I was all prepared to make 15 different jokes about the similarities between Westworld and 'Jurassic Park' before stupidly noticing that they're both written by the same guy. So that's half of my fun taken away.
Westworld is the story of a futuristic theme park where you can live in the time of; The American Midwest (a hundred years ago), Hollywood's perception of the Medieval ages back in Europe or ancient Rome. Which is so underutilised in this film that it might as well not be there.
I was surprised by just how simplistic this movie was. I was expecting a secondary story involving a robot learning compassion or some weird conspiracy where somebody tries to destroy the park. Even just a technical glitch caused by internal incompetence.
But it's implied that the robots are just turning glitchy because of bureaucracy involving computer programming from other robots.
The movie doesn't linger on the problems either. Most of the film is just the people experiencing the park and going through the motions of living out some strange fantasy in one of the three perceived landscapes.
And it's only in the last 20 minutes when one of the robots, who have been a central figure in the events of our to ''supposedly'' main characters start hunting them down. the whole thing gave me a Proto Terminator vibe. And I'm wondering if any of that film had influenced from this one.
The film reminded me of one of those offbeat episodes of Star Trek where the budget went down and they had to resort to digging around Paramount wardrobes for random costumes the stick in their show.
It's a lack luster cowboy film encased in a shell of interesting science fiction.
I feel the same way about this movie as I do Blade Runner. I don't think the actual movie is all that interesting, but it's so inspirational to everything that's come afterwards that it would be almost impolite not to give it its due. Especially considering this was a semi unique premise for the time. And it's not a bad movie by any means. It's got far better pacing them Blade Runner.
It does build up an interesting world. I would have almost like to have seen a secondary movie based on this only exploring the parks creation or maybe the corporate side of it. Essentially a lot of the stuff that went into the Jurassic Park film later on.
I feel like any suggestion I have to try and make this movie better might end up ruining it in the long run.
I think an extra half an hour would have been great to flesh out some of the characters, dive into the mechanics of the robots and the world in general. Maybe give a little bit more time to how everything works.
But at the same time might have just stagnated the whole thing and turned a perfectly decent science fiction movie into a stagnant uninteresting mess. So now we're back to square one.
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