A link in the article purports to go to a 1973 issues of American Cinematographer. Sadly the link is broken, the domain having closed up shop years ago.
I persisted though and found the issue of the magazine [1], FWIW. Maybe the site is sketchy? I don't know.
Since I was into Super-8 film making when I was a teen I definitely enjoyed seeing the ads for all the high end film gear and flat-bed editors from 1973 that I could only dream of.
There’s a scene early on where they explain how the guns work. It’s thermal based I think. So if the gun is pointing at something warm like a human body it won’t shoot, meaning you can shoot anyone and it will only fire if they’re not actually a human being.
I was astonished to find this was not a plot point later on.
Yeah, when I saw the film as a kid (in the theater) it was the first time I had heard of a computer virus. At the time I dismissed it as a fanciful but outrageous plot device.
The show is loosely based on the movie, and there’s no reason to think that’s how it worked in the show. In the show, it’s pretty easy to conclude that a lot of that type of stuff was controlled by an AI advanced enough to “just know the difference” between the humans and the hosts.
But it was never explained, and that’s fine because leaving stuff like that as a mystery is a big part of storytelling. Or, they wanted to avoid having a bunch of scenes with characters spewing technological gobbledygook like Star Trek.
At some point in the show William gets shot at, it hurts but it doesn't break the skin, so somehow the bullets have a variable speed controlled by computers.
There's also a short scene in the show where two humans are talking. One of them takes his knife out in an intimidating way and in a split second the closest host just takes the sharp part of the knife in his hand and put it in the table, so even melee weapons can't hurt real humans.
Honestly, a lot of what goes on with shooting, fighting, etc. just takes a certain suspension of disbelief that no guest gets killed or seriously hurt.
Seems like the easiest way is to do it the other way around. The robots (walls, whatever) have tiny explosives in them and when the gun reports its orientation and location when the trigger is pulled, it signals some local computer attached to cameras in the room to compute the path of the virtual bullet and then trigger the appropriate “explosion”. Gunshots in films work this way (without the computer, but the explosion is in the target). This can make all shots at real humans into realistic misses as well.
The show is fairly explicit that life outside the park—at least for the folks who could afford to go to Westworld—is effectively risk-free, and one of the primary reasons guests attend is to experience at least the frisson of danger.
Right, but you could still get a bit of that frisson of danger, but instead by environmental hazard or robots potentially choking or applying blunt trauma to guests.
I was born in the mid-eighties, but apparently I saw a scene from this movie before or during kindergarten, and it's haunted/intrigued me ever since. It was when they were taking the robots apart in the lab with the black floors and ceilings. I had zero context or explanation for what was going on, and yeah, it stuck with me. Glad I can finally stop thinking about this.
Westworld is an amazing little movie for another reason for me: it worked so well on the tension arc during the whole movie from the first minute to the last it just keeps on cranking it up bit by bit. Those footsteps...
It's not entirely useless - sure Peter Fonda can't act and neither can Blythe Danner but she sure is pretty to look at and does an adorable act with a pair of glasses. I mean, it's in the "so bad it's good" category of films where the original Westworld seems to take itself far too seriously considering the premise.
They're two different things from two different eras of storytelling, technology and production values. I would suggest trying to enjoy them separately, because it's really hard to compare them. It was cool to watch and look for inspiration in to the show, but at best those are homages, not threads.
very different in my opinion. The movie is very Jurassic Park, classic Crichton. The TV adaption, especially the first two seasons have a different tone. Very religious surprisingly enough and including a lot of Meso- and Native-American elements in the first two seasons. Personally I found those seasons much more interesting than the movie. The last two seasons lose most of that unique stuff.
The moral of the movie and show are very different too. Like JP the moral of the movie Westworld is that it is hubris to try to control a complex system and eventually something will (and does) go wrong. The show is much more like Blade Runner with the robots being actually intelligent and like BR the moral is that it is wrong to enslave and give false memories to intelligent beings even if they aren't human.
IIRC the movie largely shows the park as a visitor might see it, the television series shows it as an android or employee would see it and toys with viewers who may have seen the movie a little though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two in point of view, with technology malfunctions/adaptations playing major role in both, though given the runtime of the television series is much longer, it can play with a lot of different ideas about technology and identity.
The show's plot is lously based on the second movie, Futureworld, that, as in the show, takes places years after the incident at the park that got it shut down.
Also the idea of the hosts trying to run from the park disguised by real humans is taken from FW.
And there the similarities end.
The POV is quite different from the Westworld movie.
I would say that they are different like D.A.R.Y.L. and The Terminator are.
Same setup, but different settings, era, technology, storytelling and overall tone.
As a kid from the seventies, Westworld was maybe my favorite movie. It was amazing. I recorded it from TV on VHS tape at some point and would watch and re-watch it. I don't remember everything but, as a kid, I loved the movie.
Westworld the series: just like others commented... Season 1 is a masterpiece.
It was great to enjoy the "same" plot in the movie as a kid and then as an adult with the series.
The movie was creepy as hell at the time. I saw it on late-night TV as a little kid, and the Terminator-esque ending stuck with me.
The show could have taken it to a new level, and did flirt with doing so. Interesting note: At some point in the show, they go down to some sub-basement or something where old models are stored, and in the background out of focus you can see the Yul Brynner robot standing there.
But the show goes off the rails. After season 1 it's absolute shit that will make you angry for wasting hours of your life giving it a chance. I thought hey this is going to be cool if the robots escape into the real world, but the show utterly squandered that scenario.
I persisted though and found the issue of the magazine [1], FWIW. Maybe the site is sketchy? I don't know.
Since I was into Super-8 film making when I was a teen I definitely enjoyed seeing the ads for all the high end film gear and flat-bed editors from 1973 that I could only dream of.
[1] https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ac/ac197311/index.php#/p/38