HBO’s newest drama series, Westworld, premieres this Sunday. No, I have not seen it yet. You might think I’m some highfalutin media hotshot with connections exploding out of all of my orifices, but I’m not. I’m watching the premiere with the rest of you. Like a pleb.
I really wanted to be able to discuss the gorgeous cinematography, astounding acting, and thought-provoking thematic material with you, but I can’t. I begged – literally begged – for an advance copy. Let this be a lesson to each and every one of you: shaming yourself in order to get what you want only works when you’re 10.
Fortunately for me (and my editors) Westworld is a remake of a 1973 motion picture written and directed by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. That’s been discussed throughout the marketing of this series, but what hasn’t been brought up much at all is that this isn’t the first time Hollywood has tried to milk more content out of this intellectual property cash cow. It’s not even the first television adaptation of Westworld. If I can’t watch Westworld, the HBO show, I can pay $30 on Amazon for Beyond Westworld, the atrocious CBS series from 1980 that was canceled after airing only three episodes. What you will find as you go on this incredible journey with me is that if the HBO Westworld series is any good, based on its predecessors, it will be something of a miracle.
Westworld
The original Westworld stars Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as two unrepentant bros who just want to have a good time drinking whisky and having sex with robots, so they drop $1,000 a day to visit the Delos amusement park, where all your period-specific dreams can come true thanks to the magic of modern technology. The first difference between the HBO series and this film is that Westworld is one of three parks in the Delos complex. There’s also Romanworld, which subtly promotes the fact that you can have robo-orgies – though I imagine there will be at least one orgy on the new Westworld, because it airs on HBO – and Medievalworld, where you can eat rotting meat and contract the plague. Personally, I’d rather they switch out Medievalworld for Homeworld, a park where your parents love you unconditionally, everyone you went to high school with has gained weight, and your dad hasn’t thrown away your Limp Bizkit poster and turned your room into a dumping ground for his old copies of Rolling Stone.
The operators of Delos believe their system is foolproof. All the firearms have a heat sensor, so they won’t fire if they detect their target is a warm-blooded human being. Pretty much everything in the park is a robot, even the horses. I suppose the horses are robots so that guests can murder them too. It must be someone’s fantasy.
As fun as the killing seems to be for the guests, it’s the erotic element that really gets them going. Majel Barrett, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, shows up as the operator of the brothel that our protagonists enjoy before all hell breaks loose and the robots turn on their masters. At first, Benjamin’s character, Peter, is hesitant to have sex with a machine. ”I’m going to tell you something. I’m not sure if it matters, but it matters to me,” Peter says to one of the “girls”. You never forget your first time … with a robot.
After doing an autopsy on a robo-snake that’s malfunctioned and started biting guests, the scientists who run Delos realize that the machines are beginning to rebel against their programming. Worse yet, a maiden in Medievalworld refuses the sexual advances of a guest! Shocking! “Castle machine refuses the guest’s seduction,” a park operator says. If you squint hard enough, this movie is a sly satire of gender politics. Most of the park guests are male and indulge in misogynistic, coarse and violent behavior. Once you stop squinting, you can go back to enjoying the killer androids.
In the climax of the film, the robots finally snap, though no specific reason is given for their deviation from programming. They just start killing people. Well, the horses don’t. The horses continue functioning like horses. What I wouldn’t give to have a scene where a horse bites a guy’s leg off added to this film.
It should be noted that the first hour and 10 minutes of Westworld is just guys having a great time playing dress-up. There’s no real action until the last 20 minutes, so hopefully you have a high tolerance for people enjoying themselves in a drama-free environment. James Brolin’s character is murdered by the Gunslinger, a black hat cowboy robot played by Yul Brynner. The final 15 minutes of the film are the Gunslinger – who has been killed twice already, repaired and sent back into service – chasing Peter through the park. The whole concept of an unstoppable murderous machine hunting down human prey would be borrowed from this and used in The Terminator.
