Westworld
You only think you've seen this movie.

Westworld once existed in an age of innocence, an age in which the film's vision of an amusement park run amok with guests-turned-prey seemed fresh and novel. An age in which the casual viewer could enjoy it without the now-inevitable conclusion:

"Dude ... This is just like Jurassic Park. Only with robots."

The casual viewer might be reminded that, technically, those are androids, dude, not robots, but the damage has been done. For, now, one cannot watch 1973's Westworld, the film written and directed by Michael Crichton about a theme park overrun by killer androids, without comparing most every facet to 1993's Jurassic Park, also written by Crichton. Replace the androids with dinosaurs, keep the technical difficulties, questionable science, and lots of screaming, and presto! It's the same movie.

In the earlier film, Richard Benjamin's Peter and James Brolin's John are businessmen headed for a vacation adventure at the titular park, one of three new resort attractions that also include Roman World and Medieval World. These attractions, which cost $1,000 a day, are billed as "the vacation of the future... today." Guests enter their choice of setting wearing appropriate costumes and learning customs to interact as if they were truly part of, in this case, the Old West.

In a moment of extreme, skull-pounding foreshadowing, John and Peter learn early on the difficulty of telling the other guests from the ultra-realistic androids that fill out the population. Amusingly, as John explains to Peter, "they haven't perfected the hands yet," so we get numerous shots of rubbery-looking fingers on otherwise human androids, a plot device that has the same head-scratching pointlessness as shapeshifter Odo's insistence that he never learned how to make faces correctly on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Yul Brynner, in one of his most viscerally pleasing roles, plays an android, the Gunslinger who takes an instant dislike to Peter and provides the movie's velociraptor-chase ending.

See, it's impossible not to make the comparison. Because everything in this park goes horribly, horribly wrong, and Peter and John transform from cheerful guests to terrified prey in the amount of time it takes Neuman from Seinfeld to shut down the power grid and steal the dinosaur embryos -- wait, I mean, in the time it takes the androids to short out systemwide and start killing people.

You get the idea.

Despite the obvious similarities, Westworld is its own film and is utterly delightful. Instead of Sir Richard Attenborough's tour of the dinosaur-breeding facilities, we get the orientation to the procedures of Westworld, funny little scenes of the guests trying on period clothing and taking delight in playing with old six-shooters. Instead of Laura Dern sprinting gleefully across a field to stick her arm in triceratops poop, we get Norman Bartold adjusting to his role as stud knight in Medieval World and looking about as pleased with himself as Mel Brooks in History of the World, Part I ("It's good to be the king!").

And no matter how scary the velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rex are in Jurassic Park, nothing will ever beat the pure, enjoyable, scary-yet-campy visual of Brynner, obsessed with insane android vengeance, stalking across the screen again and again during the all-too-brief climactic chase. It's kind of like... well, it's a lot like The Terminator. And Terminator 2.

And there's the whole 1994 Simpsons episode that spoofs Westworld, in which the Simpsons family is chased by crazed androids at Itchy & Scratchy Land. Hmmm ... almost forgot about that one.

So, unless you've sworn off popular culture for two decades, you've seen this movie in one form or another. There was even a sequel and a spinoff TV series. But, trust me, you haven't really seen it until you've seen the original. And if it was good enough to spawn a Simpsons episode and Jurassic Park (the third-highest-grossing film worldwide, according to the Internet Movie Database), then we owe Westworld the respect and admiration that it enjoyed during its brief golden era as an incomparable science fiction film.

DROOL FACTOR: Remake this film with Anthony Stewart Head as Richard Benjamin's hero-geek character, and we're in business. As it is, though, Benjamin's the clichéd pencil-necked nerd, and I'm not convinced of James Brolin's sexiness. Now, Yul Brynner, on the other hand ...

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: Westworld features a high body count, but there's little real gore. Oh, and you know how, in Terminator and Terminator 2, Arnold keeps getting more and more torn up as the movie goes on? That pretty much happens to Brynner's cowboy, but since he doesn't bleed, it's not gross: it's cool!

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: This is a pre-Princess Leia science fiction movie, which means we'll find one of two things: hot-babe women in danger or no women at all. Westworld takes the second option; the only women featured are not even secondary characters; more like tertiary. Even Majel Barrett -- yes, her -- has only a few lines.

-- Jennifer Rose Hale

Westworld is currently available on video and DVD.

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