Futureworld

Futureworld builds on the foundation of its predecessor, delving deeper into the theme of "escape." Although it strays from the original theme park setting, the film uses suspense and multiple twists to engage the audience. For fans of thrillers, it's a worthwhile watch.

The sequel to Westworld, 1973's high-concept / low-budget android disaster movie, Futureworld is thematically similar, but less ambitiously entertaining. It still features a crew of convincing mechanical doppelgängers who march around a handful of themed amusement parks, mindlessly carrying out a variety of functions for delighted visitors, but their movements are less proactive. These bots act more like a servant class than the walking, talking theatrical props they played in the first film. They'll serve your drinks, maintain the park's infrastructure, even screw you if they happen to be the right model, but lack the implicit menace of their ancestors, and that makes them less essential. This time around, the big trouble involves the capture and synthetic cloning of various world leaders, to advance a vague, corporate-friendly political agenda. Not quite as viscerally entertaining as maniac machines with a spontaneous thirst for human blood. Our male / female leads, a dull-as-doorknob pair of chummy reporters in the midst of a casual fling, basically trip over the bigwigs' evil scheme in-between trips to the bar and the dirty dream machine. The latter provides our only non-flashback glimpse of cowboy Yul Brynner, the headline star (misleadingly promoted as a major player) reduced to a pointless role in a weird, three-minute-long montage. Dreary, lazy and overlong, the whole mess often feels like it's stuck in a holding pattern while more interesting developments find their positions. Imagine my surprise when those never arrived. At least the parting shot is abruptly hilarious.