Morgan Reviews – Westworld
NSFW
I didn’t know much about the HBO series Westworld going into it, I knew it appeared to be set in the Old Wild West, it was a 1973 movie and short lived early 80’s tv show, I knew James Marsden’s character apparently died a lot for some reason from the AT&T U-verse commercial, and most recently, I’d heard something about a bunch of robot sex. So color me intrigued, I had to see this show.
So the premise is the same as past versions of this story, for those who don’t know; a powerful corporation runs an *amusement park* where instead of the characters in the park being people in costume, the characters are robots, programmed to provide a good time and adventure to the high paying guests. Catering to any desire of the guest, whether their intentions are black hat or white hat *bad and good respectively*.
As you would expect from a human-like android involved sci-fi story, multiple characters question whether or not they’re alive, and like a good sci-fi, some of them are not what they thought they were. But the storytelling leaves the viewer just as much in the dark as some characters, there’s a lot of layers and surprise twists.
And it’s really thought provoking, just as humans we sometimes have so much anger with our possible creator, imagine if you were made not only to experience life once, but going through the worst atrocities known to man daily. The kind of hatred you might hold for the thing/things that created you to go through that…unfathomable.
I seriously hate spoilers, so that’s all you get, kind of a little appetizer, I don’t want to give away anything crucial to the twist. But besides the fascinating story, the cast is excellent; Anthony Hopkins, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Jeffery Wright, Evan Rachael Wood and Ed Harris.
And the soundtrack makes this already epic show that much more awesome, especially after the death of Chris Cornell not long ago, when a piano version of Black Hole Sun starts playing in the first episode, strong emotions immediately start pulling me into this show, later in the series we hear the same piano treatment on The Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black, Radiohead’s No Surprises, Motion Picture Soundtrack and Fake Plastic Trees, The Animal’s House of the Rising Sun, one of the lesser known great songs from Nine Inch Nails Something I can Never Have, and Amy Winehouse’s Back in Black. And the original score you German composer Ramin Djawadi is absolutely mesmerizing.
The end of the first season is quite a shocker and it sets up what should be a great second season, which recently began filming and show writers are calling this one *Ambitious*. No release date so far, but you can probably look for S2 of Westworld to hit HBO late this year or early next.
TL;DR: Androids are built to meet every desire in an *amusement* park, but when some start remembering past *lives*, they might grow tired of your shit.
~Morgan@1063RL