- Share
- Share on Facebook
- Share on Twitter
- Share on Google+
- Share on Reddit
- Email a friend
REVIEW
WITH Game of Thrones nearing the end of its run, HBO is desperate for another big, buzzy drama hit.
It had hoped Vinyl would fill that spot but the 70s-set music series flopped like Homer Simpson diving off a 10-metre board. So it really needs a success story with Westworld, an ambitious sci-fi western that cost $100 million to make.
Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 cult movie, the revamped concept was developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, with J.J. Abrams on board as executive producer.
On the surface, Westworld is a gigantic “theme park” where rich people go for an all-encompassing experience of the Wild West, a place designed to seduce everyone who sets foot inside it.
Only none of the park inhabitants are real. They’re all robots — incredibly sophisticated robots, called “hosts”, with absolutely no idea they’re not real. They interact with the park’s guests and with each other, with perfect mimicry of human features, gestures and speech. They’re programmed to feel the whole gamut of human emotions, from love to fear. They also feel pain.
These unfortunate beings only serve as the playthings of the cashed-up customers that visit Westworld, serving as a romp in the sack or a guide on a hunt for dangerous fugitives in the hills. Sometimes, a guest’s desires are more grotesque with rape fantasies and senseless, gory violence on the cards. And through it all, the hosts take it.
Can you trust what you see?Source:Supplied
It’s emphasised again and again that they’re not real, merely synthetic models and lines of computer code. Their memories are also wiped at the end of every interaction and their days restart in exactly the same way.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a story worthy of $100 million if there wasn’t a snafu. A new update to the hosts leaves a few glitching, able to recall past memories.
The malfunctioning hosts are recalled and either “cleared” to go back in or “decommissioned” into cold storage in the basement, a horrifying tableau that could send anyone with a fear of mannequins into a spin.
The corporation that runs the park and its enigmatic founder Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) are playing god, creating the narratives and the personalities that inhabit the park. There’s clearly a secret plan, or possibly several, beyond the adult playground.
In the original 1973 movie, the robots rebel and fight back, sick of being at the sticky end of the guests’ whims.
Here, at least in the first handful of episodes, there’s a hint of what’s to come as some of the hosts begin to display what could be sentience. An early reference to a “critical incident” in the park 30 years ago is foreboding.
The cold world of the human puppeteers is also filled with intrigue as opaque and opposing agendas are teased out bit by bit. There’s a lot to unravel for a committed viewer.
At times the dialogue is heavy with exposition but there is a lot to take in, with several subplots that will, presumably, come together.
The ‘human’ world.Source:Supplied
The production values of Westworld gives us two visually stunning, richly textured worlds — the open vistas and dusty Wild West of the park and the steely, hi-tech and claustrophobic atmosphere of the human quarters.
The attention in the set design is highly impressive from the smallest detail in the saloon to Ford’s office with its wall of masks. The process in which new hosts are created means you’ll never look at another 3D printer the same way. You can see where all that production money was spent.
Given the Crichton connection, it would be easy to dismiss Westworld as Jurassic Park with robots. But that would miss its depth as a TV show unafraid to ask the big question about life: What does it mean to be human?
If we are, as many have posited, an amalgam of our memories, emotions and experiences, then how do we differ from artificial beings capable of remembering and feeling?
One of the things Westworld does especially well is to build out the characterisation of the host characters, beings that, technically, have no personalities. The actors embodying the hosts — Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton among them — have done a spectacular job in making them seem real while always reminding us they’re not with a timely twitch or blank look.
That the hosts often feel more empathetic and rounded out than the human characters is no accident. Westworld is challenging us to think about evolution and human progress and, as one glitching host puts it, “the question you’re not supposed to ask, answers you’re not supposed to know”.
The complexity of the story, as well as the ambitious scope of its production will easily invite comparisons to Game of Thrones. It’s the closest HBO has come to a drama that has the same level of characterisation, narrative drive and a general sense that this could be the next thing to blow up in the Zeitgeist.
While a few years ago, you’d be right to be sceptical that a mishmash of sci-fi and western could be embraced by a mainstream audience, let’s remember that Game of Thrones is a fantasy series with dragons and giants.
Westworld airs on Showcase on Foxtel at 12pm and 8.30pm on Mondays.
Continue the conversation on Twitter with @wenleima.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét