Westworld.

I’m on holiday, had some time on my hands, decided to dig into that long film list of mine, here we are. I know I normally start with a long lengthy introduction normally talking about my life and something that is nothing to do with my review, but thank fully for you, not this time. Right, let’s get on with it. 

So what film did I start with? Well Westworld, duh, look at the title of the review! Was Westworld fun? Was it good? You know, I’m not entirely sure of either of those questions, because I honestly don’t know how to approach this. 

As I am on holiday you must realise I don’t have ready access to the internet, so although I may do light research around this film before this review is finalised, most of this review will be based on the viewing experience alone. 

And what did I get from the film when the credits finally rolled? The feeling that the director wanted to make a series of films revelling in an accurate depiction of the classic titans of 4 genres. The western, the fantasy, the historical drama and science fiction. However he wasn’t allowed to make these films…for some reason, so he threw them all together and stitched it up with a paper thin plot line about it all being a theme park. Of course, I made this up and I don’t know the real story behind this films conception, but that is how it felt anyway. And honestly, it really didn’t work all that well. The individual parts were great, truly glorious if not cliched moments from the genres above are featured here. Classic and old school while not feeling dated. Even survival horror and Terminator like moments are thrown in the mix towards the end and they were great as well. It is just as a whole unit, it’s just not really a very good film.

Delos is a theme park of the future…today. Guests pay a thousand dollars a day (& think this was made in 1973, think of how fucking expensive it’d be these days and it was fucking expensive back then!) you can spend time in one of three worlds, Westworld, Romanworld or Medievalworld. Seemingly from an unlimited budget from…somewhere they’ve built three accurate to life well…worlds and their themes are in the name. Guests are then given dress up and real weapons and allowed to immerse themselves in these worlds. Each world is filled with robots who play specific parts in each of the worlds. Although danger is always present, as part of the thrill but the robots can never ham humans (except maybe a few barfights here and there - yeah they never really explain why this is allowed and nothing else is but just roll with it) and the weapons are modified to not work if the person it is aimed at emits heat, which the machines don’t. And yes, they never explain how this works in melee weapons, but just roll with it. There literally are no rules, guests can have sex with sexbots, fight and kill other bots and just generally play out their fantasies in whichever world they’re staying at (& yeah I know he got thrown in jail and that makes no sense to the no rules thing but just roll with it).  

We follow guests coming to the park. And for the first hour it is basically a cliche western - only given a little exploitation flare with some gore and violence. Intersected occasionally are things about it not really being a western and it being a theme park and some short scenes of guests in the other ‘Worlds’. I honestly would have liked to see more of the other worlds, especially Romanworld which got pretty much no screen time at all…for some reason. I mean we had pretty much everything else, why not just throw some Culligula moments in amongst the barfights and robot autopsies? I’d love to see two lesbian sexbots helping out the fantasy of a hot lesbian guest. Erm... yeah anyway! Yes I know it’s called Westworld, but by including all these other things and not fleshing them out just makes it feel unfinished.  

The scientists who work on the robots drop obvious foreshadowing to the final act with lines like ‘Some of these robots were made by computers’ and ‘We don’t truly know how they work’. And yes the robots become sentient and a huge killing spree ensues, nearly everyone dies, plotthreads go nowhere, nothing is properly explained and then the movie ends. Honestly there was a general sinister feel throughout the first act, so I was expecting the not-so-obvious twist reveal to be that they weren’t fighting robots, not exactly, they were human once but had machine parts built into them to brainwash them into a function and that was how the experience was so real. Insert moral bullshit here. Look at my movie, social commentary blahblah. Looking at you, Romero (I still love you though). But nope, instead we get unexplained super robots. 

I must admit though, the amount of people who die and the general bleakness was refreshing. This film killed off nearly every human character mercilessly, when so many American movies seem to try and pussyfoot around killing an heros or goodguys unless it’s for dramatic effect or the screentime is almost done.

Now I’m not one who likes to be spoon-fed a movie, I also don’t care much for a linear narrative, hell I even love a bit of escapism. But this didn’t feel like balls of the walls crazy fun like say Kung Fu Hustle, or an intelligent little art movie like Acolytes or a crazy explosionfest like the new Star Trek movie. It felt like the team couldn’t be arsed to properly finish any of the things they put in the movie, probably in some sort of strop, so they just threw whatever they had, in whatever order they could be bothered too and left it at that. Which like I said, is a shame because individually there is some real brilliance here. I would happily recommend the movie to Western fans (silver guns and spaghetti western fans alike) because in amongst all the other shit, there’s a good cowboy movie here. 

Oh also, it deserves a mention, the robots pixellated 8 bit vision thing is absolutely hilarious mainly because it’s really rubbish. How they can have such perfect aim when everything looks like coloured blocks? It had me laughing my ass off.

So do I recommend this movie to non western fans? I can’t really recommend it, no, but if you wanted to watch it for some reason after reading this, I won’t stop you because this film does have some really good moments. It works well as an action movie if you’re into that. Plus it uses practical effects which I think are much better and much more convincing than that shitty CGI we use these days and like I said, this film is almost 40 years old. I think if more things were fleshed out, like the themepark and the tech and if the story had more direction, this’d be a truly great film, but since it isn’t, it’s more a sort of flawed gem. 

Think About It!

-Locke