Westworld ★★★★☆
There are a lot of ways to read this movie and what it might say about the people who built, run and visit this park and what becomes of them when their machines turn on them, but there is a surprising lack of direct raising of philosophical ideas in the film. No muses on the potential interiority of the robots, on why this is happening outside of a purely mechanical level. One could read this film as asking nothing more than “Wouldn’t it be fucked if robots killed a load of people?” and just on that level it is a pretty damn enjoyable movie. The gunman makes for a good slasher villain.
I cannot stop thinking about the guns though. Our protagonist learns from his more experienced friend that the park is made safe via the a system built into the guns that detects the temperature of the target and refuses to fire at anything warm, thus keeping the human guests safe while allowing wanton violence against the lifeless, cold machines that populate the park as N.P.C.s. After learning this information they head to a brothel, turning down the opportunity to do something as everyday as taking part in a bank robbery so that they can enjoy that sweet, refreshing, room-temperature pussy and the caresses of the cold, knobbly, robot hands that the park engineers just can’t get right yet.
This idea that the park is safe because of this safety mechanism hangs over so much of the movie and makes it so sillier. Guests take part in fistfights and sword duels, trash entire buildings. Sure, the robots are meant to pull their punches but what mechanism is there to stop guests accidentally stabbing another guest, or for that matter themselves, while doing all of this?
Even charging $1,000 a day in 1970s money it’s hard to see how anyone could have thought it would be a good idea to let guests constantly shoot their expensive robots with real bullets and blow up the walls of buildings (with them inside) to simulate a fun little jailbreak and then pay teams of people to put it all back together every night. No wonder everything is falling apart and they can’t even properly maintain their control room that was built airtight for no apparent reason.
Anyway that was fun as hell.