“What does it mean to be human?” is the least interesting question science fiction can ask, though that hasn’t stopped the genre from using tales of androids among us to ask it year after year. “What does it mean to be inhumane?” on the other hand? That’s an inquiry worth exploring. To knowingly inflict pain on artificially intelligent machine-men (or machine-women, though that’s a whole other issue) – when we treat them as slaves or toys or, to use Westworld‘s evocative term, “livestock” – that says a lot about us. Dr. Frankenstein made Frankenstein’s monster. The real question is whether this makes a monster of Dr. Frankenstein himself.
Judging from its intriguing, disturbing, hugely ambitious pilot episode (titled “The Original”), HBO’s series-length redo-cum-re–exploration of the 1973 Michael Crichton movie is focused on the correct side of this equation.
I’m reviewing Westworld for Rolling Stone, starting with last night’s pilot episode. I started as a skeptic and did not end that way.
Tags: horror, reviews, Rolling Stone, TV, TV reviews, westworld
Came here looking for this good news, and found it.
A tiny nitpick, maybe: you said that the opening image is “the nude body of a sexually brutalized Dolores.” Although Dolores’s body has no doubt been through many lifetimes of hell, if you meant that that was supposed to be the aftermath of the attack by Ed Harris, I don’t think so— I think it’s a flash-forward to the debriefing/diagnosis session after the saloon shootout, when they’re trying to find out why her father broke down, and the blood on her face is Teddy’s. I only mention this because I think we’re meant to notice the lack of any such debriefings after the Man in Black’s rampages: the park staff wouldn’t bother interviewing his victims, because those events wouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary.