The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Futureworld (1976), directed by Richard T. Heffron

The Trailer
and
Appropriate Tune: "Robot Stop", by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

     Those of you who are long-time fans of the Marathon, or more likely are one of the millions who have HBO, might recall a little gem known as Westworld. Written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton, it covers a subject that Crichton knew all too well: Weird amusement parks where something goes wrong and the attractions end up killing people, only instead of dinosaurs made with frog DNA it’s Yul Brynner in a cowboy hat. Although incredibly slow to get interesting like a lot of early 70s genre movies are, Westworld was a fun concept and they managed to pull it off fairly well. Not great, but definitely worth a watch at some point. Which apparently was enough for American International to sign on for a sequel three years later, because as we all know, you have to wait for the iron to get nice and lukewarm before you strike. Obviously.

     Released in 1976, not directed or written by Michael Crichton, Futureworld appropriately enough takes place some time after the events of the previous film. Peter Fonda plays Chuck Browning, the newspaper reporter (androids exist but print still isn’t dead) who first broke the Westworld story and whose latest story just so happens to involve the company behind Westworld. Yes, you’d think a little thing like ‘androids murdering a hundred people’ would be enough to drive a company like Delos (Telos? Talos?) out of business, but they’re still plugging away. In fact they’ve even got a couple new attractions up, like the titular Futureworld, and they’re inviting the cream of the crop to try and drum up some good PR, including Chuck and this evening’s female lead/romantic interest Tracy. Chuck has been suspicious ever since he met a whistleblower who died with Delos’ name on his lips, so he’s less interested in public relations and more into investigative journalism. Of course Delos has some plans of their own, and who knows what a massive corporation with access to the power players of the world and androids who can perfectly mimic humans in every way has planned?

     I’m not going to say that Westworld shouldn’t have had a sequel, because there was still a story you could get out of that universe, even if that story was predictable. Rather than expand upon what we saw in the original however, Futureworld feels like a dull retread of what we’ve had before. Not even in the best ways either. Both films take way too damn long to get to the action, both love their cts to the control and they both build their climax on the back of an overly long chase scene, but at least in the original they time they spent was in the park, playing up the hedonism of the visitors and building up the suspense when things went wrong. Futureworld by contrast apparently consists of a vault with a fake rocket in it and a bar that looks like a bargain bin Epcot, or at least that’s all we get to see of it because the protagonists spend more time in fucking Westworld than they do in the park the movie the named after. Well Westworld and what looks like the basement of a water treatment plant, so I hope you like looking at rooms filled with pipes because you’re gonna be doing it a lot. Now I know it makes sense in story, they’re digging into the inner workings of the facility, but as I’ve implied the story isn’t exactly a mind-bender. By the 15 minute mark you’ve likely got an idea of exactly where the story is headed, twists included, and that leaves about a hour of Peter Fonda walking around the same locations discovering stuff you already figured out a while back, and it ends up feeling a chore. Ultimately you end up pining for the days when Yul Brynner was the proto-Terminator gunning down yuppies, and then Yul Brynner has his cameo and you just end up pissed off.

     Of all the sequels I’ve done for the Marathon (and there’s more to come in this one), Futureworld is the one that has felt the least necessary. As I said there was still a story that could be told in that universe, but actually seeing it be told has left me apathetic, and that’s the most damning judgement. Not bad enough to hate, not good enough to love, just...there. Less of a movie and more of a trivia tidbit that one weird person you know trots out whenever you bring up science fiction movies from the 70s. Silver lining though, the time you might have spent watching this movie could be used to catch up on the Westworld series instead. All the murderous cowboy androids you can eat.

     I promise we’ll get to a movie I actually liked one of these days.

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.