Futureworld (1976)
Matt’s Review — X X /5
For those of you who are fans of HBO’s 2016 television show Westworld, this 1976 sequel to Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld will seem devoid of heady themes and meaningful dialogue. In that way Futureworld has more in common with Season 2 of HBO’s Westworld. At it’s core Futureworld, directed by Richard T. Heffron and written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck, deals with a thematic mainstay of 1970s film (and every decade since), that of corporate corruption and abuse of power.
The plot of Westworld was relatively simple. In 1983, a mega corporation has opened a Disneyworld-esque resort where the world’s rich and powerful can pay to have their way with theme parks filled with advanced robots. The robots begin to malfunction and kill park guests.
In contrast, Futureworld is about a corporation that opens a Disneyworld-esque resort in 1985 where the world’s rich and powerful can pay to have their way with theme parks filled with advanced robots. The robots begin to malfunction and kill the park guests. Wait. Something went wrong there. Must be a glitch in my programming. While that is the film boiled down for eight hours until it tastes like rubber, there are differences.
Our protagonist is a newspaperman named Chuck Browning, played by Peter Fonda at his roguish not-quite-best. The intrigue such as it is gets rolling when Chuck receives a call to meet a source named Frenchie, who promises him a story. Chuck shows up to meet him and is somewhat surprised when Frenchie immediately drops dead, apparently shot or stabbed in the lower back. The poor noble man’s sweaty last word is, “Delos.”
Delos is re-opening, this time “new and improved,” claiming to have eliminated whatever programming glitch led to the murderous robot rampage, and expanded the park to include a number of different sub-theme parks. In fact, obvious corporate villain Duffy explains in a board meeting, “The new Delos is not only the most fantastic resort in human history, it is also failsafe.” Anyone familiar with Michael Crichton’s work will immediately feel their spider-sense tingling after hearing those words. Even though Crichton had nothing to do with this sequel, it borrows his love for stories that prove those precise kind of statement false. An obvious example is Jurassic Park, about a failsafe theme park filled with genetically cloned dinosaurs brought back from extinction. The dinosaurs run amok and start killing the guests. Wait. Uh, must be a glitch in my programming. Hollywood can’t have made the same movie three times, right? And made 5 sequels to Jurassic Park all of which have the same plot?
Rebooting _________________
Chuck meets his Foxy-Tv-Reporter-Lady co-protagonist Tracy Ballard, played by Blythe Danner (not to be confused with Sybil Danning), and they head off to Delos on what is supposed to be an all inclusive public relations trip. Our heroes plan to expose whatever misdeeds are going on at the park, even though aside from dead Frenchie situation, they have no real reason to think anything untoward is going on.
From Westworld we knew that Medievalworld and Romanworld existed, but this new park incarnation includes Futureworld and Eastworld. Despite contributing its name to the title of the film, we see very little of Futureworld aside from a mockup launch platform and a futuristic arcade where guests can control life-sized robot boxers in real combat and play holographic chess. Eastworld’s only appearance is a few Cybernetic Samurai Henchmen that later attack our heroes. We spend most of our time in the guts of Delos, where the guests aren’t allowed. These guts I can only imagine were filmed at Burbank’s water treatment plant because most of the movie is Fonda and Danner running through tight, steam-filled mechanical corridors, ducking under pipes and climbing ladders.
This is where the movie fell apart for me. It might have been budgetary restraints. It might have been lack of imagination or time. But whatever fun the setting of Delos might have been evaporates in the first half of the movie in sparse scenes that take place in the theme parks themselves. It’s replaced by what is intended to be fast paced intrigue and action but in reality is repetitive and somewhat boring scenes of Fonda and Danner constantly trying to escape some behind the scenes area and moving on to another.
Our only respite is the introduction of maintenance technician Harry, played by Stuart Margolin, whose performance has more passion and emotional realism than the rest of the movie combined. Harry turns out to be the last human technician at Delos. The rest have been replaced by robots because, according to Bad Corporate Guy, human error contributed to the Westworld disaster. This reveal is obviously intended to be shocking but falls flat because of its ham-handed delivery. In any case, Harry is a fun character, and he has some interesting emotional moments with the robot buddy he lives with. This is the closest we get to anything exploring robot consciousness or human-robot interaction.
In any case and to make a long story short, Fonda and Danner find out that world leaders and wealthy, influential guests are being kidnapped in their sleep and cloned before being executed and replaced so Delos can control the world. Bad Corporate Guy explains while holding Fonda at lazer-pistol gunpoint in an Austin Powers moment of exposition, “The human being is a very unstable, irrational, violent animal. All our probability studies tell us that left alone you will destroy most of this planet by the end of the decade. We at Delos have determined to see that this doesn’t happen.” Yes, that’s right. Bad corporate guy is a robot too. Everyone but Harry is a robot at Delos, and the robots are taking over the world. This is an interesting premise, of course, but again it falls flat because of the hack delivery. The moment has no real impact because Fonda seems like he couldn’t care less and was busy pretending to be mildly worried about a plastic lazer gun.
The climax of Futureworld, which no doubt was faked, is an action scene where Fonda and Danner’s clones hunt them through Pipeworld and, since they are identical, either kill the real Fonda and Danner or are killed by the real Fonda and Danner. We don’t know until the two get on a tram to leave the park and Fonda turns around and flips the bird to Bad Corporate Science Guy. The End. It might have been a tense ending but by that point I really didn’t care what happened.
I know some people really like this movie, but for me it had all the hallmarks of a bad Hollywood sequel. Surprise twist—those aren’t new in the last decade. The acting was uninterested and bland, the plot was thin and poorly developed, the aspects of the movie that could have been interesting (like the various theme parks) were cut short most likely due to budget restraints, and it took an original idea and dressed it up in an ugly prom dress and sent it back out on stage to do an encore.
On the bright side, this movie shows off some Long Seventies trends we’ve talked about in various episodes. Futureworld is weak futurism, but it is futurism. The idea that machines would be better able to run the world is Futurism 101. Richard Brautigan’s late-sixties poem aptly named “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace” is about precisely that. In it Brautigan said:
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
In Bad Corporate Guy’s Bond-villain speech we also hear an echo of the eco-crisis debate, where many asserted that humanity would destroy the earth, or at least render it uninhabitable for humans, within a decade unless some kind of drastic change was made. The idea of managing the planet’s ecology like a massive theme park was popular at the time, not only with its supporters, but by those who saw it as a dystopian future. I think Futureworld is a milquetoast attempt to portray this possible future as a dystopia, or at least as a poor outcome managed by cybernetic corporate bureaucrats that see humans as animals that need to be put in a zoo and kept entertained with panem et circenses.
We’ll end this review on that bit of pretentious latin. This film is worth checking out if you want something playing in the background, but it falls short in too many areas to be considered “one of the good ones” from the Long Seventies.
