My first taste of Michael Crichton,
who died on Tuesday, came courtesy of the patron saint of my childhood, the BBC. I spent many nights battling disapproving parents and censorious babysitters to catch the latest edition of late-night cult movie season Moviedrome. More famously fronted by one-time UK indie darling
Alex Cox, it was initially introduced by the now-forgotten
Mark Cousins.With with his
Ulster vowels and his laboured, pseudo-creepy presenting style, Cousins came off like an unhappy hybrid of Tom Paulin and his
royal filmic majesty Mark Kermode (before he bunked up with Simon
Mayo and decided to
just chill.)
However, once Cousins had given his ten pence worth, what followed never disappointed. And never more so when the film of the night was
Westworld. This nightmarish tale of the ulitmate mini-break gone wrong, astonishes me today just as it did then.
Westworld, the theme park, not the movie, is one of three adult pleasure paradises where men and women (but mostly men) can go and live out their fantasies, vanquishing enemies and swiving beauties from
medieval Europe,
Ancient Rome, or the
Old West. Said enemies and beauties are, natch, hi-spec androids who are programmed to start fights and lose them, and to allow any old John into their boudoir with minimal effort. But guess what gang, we're in Sci-Fi land, and in Sci-Fi land, robots often kinda...well...let's just say things don't go to plan.
Soon enough one of our two heroes, (the cocky one, played by James Brolin, these days just a
dad-of) gets done in by a murderous gunslinging android who
just happens to look like Yul Brynner's character from
The Magificent Seven, and all havoc breaks loose.
This nightmarish,
oft-parodied vision of a theme park meltdown had me hooked, and remains one of my go-to films. To my inexpert eyes, it is a sci-fi film of towering genius, incorporating as it does, the
most basic cliche of the genre to incredible effect. Some 'whizz with computers' has even put
the whole thing on youtube.
Despite this, Crichton will be best remembered for two things which do nothing for me. Jurassic Park (I had the book-never read it, just looked at the pictures, no wait, the indecipherable graphs and charts) has just two things going for it;
Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. 'Nuff said.
I have NEVER WATCHED an episode of ER, though fifteen seasons can't be wrong. Of late Crichton used his high public profile as an author
to air some less-than-Gangster views on science, (that's real science, not SCIENCE FICTION.) But Michael, for Westworld, ALL is forgiven.
