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Deliverance is the key to the Luddite pulp, expressed plainly to evoke cinema (Delos' three worlds are obvious back-lots) as palliative for the audience's violence and lust. For a thousand dollars a day, the "unique vacation experience" of interacting (i.e., fucking and killing) with state-of-the-art androids in recreations of roisterous epochs (Roman decadence, medieval times, frontier town). The Chicago businessman (Richard Benjamin) picks Westworld with his colleague (James Brolin), and the satire is foregrounded as soon as the neurotic from Goodbye, Columbus strides into the mock-saloon and finds himself facing down Yul Brynner as a replica of his own Magnificent Seven gunslinger. Robotic foes are equipped with Peckinpah's squibs and slow-mo, the wench in the dungeon and the rattlesnake in the desert are all part of the package. The new species soon has its uprising, and there's the black-hatted amusement-park ride that at last decides to not let the tourist win. "Boy, machines are the servants of men!" Wellsian prophecy fused with Invasion of the Body Snatchers for Michael Crichton's cold-eyed analysis of fantasy and breakdown, from which surely flows The Terminator. The horse sprawled on the repair table is a characteristically deadpan gag, other images state the theme: The imperial bust in the Western stream, programmers slumped lifelessly over computers, the mecha-Queen and her Black Knight frozen in their thrones. The nerd becomes action hero by default, a splash of acid impairs Brynner's digital POV and reveals the microchip underneath the familiar visage. "Can't disappoint a guest." Idea exceeds execution, though Crichton closes on a biting note with depleted customer and short-circuiting damsel amid simulacra. With Norman Bartold, Alan Oppenheimer, Dick Van Patten, Victoria Shaw, Michael Mikler, and Majel Barratt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |