1973 Sci-Fi Film ‘Westworld’ Pioneered Digital Effects — and Warned Us About AI

Six scientists are hunkered down in an office. The surroundings are sleek and sterile; the mood, sober. The conversation turns to technological problems their firm is encountering. The chairman states that “there’s a clear pattern here that suggests an analogy to an infectious disease process.” A pair of colleagues dismiss the notion, but our interlocutor continues: “We aren’t dealing with ordinary machines here; these are highly complicated pieces of equipment almost as complicated as living organisms.”This conversation comes about 30 minutes into Michael Crichton’s sci-fi thriller, “Westworld” (1973), and its caution about artificial intelligence should be obvious to anyone living in the far-flung future of 2026. The Crichton picture is similarly notable for being the first popular entertainment to contain digital effects: a short passage in which we see the world through the pixelating eyes of a robot was, from all reports, the bane of the film’s special effects crew. Now it stands as a footnote to how the movies, and much else besides, have changed.Arrow Video has just released a limited edition Blu-ray of “Westworld,” a picture that’s being touted as “a high-tech nightmare that never loses its bite.” The package contains extras that will thrill the film nerds amongst us, including postcards of the movie’s stars and newly commissioned artwork by fantasy illustrator Arik Roper. Items of more scholarly interest include recent interviews with actors James Brolin and Richard Benjamin, and an essay by film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas entitled “Sex, Death and Androids.”Retrospect shows that “Westworld” was a dry run for the “Jurassic Park” franchise — Crichton, you’ll remember, wrote the novel on which the dinosaurs-run-amok series was based. The author clearly had a thing about the entertainment industrial complex. An “amusement park,” he intoned, “is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate.” Irony-seekers won’t have to dig deeply when pondering just how much Crichton profited from the “jail” he sought to vilify, satirize, and expose.The hubris of humankind is the age-old gist of “Westworld.” A plane of wealthy tourists are traveling to Delos, an island containing a set of mechanized amusement parks in which patrons can experience life as it was lived in, take your pick, ancient Rome, medieval Europe or 19th-century America. Our heroes, Peter Martin (Mr. Benjamin in tenderfoot mode) and John Blane (Mr. Brolin channelling Clint Eastwood), opt for the latter. Before you can say that nothing can go wrong, everything goes wrong — not least, an out-of-control robot that looks suspiciously like Yul Brynner in “The Magnificent Seven.”More than a half-century after the fact, Crichton ‘s movie retains its pulp appeal, not least because it is genuinely funny — Mr. Benjamin has always been a deft hand at comedy — and the cast gives it their all, thereby giving legitimacy to the hokum on hand. Woe betide those who are familiar with “Westworld” from its 2016 reboot as an HBO television series. Notwithstanding its pedigree — what with Hollywood player J.J. Abrams as producer and a cast that included Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright and Anthony Hopkins — the show proved a slog. Draping portent on one’s source material may be a sincere form of flattery, but it’s not half as entertaining as sensationalism rendered without apology. Crichton’s pot-boiler was a good night out at the movies. Should you want to travel to a future that is still being writ large, ”Westworld” is a diverting pitstop.

1973 Sci-Fi Film ‘Westworld’ Pioneered Digital Effects — and Warned Us About AI

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