Westworld Season One

A spectacular feast with Dolby Vision HDR encoding makes for a rollicking bingefest before you watch Season Two...

On the one hand, TV show reboots of 40-year old movies don’t really have a very good track record. On the other hand... Jonathan Nolan. Nolan is sometime collaborator with his more famous brother, Christopher Nolan. As the story man behind Memento, and co-writer of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, The Prestige and Interstellar, and the creator of the TV series Person of Interest, you have to at least give it a go.

And Nolan and his wife, co-creator Lisa Joy, did more than give Westworld a go. They took the premise of a decent, smart actioner from the 1970s’ Michael Crichton’s debut directorial effort, and turned it in work of art and philosophy.

Action? Yes, but it’s not all about that. Ten episodes of robots being bad to humans would perhaps have become tedious. But tension can be lacking with pre-rebellion robots: they can be counted on to never harm a human. So Westworld goes for the slow burn, with a season-long mystery. Mysteries! What is at the centre of the maze for which the Man in Black (Ed Harris) is searching? What are Dolores’ (Evan Rachel Wood) flashbacks really all about? Will Maeve (Thandie Newton) discover who she really is? Is Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) actually working to undermine Dr Ford (Anthony Hopkins)? And are those androids going to finally start causing mayhem? (Spoiler: Yes they are! And it’s very satisfying when they do.)

But it is a slow burn, and it rewards close attention because a lot of threads are laid out, and they are pretty much all tied up by the end. The more you’ve followed, the more satisfying it becomes.

Are there anachronisms and inconsistencies in a story of this complexity? I thought there may have been, but then each I identified was resolved on a second viewing. There’s even a plausible explanation given for the androids interacting when no humans are around — recentering, improving themselves. Even the ranch mayhem in the first episode, which seems initially to be android-only (and thus a wasted expense) turned out to be in anticipation of the intervention of a ‘guest’.

Among the many layers to this production are the references to classic westerns, especially The Searchers, much of which was shot in the same country. And amongst the ways that genre was honoured was the use of film rather than digital cinema for shooting. And the use of live sets rather than green screen.

This Ultra-HD Blu-ray presentation allows the viewer to luxuriate in the film. There is occasionally a fine sprinkling of grain, faithfully preserved and presented by the format. Being made for TV, the presentation is in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio rather than the wide Cinemascope of a John Ford colour production, but with the enormous vistas and exceptional detail, it seems wide anyway.

But there is also something quite unusual about this presentation. There are two main environments: the park itself in which the guests are amused, all of which resembles the late 19th century American west. And then there’s the largely underground environment where the damaged androids are repaired, new ones are built, old ones are warehoused. The

latter environment has largely dark backgrounds with lit people. But in the park, often things are in the reverse. As we see Teddy (James Marsden) enter town for the first time (just one of his innumerable arrivals), his dark grey outfit and the browns of the buildings are... dark. Much darker than we’re used to seeing. Around those things were the bright ground, sunlit, and the sky and other highlights. It was hard to make out detail under room lights in those darker areas. There are a lot of shots of characters silhouetted, or with faces shadowed by wide-brimmed hats. Again, hard to make out.

Until I turned off the room lights and watched on an OLED TV in a proper environment. Then the detail was there. The dark faces against the light surroundings drew attention in the same way that light faces draw attention when against a dark background. Except, perhaps, for a more disquieting tone.

The red of the soil, and green of the sparse foliage, is also deeper and richer than is the norm, as though it is a desert dampened by a recent rain.

All this seems to be enhanced by the Dolby Vision encoding — this is my first experience of a Dolby Vision title. Dolby Vision allows up to 12 bits of colour and brightness resolution (up from 10 in standard HDR, and 8 in regular Blu-ray), along with scene-by-scene metadata adjusting the scale. I checked sections on the same system — Yamaha Aventage RX-A3070 and LG OLED TV — except using a Sony UHD player instead of the Oppo BDP-203. The TV reported playback as HDR rather than Dolby Vision in that case. My sense was a very subtle narrowing of dynamic range in the HDR presentation, particularly at the dark end of the scale.

Unusually, the Ultra-HD Blu-ray version of Westworld we reviewed came without a regular Blu-ray version. It would have been interesting to see how they compared.

One of the reasons that Blu-ray discs are normally provided with Ultra-HD releases is because in addition to a copy of the movie, they carry the special extras. Not this one: there are lots of featurettes — 95 minutes of them in all — including seven focusing closely on pivotal moments within the series. According to the Sony player, these were all encoded in HEVC, but I assume that they are full-HD in resolution rather than UHD.

I don’t have any tools for determining the average bit-rate on Ultra-HD Blu-Ray. But the Oppo BDP-203 player shows the video bit-rate on a second-by-second basis. I expect it’s an average over that second, rather than some sample of the instantaneous peak. Anyway, this ranged from 0.1Mbps (during full black fades) to, in some scenes, the mid-70s of megabits per second. That was during a full screen pan down into a forest, with all the detail that implies. The average I’d guess to be somewhere in the mid-to-high 30s of megabits per second.

Each episode has nine chapters, except for the movie-length finale. In each case the second chapter starts at 1:41. The significance of that? It marks the end of the credits. You can easily skip to the action with each new episode. There’s also a chapter mark within a fraction of a second from the end of the title, so you can use the skip key to jump to the next title (or main menu if there are no more).

The sound is presented in Dolby Atmos, and it also is rich and deep and somewhat foreboding. But priority has been properly given to clarity of dialogue, rather than flashy effects. I wasn’t in the slightest disappointed in the sound, but neither would I be using it to show off my system.

The other week I watched the fine German TV show Dark on Netflix. I could have chosen the original audio, but the default to an English dub and a certain laziness on my part prompted me to leave it as it was. And I spent the show somewhat dissatisfied with the acting, entirely due to the voice actors. It make me realise how many non-Englishspeakers must get a second-rate version of English language productions. But it must be the worst for Polish people. As with so many other discs, the Polish version isn’t a dub, it’s a voice-over translation by a single male voice, with the original dialogue playing at a low level in the background. Perhaps Polish people are used to it.