Imagine going on a holiday where you could dress up as a cowboy and live out your fantasies of being, well, a cowboy. That’s the premise of the blockbuster science fiction series Westworld. The wild, wild west is not so wild anymore, but more of a tame and futuristic theme park for rich tourists to live out their cowboy fantasies. Some of these are pretty dark and show a disdain for humanity or our closest Android cousins.
In that sense, the wild is on the edge of morality. Who really fantasises about being a ruthless killer or an outlaw who murders everyone he meets? But that is the weirdness of the human spirit that this series explores, and explores so well.
The first three seasons are some of the best sci-fi television I’ve ever seen. I never got ’round to the fourth, and have only read bad things, so I skipped it. But I’ve loved revisiting those first couple of seasons to write this.
There is not only excellent cinematography for your eyes to feast upon, but also some stellar filmmaking in the old-fashioned sense. It (sometimes) looks like the twee cowboy films I remember from my childhood (Clint Eastwood only ever had two expressions, a distant stare and pissed off) but is lovingly shot with wonderful close-ups and clear attention to detail.
Based on a blockbuster film of the same name – which was the first major breakthrough for one Michael Crichton – the series is a masterful adaptation that upends the focus from the humans to the androids. Crichton is credited as a writer for the first episode in 2016, so there is clear – and rarely seen – continuity.
In the film, the robots malfunction – with Yul Brenner (obviously) playing the evil black-hat cowboy who runs amok. His bitter, evil-eyed character is replaced by the even better Ed Harris, who is no less ruthless as the simply-named Man in Black. Who he is, and what he is doing, is never obvious – nor is the time when Harris’s actions happen. It’s a great subplot to the main story arcs, which constantly keeps you guessing.
Watch Westworld on Showmax for R19/week – click here to learn more
But back to the central theme of humanity, which is fundamentally what science fiction is all about. Gifted writers, and now filmmakers, look to the future and extrapolate how we will evolve, as much emotionally and intellectually as technologically.
In one future, as envisioned in the Westworld theme park, the realism of the androids in this futuristic vision of entertainment (it gets baking hot during the day, and you literally have to ride across large desert plains) is a part of the appeal.
Instead of being mindless automatons of the past (circa 2018), these androids have neural networks and rudimentary emotional reactions. The young mother mourning the loss of her daughter truly believes it happened to her and can access those memories. This obviously adds realism for the rich wannabe-cowboy tourists. It also allows the filmmakers to explore those very emotions: what does it mean to love, to experience loss and pain, if the “person” doing the suffering is an artificial thing built for entertainment? When does realism become real?
The pain of loss certainly seems real for the androids – which is in no small part down to the calibre of actresses in Thandiwe Newton and Evan Rachel Wood (as the perennially unlucky Dolores). Her narrative arc always seems to involve her lost-but-returned beau, played by James Marsden. There’s a role for Breaking Bad’s excellent Aaron Paul and one of the other, eldest Hemsworth brothers, Luke Hemsworth.