Excellent pilot. Can’t wait to see where this goes. Makes me want to binge so bad.
Yep, need more episodes!!
Glad I am not going crazy. I thought that sounded like black hole sun.
I just wanted to jot down some more thoughts after watching the premiere again last night. There will be spoilers.
[spoiler]
Flipping the whole thing on its head so the robots are the protagonists is brilliant. Of course from their point of view, the guests and administrators of the park are truly evil.
Even when I was watching the beginning, before his nature is revealed, I was thinking about the essentially awful way James Marsden’s character uses Evan Rachel Woods’ to gratify his desires. The show brilliantly set up Woods as the robot being used by human Marden and when they revealed that he was also a robot and just a prop for The Man in Black’s horrible fantasy, I was blown away.
I really want to know what Ed Harris’ character is all about. Why does he get free reign in the park? Is his “next level” the killing of humans?
Speaking of mysteries, what was the “critical failure” from 30 years ago? Why is Anthony Hopkins’ Ford programming “reveries” into the robots?
Man, I loved the premier, and am really excited to see where they go.[/spoiler]
Also, here’s a cool tidbit about the music:
[quote]
“Part of the fun of it, once we clear the song, is to create an arrangement of the song that can then play on a player piano,” Nolan said. “Then we have a little company that we found in Southern California that still operates for all this time, and they can create the paper reels that we then thread into several actual player pianos. They’ve all been carefully restored. So this company can create the reel with that piece of contemporary music on it. There was a piece of Radiohead in the second episode as well, so we get a Radiohead song, we create our reel and we put it through. It’s really, really cool. It’s been a lot of fun.”[/quote]
10/10
It’s exactly the context I like, but the scientific premise is also extremely weak, so it doesn’t hold up at all when it comes to plausibility.
It’s interesting because it’s what I was discussing these past few days:
But it’s still the greatest thing. Problem is they planned for six seasons, and I don’t think the large public is going to stick to what seems to be a densely written show.
They either drop all complexity and make the shooting 95% of the story, or it has no hope of ever reaching the end…
And that right there is why I can’t stand most popular TV. Dense writing is precisely what makes a show worth sticking with for six seasons.
The problem is when shows plan a six year arc and then get cancelled after two (I’m lookin’ at you, Carnivale.)
In the end, I’d much rather have the creators put their all into one great season and then have the show runners scramble to figure out what to do with season 2. Because then no matter what happens you have that one great season, even if you never quite hit those heights again (which I would argue was the case with Sopranos and Mad Men.)
I may be optimistic, but I think HBO’s in with Westworld for the long haul. They’re dropping big money, got a Nolan running things, plus big names like Ed Harris and Anthony Hopkins. If they get just terrible ratings I guess it could crash and burn, but I don’t think we’re looking at another Carnivale here.
The buzz on this is very strong and mostly positive. Of course we can only be sure once it airs but I get the feeling that this show will do quite well for HBO
Spoilery ramblings:
[quote=“Telefrog, post:45, topic:75914, full:true”]This text will be blurred
Speaking of mysteries, what was the “critical failure” from 30 years ago? Why is Anthony Hopkins’ Ford programming “reveries” into the robots?[/quote]
I went with the critical failure from 30 years ago as a reference to the original Westworld story/movie plotline - where the androids glitched-out and began killing the guests.
I feel like Ford definitely flipped his lid a little (maybe it’s just Anthony Hopkins spooky demeanor), knew that they were on the precipice of true AI, designed the Reveries virus to give it a nudge, didn’t know exactly what would happen and the scientist in him is a little fascinated to watch it happening, but suspects we won’t like what humanity is going to see in the mirror - nevermind the blood.
Apparently, and maybe ironically, Dolores is also the first to overcome her moral safeguards to “not kill a living thing” by way of the Reveries virus, when she kills the fly on her cheek at the end of the show - something the sheriff was almost but not quite able to overcome when he started to melt down after a fly crawled across his cheek on The Posse storyline?
@Barry, I think you’re on the money with Hopkins. He seems to definitely know more than he says he does.
I thought so too, but apparently not. According to the showrunners, they didn’t want to be so on-the-nose with that.
[quote]
“It’s playful but not meant to be literal. We wanted to connect to the ideas in the original film, but also take a look at this place as a cultural institution that is not new – because these ideas aren’t new. They stretch back to when Crichton was playing with them. We wanted to consider the park in that capacity, as a cultural institution in the manner of a Disney World. We feel like there’s a long story here.”[/quote]
In the basement storage area, one of the set props is the Delos fountain globe in the plaza.
Huh, I did not pick up on any of that. So in this show, the events of the movie (including Futurewold?) did happen?
Unclear at this point (deliberately so, I’m sure.) The preview after the episode showed a location that looked a whole lot like one in the movie, cheesy 70s aesthetic and all. On the other hand, the animatronic from the original park we were shown in the premiere looked way more primitive than anything shown in the movie.
Something that hadn’t occurred to me until reading the post-premiere chatter: the Hopkins character is named Ford. I took that as a reference to Henry Ford, but it’s also a reference to famed Western director John Ford. (Speaking of which, the premiere came oh-so-close to quoting Ford’s signature door-opening shot from The Searchers when following the Evan Rachel Wood character through her day. Given it’s Jonathan Nolan, that’s probably deliberate too.)
This is sad. The card dealer that Ed Harris kidnaps? That was Eddie Rouse. He died of liver failure several weeks after filming that in 2014. They had a lengthy storyline planned for that character, but they decided to keep the actor’s final scenes and end it there rather than reshoot witth a different actor.
The location for Westworld is also the same one as John Ford’ used in his movies.
The location we see in the Westworld control room isn’t actually Arizona’s Monument Valley, but rather some kind of mashup - the Mittens rock formations from Monument Valley are there, but the place also seems to be bordered by nearby mountains, while the actual Monument Valley isn’t.
Presumably it’s some kind of digital cut and paste, much like Nolan’s Gotham City was a digital mashup of Chicago and other places. (An interesting question is whether within the fiction of the TV show things like the Mittens rock formations are supposed to be natural, or whether they were built for the park.)
According the interwebs, the HBO show was filmed in Utah and California.
Oh, also, for GTA V players, yes, that was Steven Ogg - Trevor - as the milk-drinking bandit.
Digging around some more, it turns out that the TV show was filmed in Utah’s Castle Valley - where John Ford did indeed make some of his movies (his last four, not the more famous ones.)
Still think they digitally inserted Monument Valley’s mittens into some of the shots, though.
raping, there’s always raping.
That was a pleasant surprise! I’m hoping we see more of him.