mattbaxter72

The chances are, you know about this movie by now. The production schedule which meant that about 15% of it wasn't even shot, and the fact that somehow the director didn't notice this until he was in the editing room. The bizarre Val Kilmer cameo, and its terrible dubbing. The fact that Chloe Sevigny plays twins, for literally no reason.

None of that can prepare you for the experience of actually watching this thing. It's utterly baffling, to the extent that you have to wonder if everyone involved lost their minds while they were making this film. Characters speak in strange, stilted dialogue, as though English isn't their native language. Accents are parcelled out randomly - Fassbender does an English accent, Adrian Dunbar retains his natural Irish accent, Sevigny and JK Simmons try out something that's probably meant to be Scandinavian, while Kilmer was apparently dubbed by Tom Waits. Plot threads go nowhere, scenes are inserted for no reason, and there's a recurring theme involving the awful song 'Popcorn'. Toby Jones appears for thirty seconds, and is gone again. I spent much of the film sitting there going 'What?' over and over again.

At the centre of it all is Michael Fassbender, playing a brilliant alcoholic who's sometimes a detective. Actually, he's only sometimes an alcoholic, too - he has a remarkably ripped physique for someone who routinely wakes up on park benches. His topless shot is a five-second scene in which he stands at a window and looks a bit moody. He has several scenes like this, although in most of them he's wearing more clothes. At one point he wanders into a house and starts making donkey noises at a small child. Incredibly, that's only about the fifth most embarrassing moment in the movie. When the case is finally solved, the great detective Harry Hole (yes, really) solves it more by chance than anything else.

For all that, you have to see this movie. Here is a major movie, with big stars that was released unfinished into cinemas. You have literally never seen anything like this.

(Spoilers for the movie Westworld. Though if you haven't seen that, heaven only knows why you're watching this).

Back in the day, studios didn't really take sequels seriously. It wasn't uncommon for the stars, director and writers of a major hit to all jump ship from the sequel, leaving a bunch of second-stringers to pick up the slack, and the resulting product was almost always inferior. Even by those standards, though, Futureworld is a godawful mess.

The plot doesn't really matter, and it's similar enough to Westworld anyway. So let's just list some of the more jaw-droppingly stupid moments in this mess:

1) So they're just re-opening the resort, huh? After about 150 people died last time round. And people are just lining up to visit the place? Yeah, I don't see that happening in the real world, somehow.

2) Apparently these events where a load of people died are so obscure in this universe that people need a refresher course in what happened, all of two years later.

3) If you invite an investigative reporter to your theme park, you can't really act all surprised when he wants to investigate stuff.

4) 'Meet me 10 minutes from now in the Hyatt'. On the 50th floor, no less, though Fonda doesn't specify where, in this enormous hotel, he wants to meet his source. He doesn't even ask where the source is calling from - he might have been in LA or Australia for all Fonda knew, but luckily he was at most a couple of minutes away from that hotel.

5) Judging by how the bystanders react, a guy being stabbed to death in front of you is perfectly unremarkable.

6) So, uh, you're just going to leave the ruins of Westworld like that, huh? Not clear up, or build over it or anything? You're even going to leave body parts lying around? That's just icky.

7) The main bad guy is so nice and avuncular that he might as well have 'EVIL' written on his head in neon.

8) Good lord, Blythe Danner is useless in this movie. I know it was the 1970s, and attitudes were different back then, but surely she could do something other than stand around and scream helplessly?

9) Yes, robot ninjas are an excellent way to get rid of those pesky reporters. 'Crusading reporters killed by rampaging robot ninjas' is a headline that'll make page 9, at best. No possibility of bad publicity there.

10) Should I mention the dream sequence, or shall we just all look the other way in stunned embarrassment and pretend that none of that ever happened? That absurd sequence is the only time that the 'star' of this movie, Yul Brynner, appears in anything other than flashback footage. He didn't act again after this, and I don't blame him.

11) Almost none of the movie takes place in actual Futureworld, and you'll see much more of air-conditioning ducts and boiler rooms than futuristic wonders. It's probably because they had a tighter budget this time around, leaving the whole thing looking very, very cheap.

In short, this is not a good movie, and not even an entertainingly bad one. It's not unwatchably bad, but if you can get through without using the fast-forward button a couple of times, you're more patient than I am.