Worst SFX No.16: Westworld (1973)

Martin Anderson

Published on Jan 6, 2009

There's something very 'Gene Roddenberry' about the commercial hover-liner that takes Richard Benjamin and James Brolin to their worst-ever holiday in Michael Crichton's enjoyable technophobe romp. Somewhere between the Martian ships from Byron Haskin's War Of The Worlds (1953) and the Romulan ships in Star Trek:TOS, it's not an unpleasing shape. Unfortunately it's just stuck, rock-solid, in front of some stock ariel footage, a technique so raw that even Thunderbirds tried harder. Realising the shots weren't going to pass muster, they are relayed instead on TV screens in a monitoring facility within the film (see clip below), a 'generational remove' which worked well for Ridley Scott in Alien (1979) and James Cameron in Aliens (1986) - but those two films were using the 'hand-held' technique to get away with it; in Westworld, the liner just looks like a bad SFX shot on a TV…