Theme parks are expensive. That means you often have to make the difficult choice of which parks to explore and which parks to skip. This decision is even harder, though, when you have to pick between two parks that offer unique experiences that can’t be recreated anywhere else in the world. I’m referring to the two most famous theme parks in fiction: Westworld and Jurassic Park. Both based on the work of the late Michael Crichton, HBO’s Westworld series and Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park film introduce audiences to breathtaking locations that host scientifically miraculously adventures. But if you can only afford to visit one of these parks, which should you choose?
Entertainment Value
As any five-year-old knows, dinosaurs are objectively awesome, and even the chance to see their skeletons is fairly exciting. So the opportunity to see living, breathing dinosaurs would undoubtedly be incredible. Watching a fearsome Tyrannosaurus rampage or a gentle Brachiosaurus graze in the fields would likely make a lasting impact on kids (and adults) of all ages. Clearly no expense was spared.
Westworld, meanwhile, is a truly immersive experience that allows you to freely engage with the park’s android hosts. Traversing Sweetwater and other locations based on the Wild West, guests can participate in any of the activities you’d associate with a John Wayne-style cowboy: riding a horse, having a shootout with outlaws, stopping by a saloon, and so on. Westworld provides guests with a number of constantly changing storylines involving the robotic residents of the park. However, if guests aren’t interested in these narratives, they’re also welcome to engage in whatever actions they wish to with the hosts no matter how violent, intemperate, or depraved.
Kid Friendly
Taking a child to Westworld should immediately spark a DHS investigation. The amount of explicit content, substance abuse, and visceral violence in the park means no kid should come anywhere near Westworld. Even many (if not most) of the park’s pre-programmed narratives feature levels of brutality that would most certainly traumatize a child.
Jurassic Park, on the other hand, would be a significantly less harrowing experience for kids. The dinosaurs appear to coexist peacefully for the most part, and the presence of many herbivores on the island should limit the amount of dinosaur-on-dinosaur aggression. Yes, carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus will eat their Jurassic neighbors if given the chance, but such circle-of-life behavior is hopefully the most upsetting sight children can experience in the part. Though I hear some of the dinosaurs have developed a taste for lawyers.
Safety
To say Jurassic Park has a lousy health and safety record would be a Brontosaurus-sized understatement. Ignoring the events of later films like Jurassic World, the original park never even had a chance to open up to the public before shutting down. Before even a single ticket could be sold, at least four employees and one guest died. While the majority of these fatalities were linked to an unusually powerful storm and to Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight, Seinfeld) sabotaging the park’s security systems, you can understand why the group of scientists brought in to ensure park safety would give it a failing grade.
Westworld certainly has a longer record to examine. Having been opened for more than thirty years, Westworld generally avoided significant incidents in that timeframe. One of the incidents that did occur led to the murder of one of the park’s co-founders, but Arnold’s (Jeffrey Wright, Angels in America) death was at least of his own volition. Otherwise, the hosts were prohibited from harming guests for at least three decades.
Of course, when things went wrong in Westworld, they went catastrophically wrong. No guests and employees were safe when Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood, Frozen II) killed the park’s other co-founder and led the hosts in massacring all of the humans they could find. So timing is everything when booking a visit to Westworld; do your best to avoid android uprisings that have been in the making for decades.
Ethics
In the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, Thor: Ragnarok), “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” By cloning and genetically modifying extinct species, the minds behind Jurassic Park decided to play god on an epic scale. What makes this decision worse is that their primary motivations were hubris and greed. Rather than use this scientific achievement for fighting diseases, saving endangered species, or protecting the environment, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough, The Great Escape) and his investors were looking to create a crowd-pleasing spectacle that would rake in tons of money. Jurassic Park is what happens when capitalism and science ignore ethics.
But if the ethical considerations of Jurassic Park are dubious, the moral dynamics of Westworld are absolutely nightmarish. Creating androids with artificial intelligence already poses serious philosophical questions. Knowing that the hosts are capable of forming memories, feeling emotions, and experiencing pain makes these questions even graver. The hosts may have their memories wiped, but Maeve (Thandie Newton, The Truth About Charlie) proves that the hosts can be traumatized by their interactions with guests and other hosts. That means every injury, murder, and rape is experienced by a thinking, feeling individual who may be haunted by these acts forever. The park creates, enslaves, and tortures hosts solely for the sadistic pleasure of the guests. And even worse, we gradually discover that these same hosts are capable of free will.
Even beyond those horrors, Bernard (Wright) later discovers that the park’s owners have been collecting data on guests and attempting to create human-host hybrids in order to achieve immortality. To put it bluntly, Westworld is a cruel, twisted science experiment at its very core and reflects a total lack of conscience at every level of the organization.
Final Verdict
Jurassic Park may have been a failure before the park even opened, but Westworld’s brutality and hellish disregard for ethics are unparalleled. While there is a chance you or a friend may be eaten alive at Jurassic Park, at least you won’t be traumatizing a park full of enslaved androids as you slowly reveal your own depravity and penchant for atrocities. Westworld is a dream vacation for antisocial sociopaths. For everyone else, stick with the cool dinosaurs.
Jurassic Park is currently streaming on Netflix, while Westworld is streaming on HBO NOW, and Hulu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDJbFA32_QY&t=17s
