Western style
Jul. 10th, 2011 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaniIt seems that I cannot escape the western genre even when I watch science fiction!
Tonight ARTE showed Westworld, a 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, many years before Jurassic Park.
It's a curiosity, really. It's about an amusement park based on high technology (sophisticated robots looking exactly like human beings, horses, snakes, etc) in which guests can have a unique holiday in three themed worlds: the Westworld (The American Old West), the Medieaval World and the Roman World. Most fo the film focuses on the Westworld where the main two guests are played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin (and it's striking to see how much Josh Brolin looks like his father!), and in which they have fun shooting human-looking robots, shagging android-whores, fighting in saloon brawl, basically doing all the Western-like stuff. Yul Brynner plays a gunslinger, the guests' nemesis, whom they kill twice because they are guests so they must win the duels he causes.
But bugs happen, a sort of infection spreads and the machines go rogue one by one, beginning to have a will of their own and to believe in their characters while deviating from the script. The park then becomes hell to its guests as the technicians lose control. Slaughter ensues in the three worlds and Yul Brynner's character, who is no longer restrained by his program, turns into a deadly robotic hunter prefiguring Schwarznegger's Terminator!
Tonight ARTE showed Westworld, a 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, many years before Jurassic Park.
It's a curiosity, really. It's about an amusement park based on high technology (sophisticated robots looking exactly like human beings, horses, snakes, etc) in which guests can have a unique holiday in three themed worlds: the Westworld (The American Old West), the Medieaval World and the Roman World. Most fo the film focuses on the Westworld where the main two guests are played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin (and it's striking to see how much Josh Brolin looks like his father!), and in which they have fun shooting human-looking robots, shagging android-whores, fighting in saloon brawl, basically doing all the Western-like stuff. Yul Brynner plays a gunslinger, the guests' nemesis, whom they kill twice because they are guests so they must win the duels he causes.
But bugs happen, a sort of infection spreads and the machines go rogue one by one, beginning to have a will of their own and to believe in their characters while deviating from the script. The park then becomes hell to its guests as the technicians lose control. Slaughter ensues in the three worlds and Yul Brynner's character, who is no longer restrained by his program, turns into a deadly robotic hunter prefiguring Schwarznegger's Terminator!