TheRetroCritic

As the first season of the new Westworld series on HBO finally wraps up, it's time to look back at the film that started it all. Penned by Michael Crichton and released in 1973, the movie was a descent into hell as the world's most ingenious theme park slowly but surely meets its end. Guests pay a lot of money to visit Westworld, a recreation of the Old West with realistic-looking robots populating the town. You can interact with them however you please, you can even shoot them but they can't hurt you. There's also an equally convincing Roman World and Medieval World not too far away. We follow two guests, Peter and John, played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin respectively, as they enter the park and try out some of its key features like duelling with enemies, drinking, fighting, breaking out of jail and, of course, visiting the brothel. When the scientists running the show discover some discrepancies with the robots, whose sensors have become temperamental,

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, Sphere was a 1998 sci-fi film about a team of experts in various fields exploring some crashed underwater spaceship. Directed by Barry Levinson, the film boasts an all-star cast with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Coyote and Liev Schreiber all being part of the main team. Sphere is a psychological thriller that's a bit like a cross between The Abyss , Event Horizon , The Thing and Alien as the more the selected experts investigate the spaceship, the creepier the tone of the film becomes. Eventually, characters start dropping like flies as various unexpected threats start popping up randomly from killer jellyfish to giant squids. The discovery of a gold alien sphere in the middle of the spaceship leads to growing paranoia among the crew and various twists and turns. There are references here and there to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and, indeed, the film attempts to capture the book's sense of adventure and cla