So
whatever happened to the planned remake of Westworld that
was to star Arnold Schwarzenegger? Well, it seems to have died a quiet
death along with Arnie’s acting career . . .
Think Jurassic Park - but with cowboys instead of
dinosaurs - and you will have a good idea of what
Westworld, a 1973 sci-fi thriller
written and directed by Michael Crichton, was like.
It is the near future, and people can visit an amusement
park named Westworld in which human visitors can interact with advanced
robotic gunslingers and saloon girls in a fake Western setting. The robot
gunslingers are programmed to always let the human visitors win at the
draw and we don’t even want to get into what it is hinted the sexy female
robots are required to do to keep the male visitors happy. (Just how would
that work?! The mind boggles . . .)
Anyway, seeing that this is a Michael Crichton movie (he
also wrote Jurassic Park) things quickly start
going wrong. During one gunfight a robot malfunctions and actually shoots
a visitor. One has to wonder of course about the bright spark employee who
thought that outfitting the robot gunslingers with live ammo was a good
idea – a class action suit waiting to happen if ever we saw one! Then
things start going really haywire as the movie follows two park visitors
being doggededly pursued by a robot that looks like the cowboy dressed in
black played by Yul Brunner in the classic 1960 flick, The Magnificent
Seven. (The joke is of course that Brunner himself in fact plays the
character.)
Much has been made about how the malfunctioning robot is
in fact an early template for James Cameron’s
The Terminator made more than ten years later, and with reason! The
robot hunts down our two “heroes” (they are jerks really) with cold
mechanical efficiency for most of the movie. Despite the dated tech (you
just gotta dig those huge ‘Seventies computers that fill entire rooms!),
Westworld is a brisk action thriller and it is understandable why
Warners would be interested in remaking the movie. We don’t think that it
is a good idea however . . .
|
"Jurassic Park - but with cowboy robots instead of dinosaurs!" |
Leaving aside the obvious objections (Oh God! Another
remake! Can’t they think up something original?) we can think of several
reasons why a Westworld remake is a bad idea. For starters,
Westerns are no longer as popular as they were back in 1973. Okay, the
genre was already in decline even back then, but the point is that The
Magnificent Seven was still reasonably fresh in audiences’ memories
back in the early 1970s. Next year the movie will however hit the
half-century old mark. And even if one throws out the whole Magnificent
Seven allusion – which Western heroes do the public know nowadays
except maybe for Clint Eastwood? At 78 we can just imagine him wanting to
don his Man With No Name poncho and chase after misfortunate amusement
park visitors . . .
Besides the Death of the Western, the whole
Star Trek holodeck thing is
pretty stale by now. In the age of the virtual reality worlds of
The Matrix the movie-going public will
probably think that the whole idea of a Western town inhabited by robots
is just plain, well, cheesy. Most cinemagoers will think that it’s a
Jurassic Park rip-off, even though it’s technically the other way
round. No, best would be for Hollywood to drop the whole thing (which they
seem to have done in any case) and try to come up with something new and
original.
Besides, there are about a handful of novels by the now
sadly deceased Michael Crichton that still hasn’t been filmed yet, prime
amongst them the 2002 novel Prey about a swarm of sentient nanobots
threatening a family. If that one doesn’t have “thrilling Hollywood
blockbuster” written all over it then we don’t know what does!
