Such was the topsy-turvy, wide-open, frontier-like condition of Hollywood in the early 1970s that even a humble author could winnow his way into directing a movie if it looked like they might conjure a money-spinning proposition. Michael Crichton did just that, after the film version of his book The Andromeda Strain (1970) and some work writing for television, with directing the telemovie Pursuit (1972) a crucial intermediary step. Crichton sealed a deal to make Westworld with MGM just as that studio was passing through the throes of managerial upheaval, a period of turmoil that was to make the waning studio maligned by many creative talents whose work was caught in the crossfire. Crichton provided the studio with its biggest hit of the year, and his directing career continued with a handful of good movies before running out of steam in the late ‘80s. Later, Crichton essentially ripped himself off by recycling the core idea of Westworld, of a futuristic amusement park that offers the thrill of impossible dreams but goes haywire, and repackaged it with dinosaurs for his novel Jurassic Park. The stature of Steven Spielberg’s film of that book is hard to shake these days, but Westworld is the more interesting variation on the concept for many reasons. Whereas the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park invoked the fantasies of youth, Westworld proposed a more adult, overtly satirical, acutely aimed metaphor. Delos is a triptych of fantasy theme parks built in the middle of nowhere, with clientele flown in and out by hover-jet, run by white-coated savants overseeing a cast of lifelike robots. The three parks, West World itself, Medieval World, and Roman World, are specifically marketed to men in grey flannel suits as the place to live out desires frustrated by the modern world: in essence, the freedom to kill and fuck and indulge all fantasies of power and eroticism untrammelled. Crichton reveals the carnage wrought by the entirely normal men and women (mostly men) who have come to this pleasure dome as the park’s night crews pick up the mangled, bullet-riddled bodies of the robots slain in the course of the day’s fun, and take them to be repaired in laboratories that become charnel houses of circuitry and wiring.
Crichton quickly reveals his gift of the non-diegetic gab by communicating the film’s premise with clarity and ease not through mere dialogue but by playing on the audience’s ready understanding of such phenomena as TV advertising and in-flight training films. He opens with a mock TV spot for Delos where various enthused schmucks testify to the joys of their experience and slogans flash on screen, before cutting to his audience avatars, Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin), already en route to the park: Peter is torn between excitement and anxiety, listening to the information movie for broad details but prodding John, who’s made the trip before, for the subtler tips. Peter and John are clearly delineated as the divorced and depressed milquetoast and the confident swinger who’s done it all, anticipating the act Woody Allen and Tony Roberts would sustain in Play It Again, Sam (1972) and Annie Hall (1977). John coaxes Peter slowly and with increasing gusto into losing his cherry West World style, riddling the local Gunslinger (Yul Brynner) with bullets and bedding a cyborg prostitute (“She’s from France.”) Eventually Peter gives in with boyish delight to the charm of Westworld, even declaring it the most real-feeling thing he’s ever done. The door is thus opened to enquiries about what reality and experience would become in a world where such things were possible, and of course, we await the moment when the experience will become much more urgent and authentic, when the system will break down and the robots, carefully designed to yield to the fantasies of the humans, no longer yield, and the carefully preordained tests and trials become all too real. But Crichton doesn’t belabour the existential ideas percolating beneath the surface of his tale, keeping things on the same level of pop sci-fi fun leavened by the Planet of the Apes series.
Thus the first hour of Westworld is essentially a wry study in egotism offered a venue to play itself out and littered with light and breezy pastiche of well-worn genre fare. Peter and John’s adventures counterpoint some of their fellows from the hover-jet, like Dick Van Patten’s banker, a diminutive and unimpressive man who nonetheless gets himself cast as the Sheriff of West World after the robot one is shot dead by John, whilst Norman Bartold plays a would-be heroic, irresistible knight battling the evil Black Knight (Michael T. Mikler) for the affections of the Queen (Victoria Shaw) in Medieval World, and various lotharios settle for getting oiled up and rubbed down in Roman World. Threaded through this however are glimpses of the management of Delos, the labour put into repairing the robots and keeping the parks operating. Crichton coolly and even at time abstractly studies the nuts and bolts of the operation, with Fred Karlin’s excellent score providing an eerie, dissociated electronic drone, giving the sense that beneath the surface Delos is actually a kind of derelict vessel, inhabited by simulacra and scientific geniuses who have voluntarily made themselves mixtures of carnies and pimps. Asimov’s heralded Three Laws have no place here: Crichton presents these robots as brilliant feats of narcissistic engineering but which have no more moral sense than a dishwasher. The outbreak of all hell in Delos is announced with the first, effective shock of Bartold getting the Black Knight’s sword through his stomach.
