"I think they were robots..."
The immediate thing that registered when I started watching Westworld, the basis of HBO's hit tv show Westworld (2016), was that Michael Crichton wrote and directed the film. Which is pretty cool because Westworld in many ways mirrors and seems birthed out of the well of ideas that gave us Jurassic Park. However the thematic impact was not the same for me, while in Jurassic Park we have people talking about dinosaurs, a long tease at the start, learning theories of chaos and actually spending time with characters who we start relating to, Westworld opens with a marketing commercial!
The movie then puts us on a ride with two characters who are terribly boring in my opinion - one of them is less boring than the other though - as we follow them into....Westworld. But what is Westworld? Well, Westworld is part of a resort where you can give 1000$ a day (something like 7200$ today) to spend your vacation in three of the realistic man-made depictions of old times, all filled with era-authentic environments and robots playing and acting as people of those times. There's Romanworld, Medievalworld and of course, Westworld. The movie's name suggests that most of the time will be spent in the later and indeed that is so, though for some reason Crichton employed the use of some side characters that sometimes have the same depth of characterization as the main characters (which means none) to show us what's going on in one of those other resorts.
That's the general premise and this film has basically two frames of references from this point: the western world of the resort with everything that might be in a western and played out in a loud stereotypical fashion to the benefits of the guests and the other clean, office-like interiors of Delos, the company behind these resorts. All of this turns out into a fun back-and-forth of what's happening behind the scenes and what's happening down in the resorts as the machines start to behave differently and experience failures. Visually it's awesome and the shots and framing do feel really authentic to not only it's sci-fi setting but the western as well.
Okay, now... Let's talk about Yul Brynner. He was one of the reasons why I wanted to watch this film as he was one of my favorite parts of the film "The Magnificent Seven", his portrayal of the strong silent character from "Seven Samurai" was so good and he brings all of that silent strong game, albiet with a villain twist, in Westworld. He just dominates the scene as one of the robots programmed to be a gunslinger who is reset each day but remembers that he has to hunt one of the main characters. The presence of his menace starts growing more pronounced until the last 25~20 minutes of the movie which reminds me of so much of the villain Terminator in T2 years later. It's straight up without dialogue, one man running from a robot who wants to kill him. It does drag for me a little bit because I don't really care about the character, which is one of the things this movie does.
Westworld ultimately a fun, sci-fi action movie about robots looking like humans and starting to kill humans. It's not as imaginative as Jurassic Park and definitely not as iconic in it's direction but what it is is a loud, action-filled movie that can provide a little bit of imaginative sci-fi. What I really don't like here are the characters and writing, as it doesn't really have a strong narrative and it's more about Westworld the place and feel than any one character. It genuinely feels like there's half a movie missing from it because of how events progress into chaos, often at a whim. The action scenes feel unimpactful mainly because while they look fine and cool, I can't really give a shit
6.5/10
