywood-style escapism in the 1970s as it is a timely warning against putting too much faith in technology (users of Internet Explorer please note).  It is still great fun to watch, but don’t be surprised if Yul Brynner pops up in your nightmares, eyes shining with a sadistic steely intent.  You may have to subject yourself to yet another viewing of The King and I to exorcise this grisly spectre from your subconscious.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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