What the Original 1973 Westworld Can Teach Us About HBO's New One
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BY
SCOTT MESLOW
16 hours ago
HBO's latest original drama doubles as a master class on how to do a reboot right.
If you ask the average cinephile to weigh in on everything that's wrong with Hollywood today, you won't be waiting long before you hear that dreaded word: reboot.
You can't really blame people for recoiling at the concept; over past few years, we’ve all been burned, at one point or another, by an
Amazing Spider-Man or a
RoboCop or a
Point Break or a
Ben-Hur. But a smart reboot does more than piggyback on a familiar name and concept. It
reinvents it, using modern technologies and ideas to make something old feel dazzlingly fresh.
Enter HBO's
Westworld—a total reimagining of the hazily remembered 1973 sci-fi flick of the same name, and one of the most thoughtful and complete reboots released in years. Screenwriters: If you're trying to figure out how to make an old story seem relevant again, the new
Westworld should be both your textbook and your bible.
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The core concept of the two
Westworlds is broadly the same: A futuristic theme park invites its obscenely wealthy guests to live out all their fantasies in an old west-style theme park populated by incredibly lifelike robots. In practice, these trips generally descend into hedonism, as human guests indulge their every whim by shooting or seducing any robots they want to kill or have sex with. Of course—like any good story about humans hubristically playing God—there are also ominous signs that the robots may eventually lash back at their creators/victimizers.
Today, the "theme park gone wrong" thing has long descended into cliché—due, in no small part, to
Westworld director Michael Crichton, who later revisited a similar concept in a little novel called
Jurassic Park. But in 1973,
Westworld was pretty cutting-edge, boasting references to then-obscure concepts like a "computer virus," and featuring the first-ever use of digital image processing in a feature film.
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But while you can still see the seeds of the original
Westworld in the HBO series, it's obvious that showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy spent a ton of time thinking about how to modernize, deepen, and build a whole new story on the simple, campy conceit of the 1973 original.
After a brief "commercial" that doubles as an exposition machine for the high-concept premise of the film, the original
Westworld introduces us to our protagonists: John (James Brolin), a returning customer, and Peter (Richard Benjamin), a mustachioed friend he talked into coming along. That's about as much as we ever learn about John and Peter, because Crichton is much more interested in the setting of the movie than the characters who populate it. (Even the behind-the-scenes humans who keep the park running—who play a large role in the HBO series—are relegated to substance-free bit roles, with names like "Supervisor" and "Technician.") In fact,
Westworld is just one of three interconnected theme parks at the heart of the movie; the other two, Romanworld and Medievalworld, get plenty of screen time, and go just as haywire by the movie's end.
Screenwriters: If you're trying to figure out how to make an old story seem relevant again, the new
Westworld should be both your textbook and your bible.
As the TV series begins, it seems like HBO's
Westworld will roughly approximate the narrative arc of the original film. We're quickly introduced to Teddy Flood (James Marsden), a handsome cowpoke taking the train into town. As he charms a winsome robot (Evan Rachel Wood) and rides his horse across the gorgeous landscape, it seems obvious that Teddy is there to indulge in his own personal western fantasy, standing in as a kind of John Wayne—until Teddy promptly gets shot down in a standoff with a fearsome bandit, and it becomes clear that he's just another robot, whose bland heroism has simply been programmed to make him a more appealing target for guests who want to wear the black hat.
In fact, the black-hatted villain we meet in HBO's
Westworld is yet
another clever reimagining of the original film. If you remember anything from the original movie, it's probably the Gunslinger—the robot who comes to serve as the primary antagonist, shooting John to death and stalking Peter as he desperately attempts to escape the park. As played by Yul Brynner—riffing so heavily on his character from
The Magnificent Seven that he even wears the exact same costume—the Gunslinger is the Terminator before the Terminator was the Terminator: emotionless, implacable, and virtually unstoppable. (He was also the only character to reappear in the 1976 film sequel
Futureworld—about which the less is said, the better.)
A lesser reboot would have started with the Gunslinger and built the show around him, reasoning that the most memorable element from the original is the one audiences will still want to see. But while the HBO series has its own terrifying, unnamed Gunslinger in Ed Harris, it makes one pivotal change: this time, the Gunslinger is a human guest, stalking, attacking, and slaughtering a variety of robots as he wanders around the fringes of the park.
Why would you transform the Gunslinger from a robot to a human? Because the TV series is smart enough to realize that the most interesting way to tell this story is from the perspective of the robots, not the humans. Dolores Abernathy—the robot played by Evan Rachel Wood, and the closest thing the TV series has to a protagonist—lives in a bleak loop, awakening every morning with a clean memory, to live out the same basic cycle. The routine only breaks when a human guest intervenes, steering her story down a different path (and, in the premiere, down a particularly horrifying one).
This is yet another boon because of a strong choice made by the reboot: Unlike the original movie, the HBO series is deeply interested in the experiences of women. Early on in the original
Westworld, we see a commercial that winkingly implies a female guest had an orgiastic time with a bunch of male robots in Roman World. But the film itself is almost entirely populated by male characters, and basically disinterested in the inner lives of the few women who
do appear; when Peter and John spend the night with a couple of buxom robot prostitutes, the film spends no time exploring what Westworld must be like from their perspectives.
Some of these differences are philosophical. The movie treats its robots as props because they
are props, following preprogrammed algorithms. The Gunslinger may be terrifying, but he has no will of his own; he has simply been designed to act like a ruthless killer, and the problems only start when the safeguards fail and he actually becomes
capable of killing. The robots in the HBO series, by contrast, seem to be moving toward a kind of artificial intelligence so advanced that it's essentially indistinguishable from free will. It's a very different foundation on which to build an ostensibly similar story—and perfectly suited to the longform weekly structure of a TV series, as opposed to the closed-ended structure of a film.
We can probably make some assumptions about where the HBO series might be going based on the ending to the film, which plays out much like the key quote from
Westworld's premiere episode: "These violent delights have violent ends." In the film, Peter slips behind the façade of the theme park and into the labs where the robots are created, eventually managing to subdue the Gunslinger once and for all. But whenever the bloodshed starts on the TV series, it probably won't end with a sole surviving human surrounded by broken robots. It'll be a robot, nearly indistinguishable from the humans that created it, surrounded by the bloody corpses of its victims.
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