Man or machine?
A.I. robots are all too human in ‘Westworld’
With “Game of Thrones” just two short seasons away from the end of its run, HBO has turned its sights on another large-scale epic to fill the upcoming void. With that in mind, prepare to get hooked on “Westworld,” an ambitious sci-fi western thriller based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie, and positively teeming with star power. The highly anticipated series premieres Sunday, Oct. 2, on HBO.
We know this about Crichton: he knows how to make a cutting-edge theme park dissolve into utter calamity. Two decades before dinosaurs rampaged across Isla Nublar in “Jurassic Park” (1993), androids ran amok in “Westworld” (1973).
HBO’s version of “Westworld,” like the film, takes place at a theme park in the near future, where technological advancements have allowed for the creation of near-human robots known as “hosts.” The hosts populate the park — Westworld — and are programmed to believe that they live in an American frontier town during the late 19th century. For a hefty sum, visitors can act out their wildest fantasies, however base, salacious or violent, in a totally safe environment: the hosts can be hurt or killed, but they can’t hurt or kill back. Needless to say, it doesn’t stay that way.
The creator of these lifelike machines is the brilliant Dr. Robert Ford, played by screen legend Sir Anthony Hopkins (“Hannibal,” 2001). Hopkins is joined by an all-star cast, and the series boasts enough A-listers to populate a Hollywood blockbuster. Ed Harris (“A Beautiful Mind,” 2001), Evan Rachel Wood (“The Wrestler,” 2008), James Marsden (“X-Men,” 2000), Thandie Newton (“The Pursuit of Happyness,” 2006), Jeffrey Wright (“Casino Royale,” 2006) and Rodrigo Santoro (“300,” 2006) all grace the screen, with J.J. Abrams — who seems to have a hand in just about every scifi production these days — among the show’s executive producers.
Artificial intelligence is always a fascinating subject to explore — and kind of a spooky one, particularly with how advanced we already are in the field. Westworld is essentially a pleasure island where filthy rich adults can do whatever they like to the hosts, who look, sound and feel completely human — as, indeed, they believe themselves to be. The series looks at the nature of humanity and sentience, and what exactly makes something alive.
When a glitch in the hosts appears to cause true sentience, they suddenly have an awareness of what’s happening to them and the ability and desire to fight back — and that’s where things get sticky for the park visitors.
“We’re dealing with human nature from two perspectives,” co-creator Jonathan Nolan told the Los Angeles Times. Unlike the film, which is told primarily from the perspective of two human visitors to “Westworld” who get caught up in the breakdown of the system, the series lets us see into the realities of both the humans and the hosts. The story opens on Dolores (Wood), a naive prairie girl who comes to recognize that the world and life she’s always known are a complete lie. The viewer is fully immersed in this western frontier world before we even get the broader view of what it actually is.
From there, the story goes back and forth between human and host — and we don’t always know which is which. Indeed, certain actors aren’t even sure whether their character is “alive” or not, so secretive are the showrunners.
It goes without saying that Crichton was years ahead of his time: he cooked up the idea of a computer virus before the first occurrence of the real thing. Now, however, artificial intelligence isn’t a sci-fi concept, it’s all but upon us.
“Picture your neurosis,” Nolan said to Entertainment Weekly. “Picture the things that keep you up at night — human behavior, artificial intelligence — any of those things that trouble you, worry you. That is exactly what the show is about.”
In terms of production, the series is drawing a lot of comparisons to “Game of Thrones” — another large-scale series with a massive cast, set in a place where very little is black and white (the same composer, Ramin Djawadi, even scores both series). Like “Game of Thrones,” showrunners also have the majority of the series mapped out from the get-go — yet, unlike that series, “Westworld” has only a screenplay to work from, rather than a seven-book novel series and the writer himself.
“We wanted a big story,” Nolan told Entertainment Weekly. “We wanted the story of the origin of a new species and how that would play out in its complexity.”
To that end, production went on a brief hiatus back in January to lay all the groundwork — both short term and long.
“It wasn’t about getting the first 10 [episodes] done, it was about mapping out what the next five or six years are going to be,” Marsden said in the same EW piece. “We wanted everything in line so that when the very last episode airs and we have our show finale, five or seven years down the line, we knew how it was going to end the first season.”
That’s good news for “Westworld” fans-to-be. Assuming the show takes off, we can expect at least five seasons. The series premieres Sunday, Oct. 2, on HBO.