Welcome to Delos, the high-tech Disneyland for adults that Michael Crichton created for Westworld, a nifty science fiction thriller from 1973 that also marked the popular novelist's feature-film directorial debut. The movie is so named because the vacationing buddies who travel to Delos (James Brolin, Richard Benjamin) choose Westworld as their destination (the other choices being Roman World and Medieval World), where they are free to indulge their movie-inspired fantasies of the Wild West. From brothel beauties to black-hatted gunslingers (like the villain played by Yul Brynner), the place is populated by perfectly humanlike robots programmed and monitored to cater to every guest's fancy. But fun turns into abject horror when the robots--particularly Brynner's badman--begin to malfunction and Delos turns into an amusement park that's anything but amusing. Westworld has moments of camp and the look of a low-budget backlot production, but two decades before Crichton revamped his idea to create Jurassic Park, this movie made the most of its interesting and exciting premise. --Jeff Shannon
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Michael Crichton's directorial debut, WESTWORLD is the direct precursor to JURASSIC PARK as the story of a technological amusement park gone out of control, with tourists becoming victims. For $1,000 a day, patrons can visit high-tech recreations of historically based mythical settings controlled by lifelike androids and synthetic environments: a Roman world that recreates tales of ancient Rome; a medieval world that recreates the legends of the Middle Ages; and Westworld, which recreates the myth of the classic Western. Two Chicago businessmen, Martin (Richard Benjamin) and Blane (James Brolin), spend their vacation in Westworld, where they live out their fantasies of the Old West mythology: chaotic barroom brawls, random love with beautiful prostitutes, and a violent jailbreak during which they shoot the local sheriff. But the complex technology that supports these fabricated worlds develops complicated syndromes faster than the scientists behind the scenes can resolve them. Soon the entire resort breaks down into chaos, and the androids turn hostile on the visiting tourists. WESTWORLD is both a retread on classic science fiction themes and a precocious critique of the false values and artificiality of the encroaching mass culture.
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For a $1,000 a day, vacationers can indulge whims at the theme park called Westworld. They can bust up a bar or bust out of jail, drop in on a brothel or get the drop on a gunslinger. It's all safe: the park's lifelike androids are programmed never to harm the customers. But not all droids are getting with the program.
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Twister) wrote and made his directing debut with this futuristic thriller that heralded moviemaking's future as the first feature to use digitalized images. Richard Benjamin and James Brolin portray pals confronted by a simulated reality turned real. And Yul Brynner is their stalking, spur-jangling nemesis. It's man vs. machine – in a tomorrow that isn't big enough for the both of them.
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