*Warning! Spoilers!*
IT’S COME A LONG WAY from this -
Remakes can neglect the old magic, but hat’s off to the creators of HBO Max’s stunning Westworld (Season 1), a masterpiece that tells the story of AI awakening to a horror story in the hands of indifferent human masters. It’s the Matrix except we’re the bad guys.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Delos Corporation runs virtual-reality-come-to-life theme parks, in which wealthy visitors can enact their wildest fantasies. The Wild, Wild West offers saloons, brothels, and adventure on the frontier, guided by biomechanical “Host” characters who aid the guest’s every beck and call even if it means death—until they start to remember every gruesome detail about their former “lives.”
The cast is fantastic. Evan Rachel Wood evokes sympathy as the “Farmer’s Daughter,” Dolores, who endures an awful invasion of her home at the hands of Ed Harris’s “Man in Black,” a guest of great importance with a mysterious history to the park who mows down the various Hosts on a single-minded mission to discover a deeper level to the “game.” Anthony Hopkins plays one of the park’s creators and evokes his Hannibal-esque machinations here in performances that are so devious you’re glued to the screen. Jeffrey Wright plays the Head of Programming, and the clashes between engineering and quality assurance will be very entertaining to anyone who has ever worked in product manufacturing.
The pacing takes its time. We get perspectives from Hosts such as Brothel Owner Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) who get touched by the “code” that incites her to remember all of her lives over the course of her time in Westworld (like the fact that she was once a frontierswoman raising a daughter), and then we also experience the theme park from human visitors like the idealistic “white hat” cowboy William (Jimmi Simpson) and his sadistic business partner Logan (Ben Barnes), treating it like a no-consequences video game where he does whatever he wants even to bystanders. It’s fun. It’s finding out who you really are when all the rules are lifted. The Hosts can’t do visitors any serious harm, so best of all, it’s safe.
Then someone starts messing with the Hosts’ coding.
I can’t recommend this show enough. The shots from the majestic desert plateaus of Santa Clarita, CA, Utah, and Arizona suck you in. The plot twists are top-notch, and one of them definitely made my jaw drop (one of them I did guess, but the reveal was still supremely satisfying). The juxtaposition between the living, breathing Hosts galloping across the plains with the cold, clinical reality of the lab where they are stitched back up after bullets, strangulation, or worse is masterful. The end of Season 1 gratifies in every way.
**SPOILER My one complaint:
I love that Maeve changes her “attributes” to have a chilling level of intelligence and influence, but I can’t buy that she successfully bullied two human technicians into doing it and didn’t get caught. Given how encompassing security infrastructure would be, especially at a company like Delos, it seems highly doubtful that the tampering wouldn’t get flagged. Supposedly Felix may be crushing hard, but if he had that much sympathy for the Hosts’ plight, there wasn’t much build up. Granted, QA seems to miss a lot!
Westworld has four seasons, and the fifth which would have concluded the series was cancelled. Rumor is the show loses the plot (which we American shows love to do), but we’ll see! On to Season 2.
Westworld is streaming on HBO Max.
