Amazon.com reviews for
Westworld (1973)

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Westworld (dvd):

Amazon.com video review: Welcome to Delos, the high-tech Disneyland for adults that Michael Crichton created for Westworld, a nifty science fiction thriller from 1973 that also marked the popular novelist's feature-film directorial debut. The movie is so named because the vacationing buddies who travel to Delos (James Brolin, Richard Benjamin) choose Westworld as their destination (the other choices being Roman World and Medieval World), where they are free to indulge their movie-inspired fantasies of the Wild West. From brothel beauties to black-hatted gunslingers (like the villain played by Yul Brynner), the place is populated by perfectly humanlike robots programmed and monitored to cater to every guest's fancy. But fun turns into abject horror when the robots--particularly Brynner's badman--begin to malfunction and Delos turns into an amusement park that's anything but amusing. Westworld has moments of camp and the look of a low-budget backlot production, but two decades before Crichton revamped his idea to create Jurassic Park, this movie made the most of its interesting and exciting premise. --Jeff Shannon

Chrichton Gift Set: Coma & Westworld & Great Train (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: This boxed set features three films that share a singular distinction: Not only were they written by bestseller-factory Michael Crichton (with two of three based on his novels)--they were directed by Crichton as well. Coma stars Michael Douglas and Genevieve Bujold in a thriller about doctors who discover that patients are being killed at a major hospital so that their organs can be harvested for transplants. The Great Train Robbery stars Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland in an exciting and stylish film (based on an actual incident) about an attempt to steal a huge shipment of gold from a moving train in mid-19th-century England. Westworld is a futuristic thriller about an adult vacation center, where grownups can live out their fantasies by being cowboys and battling gun-slinging robots (who are programmed to lose). But the robots (led by Yul Brynner in his Magnificent Seven mufti) go haywire and start killing the customers. --Marshall Fine

Westworld (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: Welcome to Delos, the high-tech Disneyland for adults that Michael Crichton created for Westworld, a nifty science fiction thriller from 1973 that also marked the popular novelist's feature-film directorial debut. The movie is so named because the vacationing buddies who travel to Delos (James Brolin, Richard Benjamin) choose Westworld as their destination (the other choices being Roman World and Medieval World), where they are free to indulge their movie-inspired fantasies of the Wild West. From brothel beauties to black-hatted gunslingers (like the villain played by Yul Brynner), the place is populated by perfectly humanlike robots programmed and monitored to cater to every guest's fancy. But fun turns into abject horror when the robots--particularly Brynner's badman--begin to malfunction and Delos turns into an amusement park that's anything but amusing. Westworld has moments of camp and the look of a low-budget backlot production, but two decades before Crichton revamped his idea to create Jurassic Park, this movie made the most of its interesting and exciting premise. --Jeff Shannon