Delos is the foremost amusement park of the future (1983!). Featuring three different 'worlds', each themed on a different era of history, Delos allows those who can afford the price ticket to immerse themselves in a perfectly realistic but perfectly safe fantasy where they can become a medieval knight, attend a Roman Bacchanalia, or become an outlaw in the Wild West.
Key to Delos's success are their astonishingly lifelike androids. The only hint they aren't human is in that their hands aren't quite right, and they're fully available for all your entertainment needs. Unfortunately, they might be a little more astonishingly lifelike than intended, and the current crop of visitors at this exclusive park may find themselves facing an extremely lethal form of industrial action ...
Written and directed by Michael Crichton, whose later Jurassic Park is basically just the same story with dinosaurs instead of robots, Westworld is a simple but generally fairly engaging science fiction thriller. It's sometimes a bit clumsy in its narrative beats - in particular there is a jump scare or two that comes across more funny than frightening - but when Crichton just lets the pictures do the talking it can be quite effective. The scene of the 'slain' robots being cleaned off the nighttime streets is suitably menacing, while Yul Brynner's "Gunslinger" is all menace as he silently stalks the movie's protagonist.
A lot of pre-Star Wars 70s science fiction, whatever good elements it might have, is ponderous and pompous. Westworld isn't immune to thinking it is cleverer than it actually is, but it's sufficiently fast-paced and engaging that this isn't nearly as irksome as it might have been. Worth a look if it sounds like it's at all in your wheelhouse.
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