And now for something completely different.
Sunday October 2, HBO debuted its re-imagining of Westworld, which was based on a 1973 movie written and directed by Michael Crichton. Westworld was a major example of the weird old days of 70s science fiction on film, of a piece with Rollerball, Logan’s Run and Silent Running. In the film, there’s this major corporation running a sort of “adult” Disneyland (featuring Medieval World and Roman World in addition to West World) where the “animatronic” characters are actually androids capable of interacting with humans at almost any level. But their programming starts to go awry (in what may be one of the first mentions of a computer virus on film), and the androids start killing the customers, so that the movie ends up as a horror-stalker scenario where star Richard Benjamin (and his 70s pornstache) is being hunted by a sinister android gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner and dressed almost exactly like his character in The Magnificent Seven).
The difference here is that in the movie the androids were an unknown Other attacking the human protagonists, while in the TV show, the human customers are largely an afterthought to the narrative, with secondary focus given to the corporate staff running the resort and maintaining the androids, with the ultimate focus going to the androids themselves, whose increasingly complex programming is causing some of them to realize that their world is artificial and everything in their lives – including their deaths – is scripted for the amusement of others.
Foremost of these androids is the pure, beautiful and ever-suffering Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood) who apparently exists to see her father get killed over and over again. She and her father both start to encounter what their inventor calls “reveries” of past programming. But since their real-time experiences occur within a repeated script, the pilot episode plays less like the Westworld movie and more like a weird cross between Groundhog Day and Deadwood.
The odd thing about this setup is that even though the android “hosts” are there as stock Western characters for human tourists, they also seem to have interaction with each other that may not be strictly necessary for the purpose of the business. For instance, the pilot episode sets up a romance between Dolores and Teddy (James Marsden), one of the “Newcomers” who just came to town. But then Teddy gets killed, more than once, and is revealed to be one of the hosts. It raises the question of whether the characters were “built” to be involved with anyone else, especially since their scripts change in response to customer interaction but otherwise repeat.
Meanwhile, the evil gunslinger in black is revealed to be a human (Ed Harris), who seems to be pursuing some quest within the setting that is unexplained at this point. Back in the company labs, the head of the programmers (veteran character actor Jeffrey Wright) is trying to integrate the new programming codes with the help of the company’s founder, Ford (Anthony Hopkins). Ford is both gentlemanly and sinister, a man who genuinely thinks of himself as a loving God in control of the perfect world he created. The sort of role Anthony Hopkins could do in his sleep.
Otherwise, again, the focus is away from the humans (other than a small story with Currie Graham as a deputized crimefighter) which produces a deliberately alienating effect when one sees how they treat the androids. The female hosts (not all of whom are prostitutes) are used to prurient ends by the male guests, and when two of those guests hire Teddy as a local guide, they raise the question of whether they should take him out to the wilderness and kill him just because they can. So once again James Marsden is cast as the nice, handsome guy who exists to get stomped on. It seems to be his karma for some reason.
That artificiality makes the show seem rather sterile, though I’m pretty sure that’s by design. But that, and the question of how long it will take the whole situation to blow up, raises the question of whether this premise can be stretched out past one season, although it seems like it would be a very interesting miniseries.