Westworld season 1 episode 1 review android#
Twisting Crichton’s central premise, Westworld takes the 1973 film’s central character, Yul Brynner’s android Man in Black and turns him into a human, albeit one who’s been visiting the park for over 30 years. Developed from that same idea though, Nolan takes the seeds and plants multiple trees out of it, that not only make the proceedings infinitely more interesting but also set the stage for narrative possibilities down the road. That movie, despite being ahead of its time in imagining certain gloomy AI scenarios, was far too simplistic in depicting its central storyline. Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld was about a theme park of robots that eventually go haywire and turn in on the park’s creators and human inhabitants.
Westworld season 1 episode 1 review series#
Regardless, for anyone that has had the misfortune of having missed this series and stumbling upon this review, I will avoid any spoilers for future episodes, covering only the material revealed until the episode being reviewed. Consequently, this is a re-watch I already saw the first season 3 years ago. There’s so much to uncover in this sprawling, scripted “original” premiere that I just had to revisit the series on an episode by episode basis, nearly 3 years after it aired on HBO on October 2, 2016. In Westworld, science-fiction meets westerns as Michael Crichton’s idea of a theme park populated by artificial androids not only comes to life, but is expanded in all directons and stretched several layers beyond what the original concept provisioned for.
Peppered with hot dozes of philosophical outbursts, writers, showrunners and real-life couple Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have scripted a cacophony of ideas laid out across the juxtaposition of two thematically unrelated genres. These are just some of the heavy-handed, thought-provoking questions posed by the Westworld series premiere. What does it mean to be real? To feel emotions? To remember? To be kind, gentle and noble? To be vile, sadistic and brutal? Can we conquer disease, and if so, what marks the next step in human evolution? What does it even mean to be more real? To be more human?