© MGM
Yul Brynner in Westworld
Yul Brynner in Westworld (1973)
“Westworld” ran from 2016-22 on HBO with a top-notch cast that included Ed Harris and Thandie Newton. Season one was widely watched and praised, but how long can you milk an idea before the milk sours, and everyone turns to something new?
Westworld the 1973 movie, which neatly encapsulated the concept within one two-hour drama, is where the idea began. It’s just been rereleased for home viewing on a 4K Ultra HD disc.
In the film, the Delos corporation operates a computer-run amusement park that promises “the vacation of the future today”—at $1,000 per day, an almost insurmountably steep price even for 1973. Westworld was the directorial debut for Michael Crichton, the bestselling science-fiction-thriller novelist behind The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. For Westworld, Crichton imagined a near-future where the wealthy could purchase a fantasy vacation with a choice of three time-traveling destinations that replicated Ancient Rome, Medieval Europe and the Old West.
When in Rome, tourists were encouraged to “indulge your every whim” in an “atmosphere of relaxed morality.” Medieval Europe was a Renaissance fair on steroids. The movie’s action focuses mainly on the Westworld destination, where affluent city slickers Richard Benjamin and James Brolin dress up as cowpokes to experience what’s advertised as “a society of guns and action.” Delos promises a safe space where nothing can go wrong. And then everything does go wrong.
Westworld wasn’t great art but like good pulp fiction of all sorts, it took the temperature of its time and foresaw what could come next. In all three vacation venues, androids served to fulfill the desires of guests for sex and combat (gladiators, errant knights, black-hatted gunslingers) in an illusion of danger without risk in settings cobbled from Hollywood depictions of history. The fantasies are based on fantasies. But risk comes when the movie’s ostensible stars are eclipsed by Yul Bryner, the grim, dead-eyed android gunfighter, and soon the entire Delos computer system fails. The head tech describes the unravelling as a virus of malfunction travelling across the network in a system where computers have designed other computers. It’s so complicated, one of the techs adds, that “We don’t know exactly how it works.”
It sounds like the technology undergirding today’s world.
The limited-edition release of Westworld includes new audio commentary, interviews with cast and mini-making-of documentaries.