Peter kills the Gunslinger and is left alone with the horror he’s just witnessed – something of a downbeat ending, which was popular with sci-fi in the 70s. The Westworld movie is a bit dull, but conjures up a fascinating concept – pleasure robots that humans treat callously rise up against them – that will hopefully be explored to the fullest in the HBO show. At the end of the film, it’s clear that Westworld was a terrible idea. Surely, no one would go back to Delos after such carnage …
Futureworld
Wrong again! Not only has Delos not closed, they’ve expanded! After an undetermined period of time since the robot disaster depicted in the first film, Delos has closed Westworld and added a park called Futureworld in its place. Journalists played by Peter Fonda (who sleepwalks his way through the whole movie like he just ate an edible an hour before cameras rolled) and Blythe Danner are invited to Delos to see the new park and report back about how safe it is. Except, Fonda has been tipped off that not all is as it seems at Delos, so he spends the runtime of the film sneaking around the park, hoping to uncover some dastardly plot.
“Once you make it with a robot chick, you don’t want nothin’ else,” a drunk park guest says to Danner’s character on the airplane to Delos. Again, the most fascinating aspect of artificial intelligence in the 1970s apparently was whether or not we could do it with them.
The Futureworld theme park looks incredibly lame and it has no effect on the plot whatsoever. I guess it’s just a cool-sounding title, so the producers went with it. There’s a simulator that imagines what it would be like to ski on Mars, holographic chess, and a life-sized game of Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots. All of this takes place in one room. It’s not so much a world as it is Elon Musk’s creepy bachelor pad.
There’s a ton of jokes at the expense of newspapers in Futureworld. Fonda’s character is a newspaper reporter, but Danner plays a TV host, so she spends quite a bit of time putting down his archaic profession. “Why don’t you wise up mister? Nobody reads,” she says. I guess this does take place in the future.
In order to prevent further tragedies, Delos has replaced all of its workers with robots. So, robots in the park and robots running the park. If the initial problem was robots, is the solution really more robots? This all starts to make more sense when it is discovered that Delos has been co-opted by robots who are hoping to replace all world leaders with robo-clones because they think humanity will eventually destroy the planet. Once I hear this, I immediately side with the robots.
This is a terribly boring film that’s only worth watching if you’re as high as Peter Fonda was when he made it. The best/worst scene comes around the two-thirds mark, as Blythe Danner is placed into a dream state while they clone her to ensure positive coverage for Delos. Her dream has to be seen to be believed. She has tied herself up with a red rope and is pursued by, you guessed it, Yul Brynner as the Gunslinger, who lassoes her with the red rope and eventually has sex with her. Wait, you didn’t guess? You’re saying this makes no sense? You’re wondering how something so obviously stupid could make it into a Hollywood movie? Huh.
Beyond Westworld
If you have seen the great British sitcom Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, you’ve seen Beyond Westworld – a stupendously dull early 80s cheesefest with wooden acting, clunky dialogue and a noticeable lack of action. The show ignores Futureworld completely and takes place immediately after the original film. It recasts the Gunslinger for a throwaway action scene in the pilot. It retcons the Delos corporation into benevolent machine overlords who merely want to give humankind as much dude-on-robot sex as it can handle. In the show, the reason why the robots malfunctioned is because a scientist who supervised the creation of the Delos machines is upset that they’re being used as “toys”, so he made them rebel. He’s also placed hundreds of androids across the world to further his aims of global domination. Only some generic hero can stop him.
Since it was on broadcast TV, there’s thankfully way less obvious robo-sex talk, though the pun quotient goes up by the power of 20. “I’m very good, technically,” female Delos employee Laura Garvey says in the pilot. “I assure you, my equipment has been thoroughly checked … by naval security before we got on board,” Garvey tells a submarine officer in the third act. This character is not a robot, though she might have been revealed as such later on in the series if: A) it didn’t get canceled after three atrocious episodes; and B) she hadn’t been recast when the show went to series. In another Star Trek connection, the series was produced by Fred Freiberger, who took over for Gene Roddenberry as the showrunner in the mostly bad third season.
I may not have seen the HBO Westworld series, but even without having watched a single frame that’s not in the numerous trailers, I can say for certain that it’s better than Beyond Westworld. In fact, I’d rather watch five hours of the security camera footage of Harambe attacking that kid in the Cincinnati Zoo than Beyond Westworld. So, kudos to Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and the whole team. You’ve done the very, very possible.
