Westworld (1973)
Yeah, that’s right. If you’re going to skip HBO’s shitty show (you should), try going back to the source material from whence it sprung. Novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton’s 1973 original (which he wrote and directed) is basically Jurassic Park (which he also wrote) but with robots. The premise is simple: In the future, a theme park exists where you can live out your wildest fantasies in separate “worlds” populated by robots. There’s Romanworld (ancient Rome), Medievalworld (European Middle Ages), and, yes, Westworld, where you can play marauding cowboy. It’s all fun and games until something goes wrong (hint: the robots go haywire and start killing everybody). It’s a simple, effective concept, that is nonetheless fully realized, thought-provoking, deeply creepy, and better than its successor.
