A sequel with a different kind of danger
Futureworld is the sequel to Westworld, the 1973 science-fiction film in which a futuristic theme park’s robot cowboys and gunslingers malfunction and turn on their guests. Peter Fonda stars as Chuck Browning, a former reporter for a large news organisation who is now working independently. With his colleague Tracy Ballard, played by Blythe Danner, Chuck is invited to cover the reopening of Delos, the company behind the park, which now promises a safer, more sophisticated experience called Futureworld. The park offers simulated worlds, including a space station, a medieval castle and a Roman city, where guests can live out fantasies with lifelike robots. Chuck, who is naturally sceptical, suspects that the new, improved Delos is hiding something, and his investigation leads him into a conspiracy that is more disturbing than a simple robot malfunction.
Director Richard T. Heffron, who would work with Fonda again the following year on Outlaw Blues, approaches the material as a thriller rather than as a horror film. Where Westworld was about machines running amok, Futureworld is about machines being used deliberately, by people, for control. The villains are not robots gone wrong. They are executives who have learned that the most effective way to influence the world is not to kill journalists and politicians, but to replace them with obedient duplicates. Chuck and Tracy discover that Delos is cloning prominent guests and programming the clones to serve the company’s interests, while the real people are disposed of. It is a premise that belongs to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, updated with science-fiction technology, and it gives Fonda a role that suits his strengths: a curious, stubborn outsider who keeps asking questions when everyone else is enjoying the show.
Fonda plays Chuck as a professional, not a rebel. He is older, more tired and more careful than the characters Fonda had played in the late 1960s, and he brings a world-weary humour to the role. Chuck is not a scientist or an action hero. He is a reporter, and his weapons are observation, persistence and a refusal to accept official explanations. Fonda lets the audience see Chuck thinking, noticing small inconsistencies in the park, in the behaviour of the robots, and in the stories told by Delos executives. That observational quality is important, because Futureworld is a film about seeing. Its most effective scenes are those in which Chuck realises that something he is looking at is not quite human, or not quite real, and the audience shares his unease.
Robots, clones, and the price of fantasy
Futureworld is not as famous as Westworld, and it is not as tightly constructed. Its pacing is uneven, its special effects are of their time, and some of its ideas are introduced more fully than they are developed. Yet it remains an interesting film, and an important one for understanding Fonda’s career in the mid-1970s. It shows him moving into mainstream genre cinema, working with a larger budget and a more conventional studio structure, while still choosing a film that has something to say about power and manipulation. The park in Futureworld is a fantasy machine, and the film asks what happens when fantasy is no longer a holiday but a tool. If you can live out any dream in a simulated world, will you still care about the real world? And if a corporation can offer you that dream, what will it ask for in return?
The film’s production design is one of its pleasures. Delos is filmed in real locations, including the NASA facilities and modernist buildings that give the park a plausible, corporate sleekness. The robots are less obviously mechanical than those in Westworld, which is the point. They are meant to be indistinguishable from people, and the film’s horror comes from that indistinguishability. A scene in which Chuck watches a robot being tested, or in which Tracy is confronted by a duplicate of herself, works because the film has established a world in which appearance cannot be trusted. Fonda’s reaction shots, often held a beat longer than expected, help to sell that horror. He does not overact. He watches, and the audience watches him watching, and the tension builds from that shared attention.
The supporting cast adds to the film’s interest. Blythe Danner is a smart, capable partner for Fonda, not a damsel to be rescued, and their working relationship feels professional and believable. Arthur Hill, as the Delos executive Dr Duffy, is smooth and reasonable in a way that makes his villainy more chilling. Yul Brynner returns briefly from Westworld as the Gunslinger, a nod to the earlier film that fans appreciated, even if his appearance is more of a cameo than a substantial role. Together, they create a world that feels like a real corporation, with real public relations, real security and real secrets, rather than a cartoon evil empire.
A film worth revisiting
Futureworld did not become a classic, and it did not launch a franchise in the way its makers may have hoped. Westworld would later be reinvented as a successful television series, but Futureworld itself has remained a cult item, remembered by science-fiction fans and by Fonda completists rather than by general audiences. That is a pity, because the film’s central idea, that powerful institutions might use technology to replace dissent with compliance, has only become more relevant. In an age of deepfakes, synthetic media and corporate control of information, Futureworld’s warning about duplicates feels less like fantasy and more like a metaphor.
For Peter Fonda, Futureworld was a chance to play a contemporary hero, a man in a suit rather than on a motorcycle, who uses his intelligence rather than his fists. Chuck Browning is not one of Fonda’s most famous roles, but he is a useful reminder of the actor’s range. Fonda could be quiet and watchful in a western, reckless and funny in a car-chase film, frightened and determined in a horror-thriller, and curious and sceptical in a science-fiction thriller, all within a few years. Watch Futureworld for its ideas, for its period vision of the future, and for Fonda’s performance as a reporter who refuses to stop asking questions, even when the answers are more frightening than the questions themselves.