Movie Review: West World

After Nosferatu I'd thought I was movied out but I had room for one more film for the night. The same friend that watched Egger's new film watched West World with me. Delos: the park where nothing can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong.

Nothing can-can-c...

Written and directed by the great but often forgotten Michael Crichton, the film has visitors experiencing the wild West, ancient Rome or the Medieval ages all inhabited by robots who will do anything you want. Of course something goes wrong but I love Crichton's style of hinting at problems and showing rather than telling. There's a line where the scientist state that they are unsure how the robots work. A statement that leads to their doom. There's also the scene where the park workers gather the robots each night to repair the damage done by customers. It's this subtle input that makes the movie great. The film really goes all in to make you feel like you're watching a park from the future. But at no point does anyone say the moral behind the story which allows each viewer to get their own interpretation. It's already a brilliant concept that's pushed further in the TV series and in Crichton's Jurassic Park movies and books. 

I love this concept of mankind's hubris in their own design and how we never truly understand how things work. We fall on our own sword sometimes and it's not the robot or dinosaur that kills us but our own foolishness. That might be a fault in the film because the dialogue is a bit lacking. It doesn't seem to be really telling me anything deep which is different than how other writers write today. The dialogue, to me, mainly told me that the customers were having a good time and maybe that's the point. It's to draw your attention away from a preaching message that's thrown in your face. Maybe it let's you absorb the message as you go. And I think that type of writing is something special.