Westworld takes up one of Crichton’s favourite themes of technology as a potential trap and insidious force, particularly the thread of The Andromeda Strain of the super-laboratory that becomes more of an enemy to the human inhabitants than the disease they study. Here the human staff of Delos are ensconced in control centres which they can’t escape from when something as simple as a power cut occurs: eventually they will be found, all suffocated to death. Crichton lands his best mockery as he depicts one operator ordering lunch whilst another carefully coordinates the fulfilment of some salesman’s life-long onanistic fantasy of debonair triumph. Like many a clever pop artefact, Westworld invokes a host of subtext, a lot of it not even that sub, particularly as a commentary on the state of the film industry circa 1972, still feeling its way out of the late ‘60s crisis, with Crichton using the infrastructure of MGM’s bygone blockbusters as playgrounds where the merciless future will take over and stalk: the way entertainment and its makers adapt to service our wants and secret hypocrisies is skewered with a deft hand. There is even, in the distant horizon, some understanding of the internet’s allure for those seeking alternate identities and connections through technology. Casting Brynner as an oblivious robot based on his wise hero from The Magnificent Seven (1960) is the central coup, a meta-fictional touch that relies on the audience recognising the association and having a good chuckle and then watching in dismay as he stalks our wiry, nervous, all too human hero with impassive relentlessness, as if some childhood fantasy pleasure has suddenly turned nightmare. Westworld even bears a faint but definite resemblance to Deliverance (1972) and Jaws (1975) in tackling a common theme of the era (also apparent in those aforementioned Woody Allen films, if handled in a much different manner), focusing on ordinary men forced to fight for their lives, with the quick, ironic discounting of the confident manly man that forces the man more insecure in his masculinity to prove himself.
As a writer, Crichton found success combining conceptual ingenuity with entrepreneurial guile rather than through great dramatic gifts, and although Westworld displays his real and perhaps superior talent as a director, at times Crichton can’t quite excuse a certain jokey thinness here and there in Westworld, like a jolly barroom fight copied from countless real horse operas. The story develops with the kind of obviousness one doesn’t mind if the hook is good enough, and it sure is good enough; as long as the story keeps heading where you know it’s headed it doesn’t need to do too much else. Crichton doesn’t indict his heroes too hard for looking for fulfilment in fantasy after real life has treated them badly, but their activities do have darker permutations with hints of sex tourism and other forms of exploitation. The sleazy, unnatural, post-human quality of these ideas which young David Cronenberg or a good cyberpunk author might have gone wild for, is mostly played for humour, except for one of the most memorable moments in the film: Peter sleeps with a robot prostitute and in the midst of throes of passion she goes glaze-eyed as the nightly tune-up signal goes out from the command centre: the falsity of the eroticism and the emptiness of the fulfilment is revealed for an excruciating moment, and Crichton can’t quite match it again. The film also lacks anyone as interesting as Jurassic Park’s squabbling brains Grant and Malcolm to seed exposition. Alan Oppenheimer’s role as the Chief Supervisor of the park, who tries to warn of potential disaster when he starts detecting signs of a virus-like instability in the machines, is purposefully flat and castrated, and the other staff indicted as foolish functionaries, only malevolent in their oblivious faith in their super-duper Potemkin village.
Nonetheless, Crichton handles Westworld with a steady, deadpan intelligence admirable for a first-time feature filmmaker, and the result now seems to have been as influential stylistically as it was thematically: a host of upcoming young filmmakers including Carpenter, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan and others surely drank at this well. Westworld feels like the birth of something, perhaps the modern science-fiction action film itself. Battles with blank-eyed, unstoppable monsters in such later stalwarts of this style, like The Terminator (1984) and Predator (1987), and even perhaps Halloween (1978), are strongly anticipated and probably directly influenced, particularly the digitally segmented cyborg’s-eye-view shots, daring to turn the theoretically neutral camera into the viewpoint of something beyond the human way of seeing. Crichton’s later team-up with Spielberg feels especially appropriate, as Benjamin’s nervous everyman who has to prove himself wily enough to survive a deadly situation clearly anticipates Spielberg’s fascination with that theme. Crichton tightens the screws until the comedy gives way suddenly but logically to horror and excitement. His eye for menace in echoic spaces of chilly modernity, and skill at generating tension in extended sequences of pursuit and eluding, later displayed in the techno-baroque slickness of his work on Coma (1978), is plain here. The last half-hour, depicting Peter’s desperate battle for survival against the Gunslinger in the midst of massacre and dashed fancies, passing through the various realms of Delos and then the blank, subterranean labyrinth beneath, is exceptionally well-staged. Benajmin is fine and effective as Peter as he walks the character through stages of fretful anticipation and unsteady self-concept, through to the crucial moment where, confronted with the possibility of his own annihilation, sees his chance and moves forward with the determination of the survivor. A weak sequel, Futureworld, followed in 1976.
