Westworld

Westworld (1973) is the original sci-fi western you can watch online on iFILM. Michael Crichton — who two decades later wrote Jurassic Park — wrote and directed this feature about a luxury resort where guests pay a thousand dollars a day to live out frontier fantasies alongside lifelike androids. Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin lead the cast.

The park called Delos offers three themed zones; Benjamin and Brolin's characters choose West World, where they shoot, brawl and ride without consequence. The robots are programmed to lose. Then a cascading malfunction quietly spreads through the network, and Brynner's cold-eyed gunslinger stops losing. The film runs 88 minutes and wastes none of them.

Crichton's debut as a director used early pixelated computer imagery to simulate the android's point of view — one of the first times such effects appeared on screen. The premise seeded an entire subgenre of machine-uprising fiction, including the HBO series that followed decades later. Stream Westworld (1973) online on iFILM.