Silver Screen Resolution, Take Two: Westworld

For my 2018 Resolution Project, I decided to take a page out of Lane’s book and do my own Silver Screen

Resolution (hence the Take Two part of the title). There are a lot of movies out there I haven’t seen but feel like I should have, or movies that I’ve simply wanted to see and have yet to get around to it. With a deadline of some kind, now I’ll have to finally make a point to find them, get them, and watch them. My rules for the resolution are slightly different in that:

1. They must be spec-fic (this has not changed).
2. The movie will not be one that is in theaters or that would be part of a Sound Off!
3. They don’t have to be popular — or even something folks have heard about.

But I’ve decided to take my resolution to the next level as well, since I had more than 12 movies on my list that I wanted to see. And since we’re in “Take Two” mode, I might as well up the ante: I will instead be seeing two spec fic movies per month rather than just one. This month, let’s go to some strange futuristic locales, shall we? Let’s start with a nice vacation to the wonderful land of Westworld.

Saddle up — I’m spoiling everything.

When I first heard about Westworld it was through our Editor-in-Chic. My initial reaction was, “What? A science fiction movie headed by Michael Crichton and featuring Yul Brenner as a gun-slinging robot? WHERE DO I SIGN UP?” Now we’re here, and some things have changed.

Which world will you visit?

The plot, in a nutshell, is that Westworld is just one of three amazing resorts where, for $1,000 a day, you can live in another world without the fear of getting hurt. All your desires are met. Want to go jousting and feasting? Try Medievalworld. How about gladiatorial fights and more feasting? Romanworld is your place. But our main characters — Peter and John — have opted for the gun-slinging, cowboy-ridden place of Westworld, complete with bar fights, bank robberies, and of course, robot saloon whores. Big surprise there. At first, all seems great. Our guys are having a lovely time. But behind the scenes the scientists and folks running the park have noticed some uncanny glitches in their bots — and when that glitch goes into full-on meltdown, poor Peter will have to run from his robot nemesis (Yul Brenner).

In that respect, it’s kind of like a weird version of the Terminator. Peter’s running like hell to escape Yul (he’s only known as Gunslinger in the movie), who takes a few lickings and keeps on ticking (a lot of fire included).

It’s a short movie — only 89 minutes long. Initially I thought it was going to be one of those movies where the robots get smart. You know, gain self-awareness and all that and don’t go berserk so much as rebel. Which I think is what the current HBO series is doing, but I’m not sure since I don’t get HBO. So I thought Peter and John would end up being sort of the bad guys, given that they can kill robots at any given moment and Yul gets shot multiple times on two separate occasions. Then Yul would roll back in after getting fixed and kill his would-be killers, so to speak. But that is absolutely not what happened. And while in some sense I guess that’s okay because we see that sort of theme a lot (Terminator, Matrix, etc.), we also see plenty of the whole robots-go-berserk-and-kill-everybody theme (2001: Space Odyssey, Alien, and to some extent, I, Robot).

Poor Yul-bot. Getting shot up again.

In this case though, I would have preferred self-awareness rather than outright berserker-mode. It would make more sense for the robots to kill after realizing what the humans do, and keep doing, to them. But instead they just start killing everyone. And I think that’s my problem with things. The glitch that’s described goes viral across the board, which means the robots don’t have restraint and keep going with their programming. But let’s say, for example, in Medievalworld, there’s a black knight that fights with a human guest. Normal programming would be: fight opponent, get defeated. Broken programming; fight opponent, win match. Ok, so if he’s super-broken, even after defeating his opponent, he could go on killing people. But all the robots? In Westworld, there are bartenders and hotel keepers, women who just stroll down the street, shopkeeps, and so forth. Are they also killing people? When did their programming include that? The glitch described just overrode existing safety protocols, is what it sounded like; hence, why John actually got bitten by a robot rattlesnake. I also wondered about the violent robots’ programming in general. Robot knights, for example, wouldn’t be programmed to kill women (I assume). Most of the violence in these parks is mostly men wanting to do/join in on violent acts. I kept thinking at in the end, once the park got outside help, they ought to find mostly women survivors.

I also didn’t understand where the hell everyone went as Peter ran through Romanworld, robots included. That would have been a dangerous place with all the gladiators murdering people, as we saw on the operators’ monitors. Yet when he runs through the place, all he comes across are guest bodies — to which he has no reaction at all, by the way. Yes, I know you’re being chased by murderous Yul, but there should have at least been some shock at having to run around literally dozens of bodies in a place where everything is supposed to be safe.

These are just the first few corpses. There are plenty more where those came from…

And then there’s the control room and its hermetically-sealed doors. On one hand, it was a neat touch to royally screw over everyone in charge, and I appreciated that little twist. But on the other hand, it made no sense for that to even exist. Unless it was just really, really poor building planning. And while we’re talking about trouble suspending my disbelief, I’m not buying that Yul gets set on fire and keeps going. But props to the guy in the flame suit because holy CRAP that man was ablaze. I assume that meant a lot of separate takes, but that also means being set on fire a lot. It was pretty impressive. But it also means Yul-bot wouldn’t keep on after his target. He’d melt and short circuit and his gunbelt and pants and hat would definitely not still be in pristine condition.

FLAME ON!

So. Yeah. I guess I had some issues with this movie. It felt like the kind of film where you sit there and quietly think to yourself, “I know how to make this better.” I expected better, I guess, because Michael Crichton does such great research into things and there are mistakes here that feel like they shouldn’t have happened on his watch. But of course the movie came out in 1973 and it’s not like I could ever do anything about it anyway.

On the upside, as much as I just raked this movie over the coals, I did enjoy watching it. It was short and fun. The settings were impressive, and I really did like all the behind-the-scenes type stuff of engineers and scientists collecting and fixing robots after the guests all went to sleep. I liked how even the horses were robots (I kept wondering about that the entire time until they finally picked up a “dead” one off the street and put it into a truck). The two main characters were having a good time and Peter’s wonder at the place felt genuine, as well as his kid-like excitement at the beginning. There were a lot of little things in this movie that gave it character, like the random terminal worker ordering breakfast, or Peter and John cackling like kids after a jailbreak and making silly comments about their horses. I’m glad they addressed the question I had about potentially shooting other guests (though how they fix that with swords I don’t know). When they removed Yul-bot’s face to check the insides, the mask they made of Yul’s face was very well done. I dig practical effects in every way. I really didn’t expect John to die so that was a bit of a surprise. Ultimately, it’s a movie that was okay, but I think could have been far, far better with just a little bit of tweaking.

Last minute quick tip to every company out there — never promise that “nothing can go wrong.”