Westworld (1973)

directed by Michael Crichton

USA

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I have a soft spot for Michael Crichton's fiction because he was one of the authors who taught me to love reading as a young adult, but now that I'm an adult-adult, I can admit the flaws in most of his work that I didn't see when I was younger. Westworld is, for the most part, like reading a Michael Crichton book, and although the fantastical imagery makes it more exciting, it's still got a lot of the issues his books tend to have.

But I'm making it sound like I didn't like it, which I did! It's such an interesting concept and it's executed really well, because in this case there was a roster of crew and actors to add depth to Crichton's ideas and enhance them in such a way that watching this is miles more fun than reading, say, The Andromeda Strain, where the concept is there but the writing is so flat that you feel like you're reading an academic paper. The special effects have been talked about and praised, rightfully, for being very much ahead of their time. It looks like a 70s movie but in a weird way it also doesn't, like it could have been made more recently as a parody of a 70s movie. The robots are believable as non-human entities, and the only bad quality about them is that the film doesn't seem to feel the need to focus on them, despite them being such a large part of the story. It's also very amusing to me that their insides, when they were shown, were depicted as basically just a bunch of circuitboards shoved into a human skin. Watching modern movies like Ex Machina has made me expect faux-humans to have much more sleek interiors, not a bag of chips and boards like you'd find if you opened the back of a computer- but then, computers were barely even a thing at the time this was released, so circuitboards were kind of all anybody had to work with.

I'm not surprised that this was remade as a hit TV series, because the concept really lends itself to more exploration especially in the modern era as focus on entertaining the masses and the morality of doing so has increased, but I am a little surprised that the original became such a classic because to be totally honest it's kind of boring. The story isn't boring, and Yul Brynner inexorably hunting a guy down across the desert landscape with bloodlust in his shiny robot eyes is extremely compelling. But everything just sort of... happens, and doesn't feel like it's happening to real people; there's no personal intrigue whatsoever, your enjoyment of the film hinges on whether or not you can get engaged with something where all the people are basically wooden cut-outs of humans that we're supposed to pretend are real. And again, this from the movie that has actual robots in it. Flat characters are probably Crichton's most egregious problem, and boy, does Westworld have that problem in spades. It is kind of interesting to watch a movie that feels like it has no main characters, though. Everybody in it, even the "leads", feels like just some guy.

I want to like this as a critique of consumer culture, and I understand that it was probably meant as one, but it's hard to really feel like it has any message in the end. And maybe that's my own fault for being part of consumer culture myself, for expecting to be drummed over the head with a moral from whatever I watch, but Westworld doesn't even feel like its message is subtle- it feels like it's not there. The amusement park is a lawless territory in which the guest is king, you can do no harm here and no harm can come to you; kill, maim, take, waste, whatever you want to do- but who is providing this? Who fuels this culture of lawlessness? In any other satire of capitalism, I would expect a sinister mega-corporation to eventually be revealed as the support structure behind a place of such gratuitous indulgence. I'd expect the curtain to fall and a scummy CEO, lining his pockets freely with money earned off of guests who leave the park with something like PTSD from never being sure if they really killed "just robots", to be behind it. But the people behind Westworld seem to just be scientists in a control room doing their jobs. We never see it go beyond that. The concept of letting people loose and telling them they can do no wrong is never given enough space for the implications of it to set in. Maybe these are things the television reboot addresses- I've never seen it, so I don't know. But it's fun as hell anyway as long as you don't think too hard about it.