HBO hope to replicate Games of Thrones’ success with their original sci-fi drama. But with its rogue gunslingers and robot sex,the present has intrigue of its ownA hover lands on Evan Rachel Wood’s lovely face, but she doesn’t swat it away because she is a robot called Dolores, and one of the automatons in HBO’s Westworld. “A place with unlimited possibilities,” is how she describes the bubble she calls domestic, a carefully rendered cowboy town, or designed for the pleasure of human visitors,who can shoot and shag at will, safe in the knowledge that the inhabitants are all pleasure-bots. Forgers forge, or sheriffs police and barmen serve whiskey from behind fantastic moustaches. Welcome to Westworld,where everything is fine and dandy. For now.
Westworld was originally a 1973 sci-fi film starring Yul Brynner as a malfunctioning robot gunslinger who runs amok in a wild west theme park. Basically, for writer-director Michael Crichton it was a dry run for his later franchise Jurassic Park. The guy really hates theme parks. What the film did in 88 minutes, and this 10-part series plans to chew over for longer. Which means there is more to it than a tech malfunction when things start to move wrong. Westworld the series goes beyond cruel killer droids and ponders – like Blade Runner and Channel 4’s Humans – the possibility of sentience and the nature of memory. And,given the lack of rules in the wild west, the present pulses with baseness and boobies in the same way Game Of Thrones does. It’s just a different fantasy world this time.
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Source: theguardian.com