Ano 2003: Operação Terra

Futureworld (1976)

*** (out of 4)

Sequel to WESTWORLD picks up a couple years after the events in that film as Delos plans on opening Futureworld. A pair of reporters (Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner) are invited into the new theme park but soon they discover that the owners have plans to replace various government officials with lookalikes. FUTUREWORLD doesn't quite reach the levels of the first film but I really give the filmmakers credit for doing something different with the story instead of just delivering a rehash of the first film. With that said, I think the film takes way too long for this story to take place as it really doesn't start to happen until around the 70-minute mark or so and so much of that early running time has us sitting there just waiting for something to eventually take off. It seems that the first half of the film spends a bit too much time with the reporters looking at how good everything in the place is and it just takes too long to get going. I will say that many of the early scenes in the picture are extremely good and especially the stuff dealing with people using the theme park. The jokes about robots that can handle sex were good and I thought there was some other nice humor as well. The performances were also really good with both Fonda and Danner turning in nice work and having some good chemistry together. Yul Brynner is basically here as a cameo but it was still nice seeing the gunslinger again. FUTUREWORLD runs a tad bit too long but the special effects are good and there are several good ideas throughout it.

Let's not forget, this was produced in 1976. Elaborate sets and respectable special effects! I urge anyone to take another look. Some of the earliest 3D computer generated renderings I've seen in film. Story wasn't bad and neither was the acting. Decent action and I appreciated the musical scoring as well. Forgotten gem from my humble perspective.

Westworld was the film that put Michael Crichton well and truly on the map as a writer and sometime director to watch out for. His story of an amazing theme park gone wrong was revisited twenty years later, only with raptors in the place of cowboys. It could have been revisited a lot earlier, had Futureworld been a lazy, hurried sequel to it's successful predecessor. Instead the filmmakers produced something entirely original that stands on its own with no prior knowledge of the first film necessary to the average viewer.

The film begins two years after the disaster at Westworld, with the newly improved theme park Delos ready to open its doors again to the rich and influential public. Peter Fonda however smells a rat, and following a tip-off that all is not well he takes a holiday there himself, with his ex-girlfriend and fellow journalist in tow. Of course it would be a short and uneventful film if he turned out to be wrong, so he doesn't. He's right. In fact, things there are worse than he thought, but I won't give it away here. Suffice it to say that it's not only the robot technology that has improved at Delos.

Futureworld plays on the question that audiences raised following the release of Westworld - can you have sex with these robots? The answer is yes, and whilst we're not shown any (this is a family film after all) both the robots and some of the guests discuss it openly. One even quips "Once you've had sex with a robot, you'll never go back!" If Futureworld was a real place, the implications would be scary indeed.

This film seems to have attracted a lot of negative reviews which surprises me, as I felt it was a well paced science fiction thriller. It was produced by American International Pictures, with Samuel Z. Arkoff at the helm, and as such it is a very slick looking film on a very low budget. It never looks cheap, despite some of the costumes looking a little too theatrical. And why shouldn't they? After all, it's a holiday camp, not a re-enactment society.

I would recommend Futureworld to anyone who is a fan of Westworld, or of seventies science fiction in general. I would imagine if you're reading this you probably fit into the latter category!

Years after the failure of Westworld, the same company have regrouped and are planning to open the same theme park again but improved and totally safe. Chuck Browning, the journalist who originally broke the Westworld story, is approached by a mysterious man who has information on this new park – but he is killed before he can tell his story. Looking for dirt under the surface, Browning and colleague Ballard join the elite group selected for the opening few days at the park and begin to investigate a world where nothing is what it seems – nothing.

Having enjoyed the Jurassic Park rehearsal that was Westworld, I tuned in to this sequel hoping for, at very least, more of same stuff with a clever new slant on it. In defence of the film it does try to do something with the plot and widens it out into a bigger, potentially better conspiracy story but for some reason it fails to really engage. The first half of the film drags like a chain smoker and it seems happy to just bang out sequences that we are supposed to go 'wow' at simply because they involve special effects or robots. This is a terrible first hour because the special effects at best are superimposed men painted red and green to look like holographic chess pieces and, at worst a laughable moment where people sky down the red dust on Mars – on rather, they ski down a normal mountain but the whole scene is shot through a red filter! That is not a special effect and even in 1976 I doubt that these 'effects' were enough to stop audiences from getting bored in the first half of the movie.

The second half is a marked improvement but, by then, a lot of damage had been done and a flurry of action and conspiracy was not quite enough to make it a good film. It does have some good scenes but, ironically enough, these feature between the duplicated characters rather than being the effect shots that the producers were clearly banking on being the business side of the film. However, the extent of the threat is never translated to the film and the ending is terrible – far too muted to have even the faintest relation to the plot we were being sold just a few minutes before. The film only once or twice has even vague tension and certainly nowhere near the degree that the plot demanded.

The cast are also hamstrung by the material. Fonda looks bemused the whole time and it looks likely that nobody told him what was happening in the film – he certainly doesn't look like a man who has just uncovered an evil conspiracy! Danner is also as shapeless and dipsy and she didn't make me care one bit about her. The support cast try hard to look 'evil' and 'conspiratorial' but really they are not given the tools to do the job and just end up scowling! A cameo from Yul Brynner just seems to be totally pointless and resulting in his entire scene just being stupid.

Overall this is a very poor sequel. It tries to repeat the formula from the first film while opening it out into its own plot but it fails in a big way.

The first hour is empty, unspectacular that was meant to be spectacle but wasn't and a second half that has a potentially good plot which is just wasted by a delivery that is so lacking in excitement and tension that you'd think there was no conspiracy or danger whatsoever! Stick to the original.

Sci-fi thriller set in a park filled with robots.

The problem this movie faces is that Westworld (1973) was just so good and, a bit like Planet Of The Apes (1968), the story begins and ends in one film. Making a sequel to this sort of material is a struggle. Perhaps they should have stopped after one movie?

The other reviewers have pointed out what is wrong with Future World so I will point out what is right with it. There is an oddly touching goodbye scene between a less important park worker and his defective faceless robot pal. This scene and a few other moments make Future World worth watching.