Westworld (1973)

Michael Crichton's 1973 directorial debut arrives with a premise that has aged into prophecy and a sensibility that has not aged at all. Delos is a resort where affluent men pay a thousand dollars a day to shoot androids, bed androids, and stab androids, and the androids eventually object in the only language available to them, which is violence. The film treats this as a mechanical fault. Crichton, we are told, intended a caution about corporate greed, and the supervisors who ignore malfunction reports because the park is profitable do carry a faint whiff of that argument. It stays faint. Nobody delivers a speech about shareholder value. The satire is buried under six-shooters and a man running through a corridor, and it works better for the burial.

What the film offers on the social front is close to nothing, and it offers it without apology. The cast is uniformly white, the women are prostitutes and a serving wench, and the androids' breakdown is diagnosed as central mechanism psychosis, a phrase that belongs to a repair manual and not to any conversation about the human mind. There is no racial dynamic, no environmental subtext, no reordering of history. The Western, Medieval, and Roman worlds are theme-park simulacra, assembled for the comfort of paying customers, which is the opposite of a revisionist reading. They are the cliches Crichton deliberately shot as cliches, and he said so.

As instruction, the picture is nearly silent. It is lean genre entertainment, and Crichton himself grew irritated that audiences heard a sermon about technology where he had placed a thriller. The moral, if we insist on one, is that a business will sell you an experience and then lose control of it, which is less a thesis than a weather report. Yul Brynner walks through the whole thing like a man who has been paid and intends to leave. The film remains effective, chilly, and almost entirely innocent of contemporary conscience.