Word: westworld
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...possible, he forces gratuitous cruelty between cliches. Dogs chew rats. A prisoner escaping from Newgate slices up his hands climbing the fence. Connery later strangles this poor innocent in cold blood. The funniest gag in the movie involves a decomposing cat. Nothing new for this butcher. In Crichton's Westworld, the most satisfying fantasies are also the bloodiest--robots blown to bits; one remembers brains being sliced up, organs flung about, dead bodies on dissection tables in Coma; now, Crichton gets his kicks injecting sadism into kiddie-movies. Bleah...
Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies...
FUTUREWORLD is a sequel to Westworld, a movie that concerned a sinister amusement park called Delos. The place was staffed with robots that were controlled by a bank of computers tended by some frosty-eyed scientists in immaculate white smocks. Delos was dedicated to the fulfillment of adult fantasy: pay the hefty tab for a stay at the park and one could be a gunfighter in the Old West, say, or a knight preparing for a joust. The robots eventually rebelled, however, and hay wired the whole park...
...WESTWORLD was written by Michael Crichton, author of the novel from which The Andromeda Strain was adapted. Here, making his debut as a director, he provides mechanical film making to match his machine-tooled prose. He posits an amusement park for adults, run by computer technicians and scientists, where the customers pay plenty to live out their elaborate, generally adolescent fantasies. The hero (Richard Benjamin) dresses up as a cowboy and gets to spend a week in a replica of a Western town, where he becomes involved in saloon brawls, witnesses bank robberies, goes upstairs with the ladies who hang...
Brynner). Benjamin also gets to gun down Brynner on a couple of occasions, since Brynner, like all the residents of Westworld, is a robot. The automatons weary of the monotony and indignity of their life and rebel or, more properly, run amuck, as they are wont...