In a better time for this country, Westworld would feel a lot more like science fiction. Instead, this HBO show is a bloody, pulpy, breast-intensive satire of the American male psychosis at its most demented. Its set in a futuristic theme park where guests pay thousands of dollars a day to live out their Wild West fantasies, which mostly involve shooting or torturing the robot hosts who populate the park. Saloons, whorehouses, six-shooters and Stetsons: all an excuse for the clientele to act on their most depraved urges. One of the human masterminds behind the park sums up the guests as rich assholes who want to play cowboy. The robots bleed real-looking blood buckets of it, in fact but its all fun and games as long as they dont really feel or remember anything, right? Like the replicant hunters in Blade Runner would say, theyre just skin jobs.
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Except what happens if these hosts develop their own consciousness androids who dream of electric tumbleweeds?
Thats the question that drives this small-screen sci-fi melodrama based on the excellent 1970s pulp flick starring Yul Brynner as a cyborg gunslinger in a black hat. Good though it is, this premium-cable Westworld wont blow up into the next Game of Thrones by any stretch of the imagination even an imagination that makes room for Evan Rachel Wood as a robot cowgirl. Its much slower and narrower, without any of the humor or the sense of adventure. But its got satirical teeth and emotional power, a show thats really about men and the sad pedestrian fantasies they come to the park to live out, especially the ones that involve comely young frontierswomen or Thandie Newtons brothel madam. Ed Harris is the Man in Black, a guest whos blown a fortune to live as much of his life as possible in Westworld, so he can spend his time terrorizing the robots and hiding from a real world where hes just another loser (or is he?). Does that mean hes turning into one of them? Ive been coming here for 30 years, he boasts. In a sense, I was born here.
Evan Rachel Wood, by the way, is easily the best thing about Westworld shes the spark of raw humanity who makes it all compelling. Her Dolores is a doe-eyed ranchers daughter who exists to be either rescued or abused, depending on the whims of the paying costumer. And since its usually abused, she lives out the same loop over and over again, a loop that ends as her blood gets wiped away and her memory gets reset. But before the technicians send her back to work on the bunny ranch, they test her with one query: Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? As long as she keeps saying no, she qualifies as a good little robot sexpot. Except shes unmistakably showing signs of logging memories and figuring out whats going on, which means shes showing signs of becoming disturbingly human. And after Woods absolutely bizarre career seemingly doomed teen star, Marilyn Manson muse, True Blood vampire queen nobody could do a better job of playing the all-American ingenue devised in a lab by mad scientists, realizing shes trapped in somebody elses sick dream.
The original flick was a perversely funny send-up of Nixons America as it was in the midst of turning into Reagans, where a show-biz fantasy version of U.S. history takes on a synthetic life of its own. Forget the resort the notion that it was a fancy resort; this was where citizens will gladly sacrifice their humanity (and blow their life savings) to live out a Hollywood hacks script of how the Wild Wild West supposedly rolled, preserving the frontier values of a culture that never really existed. Westworld updates the story for a moment where the technology has gotten infinitely more sophisticated and the people havent. The humans who check into this Hotel California want to act out entire scenes from Clint Eastwood movies, parading around in the boots theyve seen on TV. But in our time, Clint Eastwood is a pillar of the real-life Republican party, where hes been known to appear at conventions yelling at chairs, a sign of how far from fiction this pulp-meets-prestige series is. As Evan Rachel Wood starts to suspect theres something robotic about the America shes living in, the poignance of Westworld is that shes not alone.
From HBOs Insecure to Westworld, here are the best TV shows to watch in October. Watch here.