From: jack.bohn64@gmail.com   
      
   Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!   
      
   "THX 1138" and "Robocop" are the week after next!  How did I get that wrong?!?   
      
   Luckily, this week is "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and "Westworld," and I   
   don't see any side movies through the week (well, the wild wild movie "The   
   Wild Wild Planet" features people put under mind control along with other,   
   odder, biological changes).    
    These two can be covered quickly.   
      
   "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is based on the short story "Farewell to the   
   Master" by Harry Bates.  An alien and robot visitor land their spaceship in   
   Washington, D.C., hijinx ensue.  One aspect of the story not brought over is   
   that the robot is the    
   master of their society... or was that fact just hidden in the movie?   
      
   "Westworld" is an extension of Disneylands's audio-animatronics.  I haven't   
   been to the 21st Century parks of Harry Potter of Star Wars, I don't know how   
   immersive they really are, but I get the impression they still rely a lot on   
   what Disney calls "cast    
   members."  Westworld replaces a lot of that with robots, although it's still   
   not cheap -- $1000 a day in pre-'70s-inflation money (although it's set in   
   1983).   
      
   There is a bit of discussion on how to tell a robot, which, as I saw this   
   movie is a schoolkid, I tended to think of as schoolyard rumormongering.  The   
   guy pouring drinks in a saloon for five hours is probably a robot, although I   
   wouldn't be too sure    
   about the guy pounding out horseshoes in the blacksmith's shop.  (There are   
   conceivably guests on either side of a bank robbery shootout.  On either side   
   of a saloon girl encounter?)  The idea that the guns won't fire on anything   
   with a body temperature    
   is slightly odd.  Particularly as we are shown a Medievalworld.  Are the   
   bladed weapons programmed not to cut?  I would guess they are not changing   
   from sharp to dull, but are always dull, and the robots are programmed to _be_   
   cut when hit with them.     
   Similarly, the guns should probably always kick back, maybe with some larger   
   version of a cell phone's vibrate motor, and the robots, like the actors   
   portraying them, are wearing explosive squibs to simulate the bullet hits.    
   That way it's easier to    
   believe you've missed another guest rather than that your gun has a firing   
   failure rate more appropriate to Musketworld.  Still, for the story, there's a   
   need for the gun to actually fire.  For the story...   What if the adventure   
   we saw WAS the park    
   experience for our hero?  Bought by his friend (who included a death scene for   
   himself) as a cathartic experience of self-reliance?  No, I guess we are shown   
   too many "behind the scenes" activities our hero would have been unaware of   
   for us to think the    
   story was always about "Westworldworld."   
      
   The movie was framed in the '70s as "something has gone wrong" in the sense of   
   an engineering problem.  So realistic are the robots, however, that it's   
   tempting to assign them the feelings we associate with the programmed actions   
   they are going through.     
   I hear the remake TV series is taking this path.  The 1976 sequel   
   "Futureworld" and the '80s TV series "Beyond Westworld" ignored this and   
   assumed everything would go right, engineering-wise, and dealt with nefarious   
   plans people with lifelike robots    
   would make.   
      
   Rate them:  I had thought to rate Gort along the lines of the Robby the Robot   
   idea of hiding the lines of the person in the robot suit.  In this case, they   
   got a human of greater than average size, Lock Martin, and put him in a suit.    
   This is a good    
   trick, and will be extrapolated on with amputees portraying the drones in   
   "Silent Running" and a chimp inside the robotic dog suit in "Battlestar   
   Galactica."  However, I can't rank these all together.  The fact is that I can   
   find it easier to believe in    
   the drones and daggit as robots, Gort, and shorter than average Felix Silla in   
   the Twiki suit for "Buck Rogers," are more a person in a suit than Robby.    
   Perhaps they would have been more effective if unusually tall and short people   
   had not been featured    
   entertainment so often.  Gort and Twiki score up nearer 0.4, above  C-3P0.   
      
   I don't know about splitting the hairs of the incredibly lifelike androids   
   that fall between 0 and 0.1.  These get points for having a reason to be   
   lifelike, and a couple of storytelling tricks: one is that we are told there   
   are "tells," obvious    
   differences between androids and actors pretending to be androids, and we are   
   shown they are machines, disassembled, or at least with the faceplate off.  In   
   "Futureworld" one of the workmen has made an assistant out of a spare   
   android.  It, Clark (played    
   by James Connor) walks around with its faceplate off.  Around this time on   
   "The Six Million Dollar Man" there were attacks by Fembots, which, when   
   exposed, spent much of their time with their faceplates off.  I just find this   
   so charming that I forgive    
   the fact that I can tell the actors are wearing a prosthetic in front of their   
   faces that extends the head to really odd proportions if a humanlike faceplate   
   were attached.   
      
      
      
      
   Well, that covers this Saturday, next Saturday is already covered.  I may type   
   something else up next week.   
      
   --    
   -Jack   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)