The end of Westworld is a great time to revisit Michael Crichton's 1973 film
From Vox, by Alissa Wilkinson
*****
The Westworld movie is a glorious mashup of genres, like the show: Western, sci-fi, thriller. This movie makes explicit what the finale hinted at: Westworld is one of three theme parks (the other two are Medieval World and Roman World) in a big amusement park called Delos. It’s set in the future, which for a film released in 1973 is 1983.
*****
The film was Crichton’s directorial debut, and he turned it into a novel later. Seventeen years after Westworld’s release, Crichton wrote another novel about an amusement park experiment gone very badly, but this time with dinosaurs.
Why do Crichton’s stories keep getting remade? Probably because they’re set in theme parks — places designed for fun, to escape the real world — but are stealthily dystopian, giving a glimpse of a future that could be prevented but probably won’t be, in which we destroy ourselves in the pursuit of leisure. In the case of both Westworld and Jurassic Park, those dystopias arrive when people are desperate to experience the past, whether it’s the Wild West or the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
In an era when nostalgia threatens to take us over through both endless reboot culture and political campaign slogans, it’s worth pausing to consider Crichton’s warning.
Read it at: http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/10/13898070/westworld-movie-hbo-michael-crichton-jurassic-park
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at how many of the original movie characters kind of show up in the new Westworld.
Bernard has a quick run-in!
