In 1973's science fiction thriller Westworld, the robot 'staff' of the titular theme park ran amok, stalking and killing dozens of guests. Somehow, the company that owned the park, Delos, survived this disaster and have been allowed to re-build. The new park, they promise, is entirely safe and the (somewhat salacious) attractions it offers are even better, including the brand new 'Future World', in which guests can experience what it is like to go into space ... and then have sex with the robots they meet there.
Not everyone is convinced that Delos's new park is as safe as they claim, including journalists Chuck Browning and Tracy Ballard. Delos invites them to tour the park, along with several important political figures, so that they can see first hand that everything is above board and that their concerns are entirely unfounded.
Of course, there wouldn't be much of a movie if that was true ...
Westworld was a big success for MGM, so you might have thought a sequel was a slam dunk decision. And indeed, MGM did immediately request a treatment for a follow-up film. But then they decided to make only one science fiction film in 1976, and they gave the nod to Logan's Run.
The script got shopped around, but other studios were reluctant to take it on the not unreasonable logic that "MGM would have done it if it was any good". It ended up at American International, but they probably should have followed the other studios' lead: the film was critically panned and not a commercial success.
Clearly, things went awry with the film. But first, I want to acknowledge a decision I think the film-makers got right: they avoided the obvious option of just rehashing Westworld's "robots gone homicidal" concept. Instead, they aimed for a less immediate and visceral menace in favour of an attempt at creepy eeriness. Not in itself a bad idea: this kind of horror would be explored to great effect 2 years later in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Unfortunately, while I commend the decision to do something different, I cannot commend the execution with which they did so. The attempt to create a sense of slow key, creepy menace is a failure and the actual film is merely slow and dull. Even when it finally reveals the truth behind Delos's new project, it lacks any real punch. It's a thriller without thrills.
The writing is unsatisfactory in other ways, perhaps less critical but still enough to detract from the film. Like a lot of SF, Futureworld posits extreme advances in a few specific areas of technology - robotics, cloning, AI - without considering any other possibilities. People still use manual typewriters and land lines, computers are still large installations that fill entire rooms, and so on. If you can create a robot that believably simulates human interaction, a lot of other aspects of science would necessarily have developed far more than the film suggests.
There's also a lot of problematic sexually-themed content. Not in the sense that there's any explicit sex or nudity: there isn't. But in the sense that the primary customer draw of the park is 'sex with robots'. Would cybersex tourism really be quite this openly touted?
The film also features a long and very awkward 'erotic dream' sequence that is anything but sensual, and makes the baffling decision to wedge it in between the major plot developments. The whole sequences seems to have been included mostly to justify Yul Brynner having a cameo.
Futureworld definitely gets its wires crossed.
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