Westworld 4K UHD

While he’s better known as one of the most popular novelists of the past two decades, the late Michael Crichton was a small entertainment industry unto himself. His accomplishments include literary successes like The Andromeda Strain and Congo, director of the hit mid-70s medical thriller Coma, and the producer behind TV’s longtime juggernaut ER. But it’s Jurassic Park that bestowed upon him the same sort of immortality as his genetically-cloned dinosaur creations. As all-encompassing as the book and film became to worldwide popular culture, it was really just a second draft of one of Crichton’s earlier ideas, which he also directed in 1973: Westworld.

Delos is the amusement park of the future. Visitors, paying $1000 per night, arrive via hovercraft and are shuttled off to the world of their choice - Medieval World, Roman World or West World – to enjoy a completely authentic experience. This is made possible through high-tech robots indistinguishable from actual human beings except for small flaws on the palms of their hand – and a menacingly metallic sparkle in their eyes.

Two buddies (James Brolin and Richard Benjamin) are having the time of their lives in West World – drinking, whoring and killing with no moral or legal consequences. These are robots after all. But after their third encounter with a black clad gunslinger (Yul Brynner), things go horribly wrong. A computer virus has all the robots on the rampage and out for blood. Now their western adventure turns into a fight for survival.

The idea is so full of holes you could use it for target practice. Crichton would plug many of them in Jurassic Park, using science as a crutch to explain the impossible as only slightly improbable. Westworld doesn’t bother. We cut between a group of scientists in a backroom debating the technical challenges while outside the guests gleefully engage in non-stop carnage and debauchery. It’s a satirical set-up with a dangerous pay-off in the form of Yul Brynner’s unstoppable robotic gunslinger.

Modeled after his famous character of Chris from The Magnificent Seven, Brynner is simply terrifying. Schwarzenegger’s Terminator performance, as good as it is, seems like nothing but a next generation copy. Crichton makes the most of our familiarity with Western clichés - bar fights, bank robberies and bordellos – to get us to let down our guard, and then releases Brynner onto the screen. What could have been a sad, desperate role for an aging and irrelevant actor became a superlative swan song.

Westworld doesn’t have much going for it besides Brynner. It’s slow, clumsy and Crichton’s simplistic direction threatens to defuse much of the tension he hopes to create. But where Spielberg’s film was simply escapism on a gloriously massive scale, Westworld brings up some uncomfortable questions about violence and a selfish, disposable society with no idea of the consequences.

Languishing for years on a Blu-ray that included nothing more than the the cool pilot episode of the quickly cancelled TV series Beyond Westworld, Arrow has bumped the feature up to a 4K Ultra-HD using a new restoration from the original negative. It looks worlds better but still retains that cool ‘70s shot-on-film aesthetic. And the extras have been given a serious upgrade too with new interviews from Richard Benjamin, James Brolin and producer Paul Lazarus, plus a video appreciation, collector’s booklet, artcards, poster, reversible sleeve and the aforementioned archival TV episode for good measure.