HBO's 'Westworld' is a big, fat homework assignmen
Hank StueverWashington Post
While watching the first four episodes of HBO's extravagant but disappointing science fiction head-scratcher "Westworld," it struck me that this new drama is, in just about every way that counts, the opposite of what most viewers want or need right now. We're more than ready for an escape from current events, so it's a bummer to line up for a roller-coaster ride and instead be handed a yoga mat to facilitate the watching of 10 episodes that will require disciplined concentration and soulful contemplation.
"Westworld" is deep and brooding, but it's the wrong kind of deep and it's a style of brooding that's already been brooded a thousand times, especially in the sci-fi genre. The literary notion of robot rebellion has been around for about a century, when Czech playwright Karel Capek's "R.U.R." was performed in 1921, in which the issues of identity and hostility were evident even then.
Visually, "Westworld" is a gorgeous and occasionally captivating treat, yet it's wrapped up in a story that is astringent and sterile. Its creators, Jonathan Newton and Lisa Joy, have touted "Westworld's" philosophical bent as a selling point - exploring, per Joy's description of the show, "what it means to be human, from the outside in. ... It's a meditation on consciousness - the blessing and the burden of it."
In other words, class, "Westworld" is a big, fat homework assignment. The only fun here, if you can call it that, might be watching HBO burn some serious moola.
Based on Michael Crichton's 1973 movie that starred Yul Brynner as a gunslinging robot-on-the-fritz who begins murdering the elite customers at a futuristic Wild West theme park, "Westworld" arrives Sunday night after a long gestation period of delays and reshoots. The result is the opposite of effortless (indeed, "Westworld" is effort-full) and its perfectionist tendencies are very much in evidence. "Westworld" is nothing if not precise and calculated.
This attention to detail conveniently matches the overall premise: Set in some distant future, "Westworld" is about a vacation resort in the American boonies, where guests arrive by bullet train and pay (according to one customer) $40,000 a day to ride a locomotive into the desert West of the 1880s.
In the ersatz frontier town of Sweetwater, a citizenry of lifelike cyborgs - known to their makers as "hosts" - provide a Sensurround John Wayne experience, following a nearly limitless array of preprogrammed story lines and dialogue. A client can immediately set about living his or her Wild West fantasy, whether it's robbing banks, joining a sheriff's posse (atop synthetic horses) or heading straight to the saloon, where, in a nicely anachronistic twist, the player piano plinks out old-timey covers of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" and the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black." Some guests go straight upstairs for a romp with one or more saloon girls (or boys). The guests can become heroes or villains or toggle between the two, since the ethics of the place are always reset. The further a customer wanders out into the chaparral, the wilder the story choices become.
"Westworld" isn't particularly eager to explain everything at once (what decent premium cable drama ever is?), and Newton and Joy make an unorthodox decision to begin their story by backing into it, focusing first on the machines instead of the humans. (Some of what follows may count as spoilers; keep your eyes peeled for rattlers.)
Evan Rachel Wood ("True Blood") plays Dolores Abernathy, the pretty daughter of a cattle rancher. Dolores' narrative loop starts each day with a cheerful mornin' horseback ride into town, where she may or may not fall in love with a heroic newcomer, in some cases played by James Marsden (I'll leave it to viewers to guess whether he's a host or a guest). Sadly, Dolores often ends her day with a violent attack on the ranch by a gang of marauders, in which she may or may not be dragged to the barn and raped.
Dolores has no say in the matter; none of the hosts in Westworld are in control of their fates, nor can they harm a guest. If a guest shoots them, they bleed and die; if they shoot a guest, the bullets bounce harmlessly away. But Dolores, by design, does not store these horrors in her hard drive. Once the day's carnage at Westworld is judged to be over, a human night crew comes along and scoops up the dead (or deactivates the wounded), brings them back to the shop, fixes them up and reboots them (get it?) for another day of adventure as new guests arrive.
What happens backstage in the nerve center of Westworld is undeniably fascinating - and where this new version leaps far ahead of Crichton's original story.
Crichton, after all, was coming from the ambivalent "high tech/high touch" era of wariness and future shock, when computer technology was not to be trusted, even if it was programmed to be harmless. This "Westworld," firmly rooted in the age of Siri and driverless Uber, cultivates and even celebrates the idea that machines can and will achieve higher consciousness and self-awareness. It's not entirely clear why Newton and Joy didn't go ahead and envision their Westworld as a virtual-reality experience rather than as a cumbersome physical space populated with robots - other than it's never going to be exciting to watch a TV show about people wearing VR goggles.
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