NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

PodBill Just what I expected

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Numerootno A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

mattbaxter72 (Spoilers for the movie Westworld. Though if you haven't seen that, heaven only knows why you're watching this).Back in the day, studios didn't really take sequels seriously. It wasn't uncommon for the stars, director and writers of a major hit to all jump ship from the sequel, leaving a bunch of second-stringers to pick up the slack, and the resulting product was almost always inferior. Even by those standards, though, Futureworld is a godawful mess. The plot doesn't really matter, and it's similar enough to Westworld anyway. So let's just list some of the more jaw-droppingly stupid moments in this mess:1) So they're just re-opening the resort, huh? After about 150 people died last time round. And people are just lining up to visit the place? Yeah, I don't see that happening in the real world, somehow.2) Apparently these events where a load of people died are so obscure in this universe that people need a refresher course in what happened, all of two years later.3) If you invite an investigative reporter to your theme park, you can't really act all surprised when he wants to investigate stuff.4) 'Meet me 10 minutes from now in the Hyatt'. On the 50th floor, no less, though Fonda doesn't specify where, in this enormous hotel, he wants to meet his source. He doesn't even ask where the source is calling from - he might have been in LA or Australia for all Fonda knew, but luckily he was at most a couple of minutes away from that hotel.5) Judging by how the bystanders react, a guy being stabbed to death in front of you is perfectly unremarkable.6) So, uh, you're just going to leave the ruins of Westworld like that, huh? Not clear up, or build over it or anything? You're even going to leave body parts lying around? That's just icky.7) The main bad guy is so nice and avuncular that he might as well have 'EVIL' written on his head in neon.8) Good lord, Blythe Danner is useless in this movie. I know it was the 1970s, and attitudes were different back then, but surely she could do something other than stand around and scream helplessly? 9) Yes, robot ninjas are an excellent way to get rid of those pesky reporters. 'Crusading reporters killed by rampaging robot ninjas' is a headline that'll make page 9, at best. No possibility of bad publicity there.10) Should I mention the dream sequence, or shall we just all look the other way in stunned embarrassment and pretend that none of that ever happened? That absurd sequence is the only time that the 'star' of this movie, Yul Brynner, appears in anything other than flashback footage. He didn't act again after this, and I don't blame him.11) Almost none of the movie takes place in actual Futureworld, and you'll see much more of air-conditioning ducts and boiler rooms than futuristic wonders. It's probably because they had a tighter budget this time around, leaving the whole thing looking very, very cheap. In short, this is not a good movie, and not even an entertainingly bad one. It's not unwatchably bad, but if you can get through without using the fast-forward button a couple of times, you're more patient than I am.

SteveResin It's predecessor Westworld is a bona fide classic. One of those stand alone masterpieces that doesn't warrant or need a sequel. Nothing could compare to it and whatever was served up would only be disappointing.Disappointing is exactly what you get with Futureworld. To be frank it's awful. The story itself has promise, this time the company that create the fantasy theme park and its lifelike robots hatch a cunning plan to clone world leaders and high profile media personalities, bump them off then replace them in the real world with their doppelgangers and RULE THE WORLD! HAHAHAHAHA! (Evil Chuckle). Sounds good right? Wrong.Peter Fonda plays a journalist chosen for "replacement" alongside plucky TV host and love interest Blythe Danner, who are drugged in their sleep on a PR visit to the theme park and cloned. Now this is the worst part of the story. Instead of just killing them while under anaesthetic and leaving their clones go about their business they decide for some ridiculous reason to have the clones kill their own counterparts. So we're treated to the worst shoot-out scene in history when Danner fights it out with her double in the ruins of Westworld and Fonda is chased all around the complex by his double in the most tedious and unexciting sequence I've ever seen in a big budget action movie. Beating their clones our plucky heroes escape the park and the film actually ends on a shot of Fonda flipping the evil Futureworld boss the bird. Yes, really.Everything else about the movie is poor, it absolutely reeks of the 1970's, with terrible clothes and colours, the script is weak, the acting sub standard and the fantastic Yul Brynner only appears in a dreadful dream sequence where he dances with Danner while twirling around a red silk ribbon. In full "gunslinger" costume. Yes, this really does happen.Avoid this at all costs, it's rusty as hell and beyond repair!

Red-Barracuda Futureworld is the follow up to the innovative sci-fi hit Westworld (1973). In it, two investigative reporters are sent to the Delos resort where the robots went berserk in the previous film. While there they slowly uncover an alarming secret. With this plot-line, this sequel has changed its emphasis and moved from an action-oriented thriller to a mystery-driven one. It's not a bad move really, as sequels tend to just be poor re-treads of what has gone before, whereas this one does actually have a quite different feel and the amateur sleuthing plot thread was a pretty good idea. Although, it does have to be admitted that this is still a clearly inferior film to the original though. It makes a mistake of not really putting enough focus on Futureworld itself and too much of the action seems to occur in the machine rooms and inner workings of the complex itself. What we do see of Futureworld certainly suggests that they missed a bit of a trick not integrating it more into the fabric of the plot. It was a colourful world full of the types of plastic décor that movies from the 70's all seemed to think would be the look of the future. Of course, nowadays this looks fantastic, if a thoroughly inaccurate prediction. I also liked the robot boxers and the idea of Martian skiing. So the ideas are all here but not much is really made of them, as the focus is ultimately on the two journalists trying to get to the bottom of what bad things are going on behind the scenes.Peter Fonda plays the main character here, yet the film's original posters seemed to have promoted the idea that the most iconic character from the first film, Yul Brynner's gunslinger, was a significant presence here. In actual fact he only appears briefly in a dream sequence that seems to only exist as a means of having him appear in this sequel at all. Despite my earlier criticisms, I still think this is a pretty good bit of sci-fi. It's a sequel that isn't afraid to take the story in a slightly different direction and the revelation that world leaders who have visited the high-tech resort have been killed off and replaced by android clones is a pretty decent idea on the whole. So, this still amounts to a pretty imaginative bit of sci-fi which is sure to appeal in particular to those who like the 70's strand of the genre.

JoeB131 This sequel was kind of pointless and defied logic and reason.The movie picks up where the film "Westworld" left off. The Davos corporation has reopened the park, or at least the sections with Roman World and Miedeval World, along with a cool new place called "Futureworld". Despite the robots going crazy and killing the guests last time, and apparently every trial lawyer in the world drinking Roofies, this apparently doesn't bug anyone.We find out the robots have taken over, and are cleverly replacing real people with robots.There are a few scenes that defy logic, like the magically generated samurai and the dream sequence to get Yul Brenner (who played the killer robot in the last film that made sense) into the film.You have Peter Fonda, who obviously didn't get the thespian gene in his family, trying to stretch out 30 minutes of plot into a 90 minute feature.