Futureworld (1976)...A Bit of a Slog.
Once upon a time, the guy who wrote Jurassic Park wrote a movie called Westworld (on the same basic premise as Jurassic Park, except that instead of dinosaurs ruining a dinosaur theme park, it's cowboy robots ruining a cowboy robot theme park. This story was written long before Jurassic Park -- so, yes, theme parks breaking down was apparently a favorite topic of his).
And then, three years later, they made this movie without that guy's involvement, but starring Henry Fonda's son and Gwyneth Paltrow's mom. And thus, Futureworld was born.
"Or are THEM you YOU you you YOU?"The Premise: It's the 1970's version of the future. It's been a couple years since the "public relations disaster" that was the opening of Westworld (you know, when all those robots killed all those people). Well, they've rebuilt the entire park with fail safes and several different themes -- a "spa" world, a "medieval" world, an "ancient rome" world, and a "future" world. Hard-nosed reporter Peter Fonda, and (presumably soft-nosed) reporter Blythe Danner go to Futureworld to check it out -- and Peter Fonda immediately suspects something is wrong. He gets even more suspicious when it turns out that robots are actually the ones running the park now -- in other words, it's robots managing robots, with very, very little human involvement. It gets even weirder when the two of them are drugged and probed by the robots in the middle of the night. They have to figure out what the sinister secret of Futureworld is before it's too late...
You get the picture.The premise sounds kind of exciting... but, really, it wasn't. The film had a lot of problems. First of all... I'm not sure that I believe that they could re-open this park just two years after an incident where all the guests in their park got pulled apart by robots. BUT I'LL GIVE THEM THAT. I mean, we accepted that they would open Jurassic World despite not one, but two major incidents where dinosaurs got loose and publically killed tons of people, right? You have to give them that, because you can't have a sequel unless you accept that premise, so, fine, whatever -- it's dumb but we'll leave that alone.
However, there are several things that I can't leave alone. Namely:
1. The acting. Blythe Danner was all right in her role as "spunky girl reporter" -- but Peter Fonda (as hard-nosed reporter) largely had no expression in his face. (Did they mistakenly tell him he was playing a robot?)
Peter Fonda's expression during 95% of this movie. The glasses didn't help.2. The story. Okay, I talked up "the sinister secret" of Futureworld in my description above -- but, really, about forty minutes into this 1 hour 40 minute movie I had already guessed "the sinister secret" -- and after that point, it was kind of slog to get to the ending. There were lots of scenes of our heroes running through pipe-filled corridors... and that's about all. The film left room for a few interesting twists... which didn't pay off. Characters got set up in the beginning of the film... and then disappeared and never had a resolution for their involvement (for instance, in the very beginning, they set up this obnoxious guy who won a game show and therefore gets to go to Futureworld. I assumed he would be murdered by robots at some point... but no, after one point where we get to see him debating which of the robots to have sex with, he's simply never seen again. Not as in, "he was killed by robots so we never saw him again" -- just, "He just wasn't important, so we didn't write any other stuff for him to do.") Also, there's a story involving one of the few remaining humans that work for the theme park. It seems he has a live-in robot buddy...
... And since he's bald, and doesn't have a face, and it's stated that he was salvaged from the original park... it would have made an interesting twist if this turned out to be the Yul Brynner robot from the first movie. Right? If he pulled his face out of a bag, and there's Yul Brynner, the robot who killed so many people, now working to help people? But... no. That plotline doesn't really go anywhere.
Of course, that poster down below this shows Yul Brynner, right? I mean, he's bigger even than Peter Fonda -- so, somehow Yul Brynner has to make an appearance in the movie, right?
This is how they shoehorn him into the film:
At one point, the people running the park tell Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner that they have a dream machine that allows people to watch other people's dreams and record them and stuff! They try it out, and Blythe Danner immediately has a weird, sexy dance-themed dream about making out with Yul Brynner. She wakes up, and this whole incident is never mentioned again.
