Westworld

Westworld unfolds like an airport novella. We get a middle-aged hero upfront and struggling, along with a rhythm and pace that's closer to a sixty minute science-fiction serial than it is cinema. Writer-director Michael Crichton spends an extended amount of time unpacking his (great) idea - in the near future, themed resorts revolve around simulated murder and sexual debauchery. Crichton cycles through various permutations, detailing the central holiday destination from a variety of angles. Eventually, a simple gunslinger set-up takes centre stage in which Yul Brynner's black hat is vanquished by Richard Benjamin's nebbish attorney. Naturally, this is followed by a visit to the local bordello for the victors.

When Brynner reappears, apparently programmed for vengeance, it briefly feels as if the film is suddenly about to kick up several gears, delivering on the computer virus strand we've not long heard a few nervous scientists float behind the scenes. Westworld coils and withholds though. Brynner's 'droid is easily blown through a window, allowing Benjamin and his pal to indulge in the prison breaks and bar brawls that break up their robotic sex tourism. It's a dither, but one that permits an idea of safety to take hold. When the power fantasy shatters a little later in the piece it now registers as alarming rather than routine. Haven't we already sailed past this destination point? 

With Brynner now hot on his heels, Benjamin stumbles through the various other worlds that make up this futuristic theme park. One has been designed to resemble ancient Rome, the other the clean, Technicolor middle-ages seen in the swashbuckling cinema of these character's youth. We had previously gotten a taste of this Medieval World through a subplot in which a sweaty fifty-something tried to stick his dick in anything that moved, but Crichton had largely held back on Roman World. Our main glimpse of this pre-Christian retreat arriving during the initial malfunction when the robotic slaves threw off their shackles, like Spartacus, and murdered the middle-class holidaymakers posing as their masters.

By the time Benjamin shows up, both areas are strewn with dead bodies and deactivated androids, a development emblematic of Westworld's overall approach to conflict. Crichton's film is stubbornly anti-action. Benjamin is never asked to battle any other, subordinate threats, and his attempts to thwart Brynner's advancing clockwork heavy are realistically imprecise. Benjamin appears genuinely scared, depressingly aware of how little of a threat he is when the Gunslinger's safety restraints are turned off. In this sense Westworld is exciting for what it doesn't do. It's a relic from a time when films didn't need to have capable leading men. Like Steven Spielberg's Duel, Westworld posits adventure as a state of stress and psychological damage for a pampered everyman. It's not about baptising a hero then, it's about stripping the seventies version of a civilised man down to the naked, violent aggression wielded by our ancestors.