I first saw Westworld many years ago, partly due to its connection to Jurassic Park—both being written by Michael Crichton, and being about futuristic theme park openings gone awry, it’s hard not to see at least some parallels, although Jurassic Park further examines the corporate greed that enables the continuation of the park. Same goes for the Gunslinger’s connection to The Terminator and Michael Myers from Halloween, an emotionless, calculating man-machine whose sole goal becomes the killing of a human guest, complete with glowing robot eyes and a Terminator-like POV of the machine (created with then-impressive early computer graphics); parallels like this are part of why I’ve always loved going back to the old pre-Star Wars classics. This was also one of the later cautionary sci-fi tales before Star Wars re-popularized fun pulpy space fantasy over the more thought-provoking science fiction in film and literature—although it’s tongue-in-cheek enough to be a nice middle ground between the high-minded and more populist sci-fi before and after. Westworld itself is an entertaining thriller that packs quite a bit into its short runtime, capped off with a phenomenal last 20 minutes. The cinematography is all around gorgeous in the Westworld sequences, capturing the fake vistas as beautifully as John Ford does the real Monument Valley, and the early electronic soundtrack has some memorable, creepy moments in the finale, The film works a bit less when we enter the medieval and Roman worlds, which are much less fleshed out—both we and Michael Crichton know that Westworld is the most appealing imaginary of these.
All three parks, a western, medieval and Roman Empire world, represent a different macho fantasy, and at any point where their robots gain the slightest bit of consciousness and reject or counteract a guest’s indulgence in that fantasy, it’s treated as a malfunction—beyond the Gunslinger’s killing spree, there are sex-bots only meant to take up sexual advances, so rejecting them will be a violation of both a patriarchal status quo and the park’s abiding by that masculine fantasy, a pointed critique on Crichton’s part. Every single fantasy also caters to a movie cliche-driven imaginary of each historical period, complete with bar fights, banquets and duels, and James Brolin doing a bad Clint Eastwood impression, catering to only the most primal, kill-and-seduce human amusements; the medieval world is the ultimate case of theme park LARPing with some truly terrible accents. Right off the bat, the Gunslinger is Yul Brynner, the ultimate cliche cowboy of Magnificent Seven, and initially conforming to all of those outlaw stereotypes, putting Westworld in direct conversation with the American western imaginary—each role can be shut on or off en masse. Underneath these vibrant cinematic imaginaries are cold, steely gray laboratories full of old-timey futurism, creating an unsettling liminal space during the chase between Peter and the Gunslinger.
I first saw Westworld many years ago, partly due to its connection to Jurassic Park—both being written by Michael Crichton, and being about futuristic theme park openings gone awry, it’s hard not to see at least some parallels, although Jurassic Park further examines the corporate greed that enables the continuation of the park. Same goes for the Gunslinger’s connection to The Terminator and Michael Myers from Halloween, an emotionless, calculating man-machine whose sole goal becomes the killing of a human guest, complete with glowing robot eyes and a Terminator-like POV of the machine (created with then-impressive early computer graphics); parallels like this are part of why I’ve always loved going back to the old pre-Star Wars classics. This was also one of the later cautionary sci-fi tales before Star Wars re-popularized fun pulpy space fantasy over the more thought-provoking science fiction in film and literature—although it’s tongue-in-cheek enough to be a nice middle ground between the high-minded and more populist sci-fi before and after. Westworld itself is an entertaining thriller that packs quite a bit into its short runtime, capped off with a phenomenal last 20 minutes. The cinematography is all around gorgeous in the Westworld sequences, capturing the fake vistas as beautifully as John Ford does the real Monument Valley, and the early electronic soundtrack has some memorable, creepy moments in the finale, The film works a bit less when we enter the medieval and Roman worlds, which are much less fleshed out—both we and Michael Crichton know that Westworld is the most appealing imaginary of these.
All three parks, a western, medieval and Roman Empire world, represent a different macho fantasy, and at any point where their robots gain the slightest bit of consciousness and reject or counteract a guest’s indulgence in that fantasy, it’s treated as a malfunction—beyond the Gunslinger’s killing spree, there are sex-bots only meant to take up sexual advances, so rejecting them will be a violation of both a patriarchal status quo and the park’s abiding by that masculine fantasy, a pointed critique on Crichton’s part. Every single fantasy also caters to a movie cliche-driven imaginary of each historical period, complete with bar fights, banquets and duels, and James Brolin doing a bad Clint Eastwood impression, catering to only the most primal, kill-and-seduce human amusements; the medieval world is the ultimate case of theme park LARPing with some truly terrible accents. Right off the bat, the Gunslinger is Yul Brynner, the ultimate cliche cowboy of Magnificent Seven, and initially conforming to all of those outlaw stereotypes, putting Westworld in direct conversation with the American western imaginary—each role can be shut on or off en masse. Underneath these vibrant cinematic imaginaries are cold, steely gray laboratories full of old-timey futurism, creating an unsettling liminal space during the chase between Peter and the Gunslinger.
