Westworld (1973)
Directed by Michael Crichton
Delos is a futuristic amusement park that features themed worlds populated by human-like androids. After two patrons have a run-in with a menacing gunslinger in West World, the androids at Delos all begin to malfunction, causing havoc throughout the park.
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What critics compared Westworld to
If Blade Runner was interested in who can be truly considered human, and how that’s linked to our ability as a species to feel empathy for others, Blade Runner 2049 is more interested in the question of freedom, in a manner that recalls much recent blockbuster entertainment from Twin Peaks: The Return and Westworld to Alien: Covenant and even The Good Place.
Our current moment is that of Westworld on TV and Her and Ex Machina at the multiplex.
Again, it’s impossible to talk about specifics, but I will say that while K is working through many of the same questions introduced in the original–the same questions at the heart of Westworld or Ex-Machina or any brilliant examination of artificial intelligence–2049‘s exploration hit me in a visceral way, not necessarily harder but definitely different from Blade Runner.
(The movie shares a strong DNA with HBO’s Westworld in this regard.)
— was hashed out more organically in the first film and has been parsed to death in movies and TV shows like “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” “Her,” “Westworld,” and “Humans.”
And in much the way that HBO's "Westworld" brought fresh considerations to Michael Crichton's movie, this 35-years-later sequel introduces ideas and concerns about renegade robots and artificial intelligence that feel very much suited to where we are now.
I, Robot is meant to be a cautionary tale, but we've been cautioned so many times -- starting with Michael Crichton's 1973 Westworld, in which amusement park robots go on a murderous rampage -- that it's become a little like listening to white noise or a Britney Spears album.
When Jurassic Park author and “Westworld” writer-director Michael Crichton succumbed to cancer in 2008, he left an entire genre of literature and film (the techno-thriller) to be tended to.
From “Frankenstein” through “Westworld” through “Blade Runner” through “Ex Machina,” have we still not learned that nothing good comes from creating artificial beings that look, behave and begin to act like actual human beings?
And for the villain of the piece, Westworld nabbed one of the all-time great killer robots: Yul Brynner as a gunslinger 'bot plainly modeled on the actor's role in The Magnificent Seven .
Given all the robotic cowboys blasting at our precious brain cells, one wouldn’t be rash in assuming Antoine Fuqua got his Yul Brynner Westerns mixed up by giving us “Westworld” instead of his promised remake of “The Magnificent Seven.”
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Fallen Kingdom is the silliest and most purely enjoyable variation on a story that a few big studio productions have been offering recently, in Alien: Covenant, War for the Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner 2049, and, on TV, Westworld — all fantasies leaning toward endings that involve not saving the world for humanity, but ceding it entirely to nonhumans.
While I agree that the original “Jurassic Park” (1993) deserves a place in cinema history for the stunning technological advances it deployed to create the illusion that dinosaurs were back, the story has always struck me as being little more than Michael Crichton revamping his 1973 sci-fi cult favorite “Westworld” and replacing Yul Brynner with raptors and also suffered from Steven Spielberg trying a little too hard to invoke the spirit of the Spielberg who once so effortlessly made such across-the-board favorites like “Jaws” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Oddly, it is the largely derided “The Lost World” (1997) that I prefer the most—the big set pieces (such as the one involving the truck dangling over the chasm with the cracking windshield and the dinos rampaging through San Diego) were breathtakingly effective, the shifting of the always-reliable Jeff Goldblum from supporting player to lead lent an additional edge of offbeat humor to the proceedings and Spielberg’s obvious lack of…
(Perhaps those involved consulted the Delos corporation, which reopened for business after the theme-park massacre of Westworld in another Crichton-inspired sequel, Futureworld .)
The sickening grandeur of the place gave me a “Westworld” vibe (ironically, another Crichton project), because as cool as it was, you know that things are going to go bad.
Having learned nothing from the previous three movies ( The Lost World and Jurassic Park III are essentially sidestepped), nor from Michael Crichton’s gene-pool text Westworld , the owners again find themselves running an amusement park in which the attractions eat the guests.
What the film’s four credited screenwriters also understand is that part of the appeal of Michael Crichton’s original premise, reconfigured from his earlier Westworld, was the sight of a corporate vacation destination gone horribly wrong.
Throughout, the director blunted the potential for a scary-funny indictment of corporate amusement-park culture (for that, you have to re-watch Crichton’s own delicious Westworld ), and he romanticized the park’s demise as paradise lost.
Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow injects the moribund Jurassic Park franchise with new life by pairing the usual dinosaurs-running-amok formula with a seductive, Westworld-style story hook.
The director Michael Crichton successfully spliced the sci-fi and Western genres in 1973's Westworld, which cast Yul Brynner as a rampaging robotic cowboy.
The plot is equal parts "Westworld" and (believe it or not) "Jaws 3-D."
The set-up is just chilling enough, a variation on a theme Michael Crichton worked earlier in his film "Westworld," about a high-tech amusement park that turned lethal for its customers.
The story itself is a recycling by novelist Michael Crichton, who has taken his 1973 film "Westworld," about a Western theme park taken over by rebellious robots, and substituted flesh-and-blood dinosaurs, generated from prehistoric DNA strands, for the villains.
This week: the failed theme park of Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park finally opens for business in Jurassic World , with the expected results.
Michael Crichton infuses H.G. Wells prophecy with Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a cold-eyed analysis of breakdown, from which Coma and Jurassic Park were to be reaped.
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The bottom line is; this isn’t Westworld, and I’m not worried that anything could possibly go worng…
Crichton's directing is anonymous at best, but that's partially a result of his self-conscious desire to copy the trappings of a generic Western, since Westworld is meant to be the ultimate expression of of a generic Western (or not-so-generic: there's a slow-motion shootout that could only be regarded as a deliberate parody of the then-recent The Wild Bunch ).