Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin, Love at First Bite) and John Blane (James Brolin, The Amityville Horror) visit the futuristic Delos resort, which allows guests to fully experience life in medieval times, the Roman era, and the American West. Martin and Blane choose to be cowboys in Westworld, ready for a rip-roaring escape from reality. What sets Westworld apart from a family-friendly theme park like Disneyland’s Frontierland is that its employees are androids, designed to be fully indulged by the guests. The android locals won’t shoot back in a duel or resist being taken to bed. This proves useful as Martin and Blane repeatedly fire their six-shooters at The Gunslinger (Yul Brynner, The Magnificent Seven) to sharpen their showdown skills. It’s the holiday of a lifetime until something goes wrong with the park’s computer programming. Suddenly, the androids are no longer subservient to the humans. Can the duo survive the Old West when fantasy becomes reality and the Gunslinger finally draws on them?
What We Thought:
Decades before it became a TV show, Michael Crichton’s Westworld was a 1970s Western/Sci-Fi hybrid with a fantastic bad guy in Yul Brynner. If you are familiar with the TV series and haven’t seen the film, it’s very similar. I hadn’t seen the movie version in decades so it was cool catching up with it on this new 4K Arrow Video release.
Not only did Crichton write the film, he directed it and it very much feels like one of his projects. The man behind Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain liked to morph genres to bring to life quality dramas. Like the show, the movie is about a resort where for the right price, you can fulfill your wildest fantasies. You can be a knight fighting in a castle, a Roman soldier or an 1800s old west cowboy in Westworld. That’s where James Brolin and Richard Benjamin’s characters head to after we meet them on a futuristic transportation machine. Brolin has been there before, but it’s all new to Benjamin’s character. They get dressed in cowboy wardrobe, have some whiskey and meet some women. Brynner’s robot Gunslinger steps up to them and they get into a shootout. As their vacation continues Westworld starts having some glitches and soon it becomes man vs. machine for survival.
The film is definitely remembered for Brynner’s man in black robot vs. the two leads. It’s a classic story of machines taking over and other projects have done similar. The Simpsons did an episode where Itchy & Scratchy Land goes bonkers and the machines fight The Simpsons. It’s all thanks to Crichton. You can argue Jurassic Park is the same story, but with the dinosaurs replacing the robots.
What I’ve always liked about the film version of Westworld is its minimalism. It’s Crichton’s first time shooting a theatrical film and it had a short shooting schedule. The story gets right into it. The machines turn pretty quickly and because of it the movie isn’t even 90 minutes long. It never wanders away from its tightly packed story and performances. Nothing feels out of place or unnecessary which is surprising for a sci-fi film especially of the time period. The new 4K looks and sounds great and comes with commentary, brand new interviews and more. If you are a fan, this is highly recommended.
Special features include a 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible); the original restored lossless 4-channel stereo, 2.0 stereo, and 1.0 mono audio options and an optional remixed 5.1 DTS-HD MA surround audio; optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing; a brand new audio commentary; a newly filmed conversation between actor Richard Benjamin and producer/screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood); brand new video interviews with actor James Brolin and producer Paul N. Lazarus III; a brand new video appreciation; an archival behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film; the pilot episode of the television series Beyond Westworld; the theatrical trailer; image gallery; a perfect bound booklet; double-sided fold-out poster; and six postcard-sized artcards.
The Nerds Templar 