Saddle up and head for the hills, the robots in Westworld are revolting!
Every Wild West gold rush began with a handful of eccentric pioneers, staking a claim where no sane prospector would dream of digging — until the first nuggets are found, and a whole city comes rushing in.
That’s what has happened with Westworld (Sky Atlantic, subscription only), conceived as a quirky remake of a yul Brynner movie about a cowboy themepark where the gunslingers are androids.
Starring Thandie Newton as Maeve the cynical madam of a saloon brothel and Sir Anthony Hopkins as a mad inventor, the first series in 2016 built to a satisfying climax as the robots turned their six-shooters on the humans.
But the show was far more successful than Tv bosses expected. Audiences loved the violence, the sci-fi plot twists and the Spaghetti Western scenery. The networks had taken little notice while Westworld was developed — but they weren’t ignoring it now.
The effect is obvious. Westworld’s individual style has been replaced by something that feels corporate, as if every scene had to be approved by a committee of producers.
The set-piece tableaux and the close-ups of blood-spattered faces look as though they were drawn for comicbooks. A deliberate decision has been taken to make Westworld look more like a superhero movie. But viewer surveys and feedback groups have reported that ultracarnage and gore are popular too — so the robotic rebels have started acting like the zombies from another hit serial, The Walking Dead. Now, when they are gunned down, they disintegrate graphically.
The characters are taking themselves very seriously, a sure sign of a Tv show that’s too successful for its own good. They spout cod philosophy in agonised tones.
Innocent ranch girl Dolores (evan rachel Wood), now a bloodthirsty killer, delivered a five-minute lecture at a lynching party. She should have taken a lesson from Clint eastwood, and condensed her speech to two words between clenched teeth — far more effective.
A massively increased budget is not all bad news. More scenes are now shot on a filmic, epic scale, the way Westerns should be.
And the opening credits, already beautiful, have been reworked to become quite sumptuous — even if you’re not going to watch the series, you shouldn’t miss the dazzling delicacy of these images. Above all, the army of new writers dropped another tantalising clue that the show can be expanded: a dead tiger was discovered in a canyon, one more hint that there are other robot realities nearby. Westworld, meet eastworld. That should be interesting.
real-life violence is less stylised and more brutal than in fantasy Tv, a fact not lost on trainees in the commando documentary Secret Agent Selection: WW2 (BBC2). Sneaking up on a ‘Nazi sentry’ was one thing to contemplate, breaking his neck was quite another.
The recruits, including a drama teacher and a research scientist, were learning how to hide in the windswept landscape of the Cairngorms, and scale a cliff-face in heavy rain using three iron ladders that, unhelpfully, didn’t link up. If that wasn’t tough enough, they also had to swim across a loch.
But the only time they looked truly shaken was when one, a former Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, opened a beer bottle with his teeth. Heroic risk is one thing, dental recklessness quite another.
The rapid mix of history and reality show makes this series throughly absorbing. Clips of newsreel and glimpses of an agent’s file from the Forties are a reminder that we owe our freedom to fighting men and women like these.