Two years after the Westworld “incident,” (in which a group of robots malfunctioned and murdered hundreds of humans), Delos Amusement Park has reopened and is accepting guests. Westworld has been permanently shut down but guests can still go to Romanworld and Medeivalworld (despite the fact that it was in Medievalworld that the whole robot rebellion started in the first place). Delos has added two new worlds: Spaworld and Futureworld. Spaworld is a spa for people who want to think young and Futureworld is the world of the future, which looks much like 1976, the year that this film was made.
Two reporters, Chuck Browning (Peter Fonda) and Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner), have been invited to cover the grand reopening of Delos and to hopefully generate some good publicity. Chuck, however, has reason to believe that there’s something sinister happening at Delos. While Tracy is busy fantasizing about Yul Brynner, Chuck discovers that Delos is using Futureworld to clone diplomats.
At the end of Futureworld, Peter Fonda gives everyone the finger and that’s really cool but otherwise, this is a forgettable sequel to Westworld. The whole point of the original Westworld was that the robots didn’t know they were robots but, in Futureworld, the robots not only know what they are but they’re also superfluous to the plot. There’s no robot revolution in Futureworld nor is there any of Crichton’s concerns about technology run amok. Instead, it’s all about clones and a predictable political conspiracy.
The main issue facing the makers of this film was how could they do a sequel to Michael Crichton’s unexpected hit when Westworld‘s main attraction, Yul Brynner’s robot gunslinger, was thoroughly destroyed at the end of the first film. It would not make any sense for anyone to have reactivated the robot. Their solution was to bring Brynner in for a cameo in which he appeared in one of Tracy’s dreams. Sadly, why they thought it was a good idea to have Tracy develop an erotic fixation on a killer robot and then, just as abruptly, abandon the idea is not for us to know. They would have been better off leaving Brynner out of the film entirely because his presence just reminds us that Futureworld is no Westworld.
Through the Shattered Lens 