SO, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ROBOTS AND DOESN'T FIGURE INTO THE PLOT. It was just an excuse to get Yul Brynner back into the film without actually coming up with a valid excuse for him to be back in the film. PRETTY LAME. If I had been a big Yul Brynner fan, I would have felt cheated. Heck, I'm not a big Yul Brynner fan, and I still felt cheated!
SO MISLEADING.3. The music. Now, at first I kind of liked the music, because I really like TV mystery shows from the 1970's -- which is exactly what this sounded like. Music from a 1970's made-for-TV mystery movie. If you've ever seen the failed pilot for Code Name: Diamond Head (a Quinn Martin Production) you know exactly what kind of music I'm talking about.
Of course, you might ask yourself whether that sort of music is entirely appropriate for a film called 'Futureworld' -- and that would be a valid concern. But, ultimately, the biggest problem was that the main theme was extremely repetitive and kind of began to get on my nerves after a while... so it didn't even ultimately work for someone who liked it to begin with.
4. Waste of Sets and Themes: Okay, they establish we've got a Futureworld, Medieval World, Spa World, and Pompeii World. We can probably guess that because the movie is called Futureworld (and not Spa World), Futureworld is going to be the main park featured. So even if the other parks are barely featured, we can expect a lot of "future" themed stuff, right? ... Honestly, I felt like we mainly got that in the first twenty minutes or so, and the rest of the film could have taken place in any resort, anywhere.
5. Wasting time. This movie's biggest problem, ultimately, was just plain wasting my time. Like I said, the "secret" was not a hard nut to crack... and after that, there wasn't a lot to keep me watching. Mr. Hall fell asleep. I opened mail and wrote some checks, and flipped through Better Homes and Gardens. But the most telling thing of all is that Mr. Hall wound up sleeping through about thirty minutes of this movie... and he really didn't miss anything.
So, ultimately, is Futureworld worth a spot on your shelf? Well, I guess if you love Blythe Danner or Peter Fonda, maybe. But Yul Brynner fans will be sorely disappointed -- as will fans of Sci-Fi, and of well-written stories. Probably give this one a miss.
And then, three years later, they made this movie without that guy's involvement, but starring Henry Fonda's son and Gwyneth Paltrow's mom. And thus, Futureworld was born.
"Or are THEM you YOU you you YOU?"The Premise: It's the 1970's version of the future. It's been a couple years since the "public relations disaster" that was the opening of Westworld (you know, when all those robots killed all those people). Well, they've rebuilt the entire park with fail safes and several different themes -- a "spa" world, a "medieval" world, an "ancient rome" world, and a "future" world. Hard-nosed reporter Peter Fonda, and (presumably soft-nosed) reporter Blythe Danner go to Futureworld to check it out -- and Peter Fonda immediately suspects something is wrong. He gets even more suspicious when it turns out that robots are actually the ones running the park now -- in other words, it's robots managing robots, with very, very little human involvement. It gets even weirder when the two of them are drugged and probed by the robots in the middle of the night. They have to figure out what the sinister secret of Futureworld is before it's too late...
You get the picture.The premise sounds kind of exciting... but, really, it wasn't. The film had a lot of problems. First of all... I'm not sure that I believe that they could re-open this park just two years after an incident where all the guests in their park got pulled apart by robots. BUT I'LL GIVE THEM THAT. I mean, we accepted that they would open Jurassic World despite not one, but two major incidents where dinosaurs got loose and publically killed tons of people, right? You have to give them that, because you can't have a sequel unless you accept that premise, so, fine, whatever -- it's dumb but we'll leave that alone.However, there are several things that I can't leave alone. Namely:
1. The acting. Blythe Danner was all right in her role as "spunky girl reporter" -- but Peter Fonda (as hard-nosed reporter) largely had no expression in his face. (Did they mistakenly tell him he was playing a robot?)
