Because there’s an exciting new HBO television series based on it, we decided it was time to take an in depth look at the Michael Crichton SciFi classic, Westworld! Featuring Yul Brynner, playing off his Magnificent Seven performance, this dry run for Jurassic Park features a Western-themed amusement park of the future, where guests can live out their cowboys and indians fantasies (and fantasies of a more lurid sort as well). In classic SciFi tradition, things go haywire and the cowboys run amok! It turns out that calling it a classic is probably a gross overstatement, but it’s hard not to have a little bit of fun with this whackadoo premise, and Dad and I certainly did. Topics of conversation range from Dad’s nostalgia for the Disneyland parks (which he visited as a child the year of its opening), the history of scary clowns, a lot of wistful theme park talk, the desire to live out western movie tropes, the morality of robot sex, the complete and frankly unbelievable fallacy of the science as presented in Westworld, and the likelihood of a park fully encumbered by rich schlubby fat guys. It’s a lot of having fun at the movie’s expense, which is pretty much what the movie deserves. We also spend a bit of time discussing the first few episodes of the thus-far vastly superior HBO series, and as a note, the music included in the episode is from that (it’s just way better).
After that, we spend a bit of time talking about other things we’ve watched, in this case, the Laurence Olivier version of Wuthering Heights and the Donald Sutherland Venice-based horror film Don’t Look Now (which we completely spoil, by the way. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it and skip over that part). Next time, we’ll be celebrating Halloween with the Horror-based Western, 1999’s Ravenous. More cannibalism! See you then!
Westworld stars Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, and was written and directed by Michael Crichton. Reach us online at westernswithdad.com, or by email at westernswithdad@gmail.com!
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