Westworld (1973)

 

Many years before I watched the Westworld TV show on what I believe was HBO, maybe it was Showtime, I’m not sure.  The first couple of seasons were decent but it started to fall apart after that IMO.  Westworld was written and directed by Michael Crichton, who you might know better as the guy who wrote all the Jurassic Park stories.  He also directed Coma and The Great Train Robbery.  Westworld is the first film to feature 2D computer generated images.  The story is a not unfamiliar one in that what we have are robots (androids) running rampant.  Westworld, representing the American old west, is just one of three areas described as “amusement parks” created by a company called Delos.

 

There is also Roman World which takes place in the days of old Pompeii and the third land is Medieval World which is placed in Camelot days.  Think Medieval Times if all the knights tried to kill you.  Two of the main characters that the story follows are Peter and John.  Peter is played by Richard Benjamin (Deconstructing Harry, The Last of Sheila, and Catch 22) and James Brolin (The Amityville Horror, and Catch Me If You Can as well as the TV show Hotel) is John.  All is well, in fact Peter is enjoying his vacation being a heroic gunslinger in the old west until things go wrong and the bad gunslinger Peter has been facing off against glitches.  In fact all the androids glitch and then they begin to kill all the guests in all the different worlds.

 

 

Yul Brynner plays The Gunslinger which is essentially the same character from The Magnificent Seven.  Even with very limited spoken lines Brynner nearly steals the movie but I give Crighton credit for taking someone who may have been bigger than the film itself and working everything around him.  I truly believe Brynner was playing a robot based on Chris from The Magnificent Seven.  It’s done that well.  I almost forgot to give Dick Van Patten (Spaceballs, High Anxiety, and Eight Is Enough) proper credit as the third vacationer along for the ride but to a lesser extent.  Something else I wanted to point out is the music by composer Fred Karlin. 

 

 

Specifically the music he plays whenever the crazed gunslinger (Brynner) is on the move.  It ranks up there with the piano notes heralding the arrival of the great white in the film Jaws.  Westworld proved to serve two purposes as it served as a launching off point for Crighton where his havoc in an amusement part theme continued on an even grander stage with the Jurassic Park franchise. The other theme being the robots taking over scenario can lead one to speculate if it helped to influence such films as Terminator, I Robot, and M3gan.  If I was rating this in the 1970’s I would probably have been tempted to give this 4 but as it is I will still give this three and a half robotic rattlesnakes out of five.