[TV REVIEW] Westworld on HBO

When Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy began working with Westworld they drew upon the director and sci-fi author Michael Crichton's film from 1973 with the same name, about a futuristic amusement park in Wild West milieu for adults, populated with androids, or game characters, that goes berserk and starts killing the visitors.

The TV show has a slower pace, but the feeling of impending disaster and chaos is imminent. Another thing that differs the new HBO show from the film is that the perspective has shifted. Here the victims aren't humans that are terrorized by robots running amok, but it's rather the androids that are the victims of the unscrupulous and sadistic visitors. Whereas Yul Brunner's android character was the scary monster in the film, Ed Harris' nameless and mysterious human character is so far the soulless monster of the show, who kills and rapes without giving the victim a thought.

We find ourselves in the near future when artificial intelligence technology has come so far that the theme park can be populated by androids that are so human-like that it's almost impossible to distinguish between humans and androids. The plot switches between two scenes.

One is the theme world Westworld. A bacchanalian Wild West park where rich people go to act out, often dark and depraved, fantasies, without having to live with the consequences it would have in the real world. You can get anything you want - all forms of sexual fantasies, murdering anyone and as many as you want, playing sheriff in epic Western adventure with gunslingers and wanted outlaws. On site there are "hosts" - human-like androids in the form of cowboys, brothel girls, bounty hunters and simple farmers - programmed with specific dialogues and stories, but also with some room for improvisation in interaction with the guests. They are shot dead, raped and subjected to tragedies and abuse, only to be repaired, restarted and wake up to a new day, just as sunny as the day before, with the memories of the last day deleted. But a glitch in the system occur, and many of them suddenly remember things, and have feelings that something is wrong with their world.

The second scene is the great high-tech facility where the brilliant mastermind behind Westworld - Doctor Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) - and his group of puppet-masters manufacture, repair, program and write screenplays for the androids. The parallel action strands are carefully monitored from these sterile headquarters. One of the androids, Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood), is trapped in a horror filled day that always ends with the robbery at her farm where her father and mother usually are shot and killed. It's easy to empathize with and become emotional thinking about the horrors that Dolores have had to endure before she's repaired, reprogrammed and sent back into the park again, even though she's just a robot with circuit boards and a combination of ones and zeros instead of a limbic system.

The season premiere opens with a sequence that sets the tone. The camera zooms in on Dolores sitting stiff and expressionless on a chair in a dark, futuristic room. She's asked if she ever questioned her reality. It's commendably filmed and the dialogue reflects an ambivalence and ambiguity that continues to run like a thread through the story. What is man? What is a robot? When does the one become the other? Can robots have consciousness? What happens when man's hubris goes too far, and the technology we created turn against us? And how would a world were man's worst impulses can rein free free look like? How do we behave towards what we have created when it comes to life and becomes aware?

Classic science fiction themes are seamlessly merged with the tantalizing lawlessness and the wide, colorful horizons of the Wild West aesthetics, in an immediately seductive, gripping, philosophical, sophisticated and terrifying show, which features a brilliant cast and successfully combines big, wild and convincing ideas with visual splendor and melancholy around the darker sides of humanity. 

Westworld is a beautiful and unique sci-fi dystopia, and the generous budget is well managed and makes the show one of the year's most interesting. After the first episode I can conclude that it has everything one could wish for in great sci-fi: a sense of awe and wonder, existential questions, problematization of technological development, etc.