The late Michael Crich­ton is pri­mar­ily known as a best­selling nov­el­ist, but some­what less so as a screen­writer, fea­ture film direc­tor, and tele­vi­sion pro­ducer (he was one of the co-creators of the block­buster series E.R.). Char­ac­ter­is­tic nov­els Juras­sic Park and The Androm­eda Strain are built upon fas­ci­nat­ing spec­u­la­tive sci­ence with thrilling story poten­tial, spoiled by wafer-thin char­ac­ters and sim­plis­tic plots. His 1973 thriller West­world suf­fers from the same syn­drome. Despite its high-minded ori­gins in spec­u­la­tive sci­ence, the movie is sim­ple in struc­ture and theme. It’s not unusual for sci­ence fic­tion films to be overtly based on West­ern tropes (the best exam­ple that comes to mind is Out­land), but West­world is a hybrid with equal parts of each. The sec­ond half is basi­cally an extended chase sequence, punc­tu­ated by a few clas­sic hor­ror movie tropes.

There’s a face off in the corner

West­world posits a future in which robot­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have advanced enough to enable a new mar­ket for enter­tain­ment and leisure. The futur­is­tic vaca­tion resort Delos is a fore­run­ner to Juras­sic Park: an expe­ri­ence adven­ture for the afflu­ent, pow­ered by untested advanced tech­nol­ogy. Imag­ine Dis­ney World-like ani­ma­tron­ics taken to the next level: semi­au­tonomous robots roam an immer­sive envi­ron­ment to serve as inter­ac­tive ser­vants, sex toys, and tar­get practice.

Crich­ton skips over the entire issue of how these machines achieve con­scious­ness, mak­ing the com­mon movie fal­lacy that robots = arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. If they are basi­cally ani­ma­tronic machines, how did they evolve an instinct for self-preservation? If these droids are not feel­ing actual rebel­lion and mur­der­ous vin­dic­tive­ness, is it a virus or mal­func­tion? On a more prac­ti­cal level, there appears to be a plot hole in how all robots but The Gun­slinger (Yul Bryn­ner) appear to com­pletely van­ish after mur­der­ing the Delos’ staff and visitors.

James Brolin & Richard Ben­jamin take the vaca­tion of the future, today

Brynner’s may wear the same cos­tume as in The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven (read The Dork Report review), but The Gunslinger’s true ana­log is closer to Jaws and Moby Dick. He pops up again and again, seem­ingly unkil­l­able, pos­sessed of an unex­pressed, inex­plic­a­ble moti­va­tion to hunt one sin­gle man. He fix­ates on tourist John Blane (James Brolin) and remorse­lessly pur­sues him to the death, not unlike the implaca­ble demons that haunt Cor­mac McCarthy’s No Coun­try for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Merid­ian. Bryn­ner isn’t given much in the way of dia­log or char­ac­ter, but you can see he worked very hard on his phys­i­cal per­for­mance. His bear­ing, pos­ture, gait, and gaze are all unset­tling. Far from a car­toon­ish robot fig­ure, The Gun­slinger is really inhu­man, weird, and creepy.

West­world, like Juras­sic Park, seems to be a vague cau­tion­ary tale against toy­ing with advanced sci­ence. The famously science-minded Crich­ton (an M.D.) is not sim­ply demo­niz­ing sci­ence itself, but rather its arro­gant mis­use. If the first mis­take is to build machines more com­plex than the human mind can under­stand, the sec­ond is to bet our lives upon them.

Delos is a fan­tasy world where peo­ple can kill or fuck any­thing they want. In other words, a recipe for dis­as­ter. Later sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries like Tron, The Matrix, and Caprica (read The Dork Report review) would typ­i­cally stage sim­i­lar moral­ity plays in vir­tual real­ity. But I don’t get the sense that West­world is crit­i­ciz­ing the indul­gence of humanity’s worst ten­den­cies. Is it instead focus­ing on the mis­treat­ment of semi-sentient beings as slaves? When the park is in work­ing con­di­tion, the robots are pros­ti­tuted and mur­dered over and over for humans’ enter­tain­ment. After they become con­scious, we see one “female” robot reject a human’s sex­ual advances, while another is cru­elly chained up in a dun­geon. Nei­ther seems to be express­ing much in the way of grief or resent­ment. Instead, we are per­haps meant to see them as inno­cents that are sim­ply seek­ing a lit­tle dignity.

Stray obser­va­tions:

• The sequel movie Future­world (1976) and TV series Beyond West­world (1980) are not avail­able on DVD or online at this time of writing.
• Young James Brolin looks so much at times like Chris­t­ian Bale does today that it’s almost creepy.
• Even Delos’ ani­mals are robotic, per­haps allud­ing to the moral tests regard­ing the treat­ment of ani­mals (robotic or real) in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep. Even more on the nose, Blane finds a robot snake in the desert, fore­shad­ow­ing the ones we see for sale in Blade Runner.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

•