WESTWORLD - Ep. 1, The Orginal - A TV Review

HBO's new sci-fi opus premiered on Sunday, and we here at PRC can't wait to talk about this freaky-ass marriage of Michael Crichton, JJ Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Bryan Burk. Let's swat some flies and dig in!

Spoiler Warning - Not that there's much to spoil so far, but I'm not exactly going to avoid dealing with explicit plot points, so...read at your own risk. 

I was really tempted to sit here and say "wow! what an original premise! what a unique concept!" but I can't. Not because it's a bad idea or anything like that. But because it's not an original idea. 'Westworld' the series, developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, is based in a 43 year old movie that was written and directed by Michael Crichton. Crichton's fingerprints are all over the backbone of this series and you can even see some elements that would eventually evolve into 'Jurassic Park'. So as great, wondrous, and weird as the premiere of this series is, it's even weirder to think that the idea behind it is nearly half a century old. This first episode, titled "The Original", sets up a pretty interesting, if more than a bit complex, idea. 

Hosts "Teddy" and "Dolores"

Sometime in the future, the very wealthy can amuse themselves by entering what amounts to a theme park cum video game. Pay for your stay, and you can visit the Old West, wear a cowboy hat and gunbelt, and interact with the old timey residents. The visitors, called "newcomers" by the residents, interact with pre-programmed androids, called "hosts", in any way they desire. The androids operate off a very sophisticated AI that prompts them to follow a script but also leaves room for improvisation and realistic reactions to the newcomers. Want to spend all your time getting drunk with whores in the saloon? Go ahead. Want to ride up into the hills to chase a bandit? Right this way, sir. Want to go the "straight evil" route, as one newcomer mentions? Well, you can do that, too. In fact, one visitor, an unnamed man dressed all in black and played with a business-like cruelty by Ed Harris, seems to be doing just that. He murders, rapes and scalps, but also seems to be after something real in this unreal world.

As I mentioned, the hosts have scripts they are programmed to follow, until a programming update starts to trigger some mild malfunctions. But for the most part, things run smoothly. Evan Rachel Wood plays "Dolores", a gentle young android lady who divides her time between painting landscapes and doting on her father and boyfriend, "Teddy" (James Marsden). Watching these performances, the thing that popped into my head was the film 'Starman' wherein Jeff Bridges plays an alien inhabiting a human body. The stiff, awkward movements and stilted cadence effectively gave the impression of someone who is entirely unused to the idea of simply existing. Wood, Marsden, and Louis Herthum (who plays "Peter", Dolores' father) all shift from believable yet archetypal western characters to convincingly glitchy androids with such deftness that you forget, for a moment, that they are real people acting. Wood and Herthum have scenes where they deliver dialogue while completely nude and it comes off as unsettling as watching a mannequin suddenly speak. 

Westworld's creator, Ford

Meanwhile, the outside world (think a less aggressive version of the controllers and control room from 'The Hunger Games') is less defined than the Western World. Jeffrey Wright, Sidese Babett Knudsen, and Anthony Hopkins all do a good enough job at establishing the concept and rules of Westworld, but they're also not given much room to shine in the same way the hosts are. Still, it's clear what is going on in their world is going to trickle down and affect both newcomers and hosts adversely.

Visually, this shit is the dopest dope. As gorgeous as anything Chris Nolan and Wally Pfister shot, Jonah Nolan and his cinematographer Paul Cameron make the "west" seem as perfect as it could possibly be, which makes sense. Immersed in the gorgeous orange and pink vistas of southern Utah. the Newcomers are there for fun, not for realism. They'd expect the land to look like a postcard, so give them what they want, right? Everything has to be an archetype, not just the people/hosts living there.

I also want to give a quick shout out to Ramin Djawadi, the busy composer we all know and love from 'Game of Thrones'. Overall, he does a pretty good job, but one piece in particular, an orchestral version of "Paint It Black" done in a sort of Ennio Morricone-y way, elevates an already exciting action sequence to something that is nothing short of masterful. It gave me the same sort of chills Djawadi's work did during Cersei's coup d'etat/coup de grace in the season finale of GoT. Oh, and there's also an old-timey player piano doing a western version of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" that tickled me immensely. It was a sort of anachronism that was so sly it nearly got past me, but still gave you the sense that something about this "real" world isn't quite right.

"The Original" is a very well conceived and well executed pilot episode. It does what a good pilot should do - introduces the world (or in this case, the two worlds), establishes the rules, introduces the characters and gives them enough characterization to let us know who they are, and it sets up the conflicts of the season and series to come. Are they reverie glitches just glitches or is something more sinister afoot? What is Ed Harris up to? What is that map underneath the one host's scalp? Are we going to keep getting awesome renditions of popular rock songs?

All I can say is that Nolan and co. did such a great job in this first episode I'm damn sure going to turn in for the rest. And if it's all right with you guys, I'll keep writing about it.

FINAL SCORE - 9/10

Ed Harris is up to some wrong shit

Westworld airs on HBO Sunday nights at 9/8c