The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2015: Westworld (1973), directed by Michael Crichton

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Wild Wild West", by Kool Moe Dee

     If there’s one things we’ve learned in the hundreds of years since the invention of speculative fiction it is this: People will always find a way to fuck themselves over, no matter what. Human have been around for quite a while, and in the dozens, some might say hundreds, of years, we have packed the entirety of the human literary canon about how arrogant, spiteful dicks people are, and how they ruin their and other people’s lives through their arrogant, spiteful ways. We can’t get enough of the stuff. Of course, since we’re so busy talking about how bad other people, how stupid they are, how their way of doing things isn’t like ours, we tend to be very slow at actually trying to make the world a better place. It seems like humanity loves to revel in the idea of of our own helplessness when it comes to our media, that our lives have to be bad, that we have no agency, in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy/egotistic masturbatory session. Or maybe that’s just how I see things, being a severe depressive and all. Can’t say for sure.

     If there’s any man who knows the folly of man’s arrogance, it’s Michael Crichton. From his first novel back in 1966 until his death in 2008, Crichton loved to explore the ways in which we humans could fuck ourselves over through our own stupidity, generally through some horribly mismanaged sci-fi concept. The most famous of these explorations was of course Jurassic Park (adapted to film in 1993), recently given a franchise update in Jurassic World (which seems to simultaneously one of the most hated and most successful movies of the year if anonymous people on the internet is anything to go by), but it has also been seen in other Crichton adaptations like Congo, The Terminal Man and The Andromeda Strain. So when it came time to hand the directorial reins over to Crichton, it makes sense that his debut film, the film that I’m featuring on this list, would deal with the same themes that he would later use with cloned dinosaurs and hyper-intelligent gorillas in novels/movies. We’re talking Westworld

     In the far-flung American future of hovercrafts and things that aren’t hovercrafts, the most popular amusement park in the world isn’t Disneyland or Six Flags or Dear Leader’s Happy Funtime Child Pit & Salt Mine (#1 in North Korea),it’s Delos. For a paltry 1000 dollars a day, you can vacation in Medievalworld, Romanworld or Westworld, perfect recreations of those historical periods populated entirely by androids. You can talk with them, fuck them, kill them,beat them up, all under the watchful eye of trained Delos technicians and engineers. Ever wanted to rob a bank on horseback? How about swordfighting a knight while feasting on mutton and mead? Does a drunken outdoor orgy with men & women of indiscriminate ages strike your fancy. The heights of debauchery and wish-fulfillment in a safe, controlled environment can be yours when you try Delos, so why not take a trip to Westworld today? Heck, even our animals are artificial!

     Of course, this being a movie, the day that our protagonists John Blane (James Brolin) and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) decide to take a trip to the most magical place on Earth is the day that everything goes to shit. It seems that the rate of malfunctions in the robots has dramatically since the park opened, mostly tied to a breakdown in their logic processors it seems, and in true Jaws fashion the higher-ups are too interested in their profits to notice when something is about to go tits-up. Blane and Martin might find shootouts, bar fights and sex with robo-hookers fun now, but what happens when the machines don’t want to listen anymore? What happens when the sensors that keep the (very real) guns from firing on real people stop working? Worst of all, what happens when you have a bloodthirsty Yul Brynner gunning for your ass? You get three guesses.

     Crichton was already a fairly accomplished novelist before his work on Westworld, so it’s not surprising at all that this movie probably reads far better than it plays. Particularly in the case of the protagonists, Blane and Martin. I can’t writing and erasing things down trying to accurately describe my feelings about it, but the heart of the issue was that they were completely totally uninteresting characters. Barely characters really, you never really learn much about them, never really get to identify with them (unless you too are a scrawny douchebag with a pornstache) and thus, inevitably, don’t care about whether they live or die. Compare it to Jurassic Park, which is pretty much this move but with dinosaurs: You cared about Hammond, you cared Malcolm, because you learn about them through the course of the film by the way they act and interact with others. Crichton manages to impart a bit of personality to other characters, most of which have even less screen time and dialogue, but Peter Martin (who is technically the protagonist I suppose, with Blane being the deuteragonist) is a nonentity. Sit through the entire movie and the most you’ll figure out about him is that he doesn’t like to get shot by robots. The last half of the movie is filled with corpses, and this fucker is still gives the most lifeless performance in the room.

     Westworld isn’t what I would call a bad movie though (otherwise it wouldn’t be this list presumably), and for a debut film by someone who presumably didn’t study filmmaking it’s quite well made, all things considered. I mean the ‘Amusement Park run amok’ setting concept was good enough that Crichton managed to successfully recycle, it managed to at least touch upon how the removal of consequence affects man’s behaviour and sense of morality, and Yul Brynner as a cowboy Terminator years before Arnie played a killer robot is pretty cool. If you keep in mind that this movie is from the early 70s, when science fiction was at this weird crossroads between new wave philosophy and commercial genre fiction, the concept is enough to warrant a watch. If you liked Soylent Green and Logan’s Run, then you might like to take a trip to Westworld this Halloween.