Peter Fonda's expression during 95% of this movie. The glasses didn't help.2. The story. Okay, I talked up "the sinister secret" of Futureworld in my description above -- but, really, about forty minutes into this 1 hour 40 minute movie I had already guessed "the sinister secret" -- and after that point, it was kind of slog to get to the ending. There were lots of scenes of our heroes running through pipe-filled corridors... and that's about all. The film left room for a few interesting twists... which didn't pay off. Characters got set up in the beginning of the film... and then disappeared and never had a resolution for their involvement (for instance, in the very beginning, they set up this obnoxious guy who won a game show and therefore gets to go to Futureworld. I assumed he would be murdered by robots at some point... but no, after one point where we get to see him debating which of the robots to have sex with, he's simply never seen again. Not as in, "he was killed by robots so we never saw him again" -- just, "He just wasn't important, so we didn't write any other stuff for him to do.") Also, there's a story involving one of the few remaining humans that work for the theme park. It seems he has a live-in robot buddy...
... And since he's bald, and doesn't have a face, and it's stated that he was salvaged from the original park... it would have made an interesting twist if this turned out to be the Yul Brynner robot from the first movie. Right? If he pulled his face out of a bag, and there's Yul Brynner, the robot who killed so many people, now working to help people? But... no. That plotline doesn't really go anywhere.
Of course, that poster down below this shows Yul Brynner, right? I mean, he's bigger even than Peter Fonda -- so, somehow Yul Brynner has to make an appearance in the movie, right?
This is how they shoehorn him into the film:
At one point, the people running the park tell Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner that they have a dream machine that allows people to watch other people's dreams and record them and stuff! They try it out, and Blythe Danner immediately has a weird, sexy dance-themed dream about making out with Yul Brynner. She wakes up, and this whole incident is never mentioned again.
SO, IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ROBOTS AND DOESN'T FIGURE INTO THE PLOT. It was just an excuse to get Yul Brynner back into the film without actually coming up with a valid excuse for him to be back in the film. PRETTY LAME. If I had been a big Yul Brynner fan, I would have felt cheated. Heck, I'm not a big Yul Brynner fan, and I still felt cheated!
SO MISLEADING.3. The music. Now, at first I kind of liked the music, because I really like TV mystery shows from the 1970's -- which is exactly what this sounded like. Music from a 1970's made-for-TV mystery movie. If you've ever seen the failed pilot for Code Name: Diamond Head (a Quinn Martin Production) you know exactly what kind of music I'm talking about.Of course, you might ask yourself whether that sort of music is entirely appropriate for a film called 'Futureworld' -- and that would be a valid concern. But, ultimately, the biggest problem was that the main theme was extremely repetitive and kind of began to get on my nerves after a while... so it didn't even ultimately work for someone who liked it to begin with.
4. Waste of Sets and Themes: Okay, they establish we've got a Futureworld, Medieval World, Spa World, and Pompeii World. We can probably guess that because the movie is called Futureworld (and not Spa World), Futureworld is going to be the main park featured. So even if the other parks are barely featured, we can expect a lot of "future" themed stuff, right? ... Honestly, I felt like we mainly got that in the first twenty minutes or so, and the rest of the film could have taken place in any resort, anywhere.
5. Wasting time. This movie's biggest problem, ultimately, was just plain wasting my time. Like I said, the "secret" was not a hard nut to crack... and after that, there wasn't a lot to keep me watching. Mr. Hall fell asleep. I opened mail and wrote some checks, and flipped through Better Homes and Gardens. But the most telling thing of all is that Mr. Hall wound up sleeping through about thirty minutes of this movie... and he really didn't miss anything.
So, ultimately, is Futureworld worth a spot on your shelf? Well, I guess if you love Blythe Danner or Peter Fonda, maybe. But Yul Brynner fans will be sorely disappointed -- as will fans of Sci-Fi, and of well-written stories. Probably give this one a miss.
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