WORSTWORLD

WESTWORLD (1973)
dir: Michael Crichton

WORSTWORLD
Crazy #5, July 1974
w: Marv Wolfman
a: Bob McLeod

Before Michael Crichton created the blockbuster franchise of movies about robot dinosaurs gone rogue with Jurassic Park, he created a movie about robot humans gone rogue with Westworld. This was a science-fiction film about the Delos corporation, the business behind Romanworld, Medievalworld, and Westworld, amusement parks where you can live out your fantasies in one of these worlds that simulated life in the historical past.

The movie begins with a commercial for the Delos corporation hosted by Ed Wren (Robert Hogan) introducing the audience to these parks and interviewing exiting guests for their reactions to visiting these parks. Then we see Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin) flying in to Wetworld and being served by a stewardess who may or may not be a robot, showing how lifelike the simulations at the parks really are.

Everything at Westworld is realistic. The food, the lodgings, the bars, the prostitutes, but only with conveniences up to a hundred years old. You can have gunfights but you can tell the difference between a robot and a real person because the guns are programmed not to work on real people.

Technicians are supervising everything in all the parks to make sure everything goes smoothly and recalling any models that don't work. Things start to go wrong when Peter kills one of their models in a gunfight (Yul Brynner) and it keeps coming back.

Peter shoots the gunslinger yet again and is sent to jail for it. He's able to blast his way out and he and John flee to the desert. (Not shown: Robots start disobeying guests and rebelling in Medievalworld). Peter and John return to town and John is shot and killed by the gunslinger, who chases Peter out into the desert again. We see it from the gunslinger's point of view.

Peter escapes into the laboraratory, then to Medievalworld, where all the guests and technicians have already been killed. Peter destroys the gunslinger by throwing sulfuric acid on him and setting him on fire, which finally defeats him after several attempts to get up.

references are made to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Henry Kissinger.