Westworld doesn’t play so well now, at nearly 40 years old that’s allowed, especially for science fiction, but its main downfall is that Crichton took many of the same themes, and in fact same scenes and used them to much better effect in Jurassic Park. Whilst staying stock still to avoid a massive t-rex eating moment is measured tension wise as maybe a mountain, the same thing with a cowboy robot amounts to a veritable mole hill of tension, and thats even ignoring tension depleting plot holes. The only reason to watch this instead of Jurassic Park (literally, I cannot stress enough that they are the same film, but this one has robots instead of dinos, no tension and, perhaps thankfully no awful “importance of the family” storyline) is first that it has that brilliant super red seventies blood, and second, that given we are getting ever closer to creating hyper-realistic robot versions of ourselves the questions it raises here are as prescient as ever. Though really in terms of inevitability that the first things we’d do with hyper-realistic robots is fuck them, and shoot them, is on a par with the fact that they would eventually go haywire and murder us all in the boxed marked “will definitely happen”.