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.