Westworld turns 50 on November 21. Director Michael Crichton’s cautionary tale showed that high-concept feature films could act as a vehicle for social commentary. Westworld blended cinematic genres, taking into account the audience’s existing knowledge of well-worn narrative conventions and playfully subverting them as the fantasy turns to nightmare.
The film centres on a theme park where visitors, in this case the protagonists Peter (Richard Benjamin) and John (James Brolin), can enter a simulated fantasy world – Pompei, Medieval Europe, or the Old West. Once there, they can live out their wildest fantasies. They can even have sex with the synthetic playthings that populate the worlds.
This sinister idea went on to be explored further in later films such as The Stepford Wives (1975 & 2004), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Ex Machina (2014).
