The Criterion Channel this month added a number of films as part of their spotlight on 70s science fiction. There is a pretty good representation of the pre-Star Wars genre in the selection. Worries about the population bomb with Z.P.G., environmentalism with No Blade of Grass, Corporate control before cyberpunk made it trendy with Rollerball and societal collapse with both The Ultimate Warrior and Mad Max. Sunday night I watched Michael Crichton’s Westworld, which of course served as the basis for HBO’s current series.

The set-up is straight forward, the company Delos runs three theme parks, Roman World, Medieval World, and Westworld where guests for the sum of a thousand dollars per day, just north of 5 grand in today’s money, can live out their fantasies amid a park filled with robots that are nearly indistinguishable from human. Being a Michael Crichton SF story, the technology goes wrong and the robots in the last act of the film go violent and begin killing all the guests leaving our hero Richard Benjamin being hunted by a gunslinger robot player by Yul Brynner.

With a brief running time of just 88 minuets you would think there there’s no room for exposition and yet this movie drags with scene after scene of nothing but exposition. There’s an attempt to explain how the park is safe because the guns detect human body temperature and will not fire at a living person but utterly disregards the concept of ricochets. I was surprised just how dull this movie was. I had not watched it since perhaps the 80s and truly this is an exercise in watching someone else play a game. It isn’t until very late in the movie that the threat rears its head and then there is very little but chase and escape.

There are a lot of SF films from the 70s that hold up today, but boy this is not one of them.

I had planned to start my year off with the 1980 Musical Fantasy Xanadu, a flawed film but an emotional favorite, but before I slipped the Blu-ray into the player I surfed the Criterion Channel and discovered a mid 70s SF film I had not only not seen but had never heard of, The Ultimate Warrior.

The Ultimate Warrior from 1975 and set it the far distant future of 2012 is about competing bands of survivalists in a world that had been devastated by viral plagues. The Plague apparently killed off an enormous number of people as New York City is desolate and deserted, and destroyed the several species of plants, ending cultivated farming. It is suggested in the movie that some form of economic collapse occurred shortly before the plagues swept across the earth as we are told that 1981 was the last year automobiles were produced and the plagues came later. The film is light on explaining the backstory giving the audience just enough to feel that it is a world with history that has been thought out and not simply bludgeoned with that information.

Baron, played by the unequaled Max Von Sydow, leads the ‘good’ commune/compound of survivors. Their numbers have been dwindling and the scavenged food is beginning to run out. A rival compound led by Carrot, William Smith, survives through force and theft and threatens the survival of Baron’s community. Into this mix comes the mysterious Carson, Yul Brynner. Carlson is a hired warrior and Baron manages to in his services. In Baron’s commune is Cal, it is never explained if Cal is a farmer or a botanist, but either way he had cross bred another of plants to produce food bearing crops that are immune to the plagues. Knowing that the decaying city is no place to reestablish cultivated farming, Baron has hopes of using Carson’s tremendous gifts as a warrior to get Cal, Baron’s Daughter Melinda, and the precious seeds, out of New York to someplace suitable, but Carrot’s murderous goons growing stronger, time is running out.

Directed and written by Robert Clouse, The Ultimate Warrior, capture the mood of mid-70s cinematic science fiction, dark, cynical, and if there are ‘happy endings’ the price if terribly high. This atmosphere dominated 70s cinema and culture until the release of 1977s Star Wars, when light escapist fare displaced the dark dreary movies with adventure of Campbellian heroes.

Produced on a modest budget the film still manages to portray a dying world and a dead culture. Baron is striving to do what is best but is not immune from mistakes with terrible consequences. Carrot and his gang are not characterized at all, but are presented as simply violent, greedy, a force of the world out to destroy and then be destroyed. There is never any reveal for Carson’s extraordinary skills. He is not presented as a product of science or breeding, and it is never even hinted as having a particularly interesting backstory, or any backstory at all. He simply arrives and upsets the delicate balance with his presences.

The Ultimate Warrior was an enjoyable movie and for those who did not live through the decade of malaise it could be instructive to see the tone that so many did experience in nearly every aspect of the culture.