Yep. I am recording and watching this tonight after Football. Hell, I might even skip part of the Sunday Night Football game to watch it as it airs (I don't like the Steelers anyway.)
l'll be watching this today. The first episode received a very good review at the Collider, always a good sign in my experience, along with a recap. I like the Collider recaps for HBO with dozens of characters like Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire. The author mentions how amazing it is that Michael Crichton came up with this in the 1970s and it's still relevant today. Westworld Premiere Recap: "The Original" »
I am a bit young for the original movie and shows (although I will find the movie now, I typically really enjoy the great films of the 50s, 60s and 70s), but I really loved the first episode. The concept was fascinating and I think there will be a nice pacing as a series - looking forward to next week already!
It was good, not great (IMO). It looks like money's just dripping off the screen! The opening credits alone looked like it cost more than most shows do! This could be problematic for the show as it'll need huge viewing numbers to keep it alive.
Should do well. Though Yul Brynner was so effective in the original. His cameo in The Magic Christian perhaps not.
Did anybody catch Black Hole Sun playing on the player piano? The melody of Paint it Black was used as background music at one point. Hmmm, two songs with the word "black" in them.
I caught Paint It Black and thought the other sounded familiar but I just couldn't pin it down, thanks.
A fan here so far and I and my S.O. loved the Paint It Black scene. Really interested in how this is all going to play out. I hope the viewership #s are such that it doesn't get Romed or Deadwooded.
There are a lot of elements of Dollhouse, but bear in mind that Michael Crichton wrote and directed the original Westworld back in 1973. I've also observed that co-creator Jonathan Nolan did quite a bit about artificial intelligence with Person of Interest, and there was an ongoing thing in the show as to what point a computer crossed over where it could be as smart and emotional as a human being. I think Westworld is an extension of that, only with robots. The main difference with the series vs. the movies is that in the new series, the robots are the sympathetic characters and I think we're supposed to see them as kind of an enslaved people. I kind of wince at the bad science in the show -- for example, in the lab you can hear the clicks and whines of the motors and solenoids in the robots, but those are unheard when the robots are out in the Western town -- but if you can get past that, it's an interesting show. I burst out laughing when I recognized "Paint It Black" as a Western-ized song. Note that Deadwood was shot in the exact same Western town, Melody Ranch in the Southern part of Valencia (20 miles north of Los Angeles). That's an amazing town, and it's never looked better than it does in Westworld. The permanent bar set in particular is terrific, and the stairs are real as are most of the rooms that ring around the second floor. (This was also used in Django Unchained, as well as many other films & TV shows.) HBO just had a huge premiere, so at the moment they're very happy with the ratings. 'Westworld' Ratings: HBO's Biggest Premiere in Nearly 3 Years »
I could've sworn I read something about the Deadwood sets being torn down. That this was one of the primary 'nails in the coffin'. All this chatter was back when it was originally cancelled and there was talk about a movie. The buzz was there was hope as long as the sets stood, and that hope was lost once the sets were gone. But I read recently that there IS going to be a movie(yay!) so go figure. I know yr an 'insider' and don't doubt what yr saying but I definitely did read that. I gotta say, the streets in Westworld look a lot wider/spacious than in Deadwood.
I enjoys the first show, but with some reservations. Some of the script/acting didn't really flow that well. The English guy working for the game company irritated the hell out of me to start with. He was so over-the-top it just didn't come across as realistic. The Borgen boss lady doesn't have much to work with either. The promise of the tightly scripted narratives troubles me too. Why would customers want to keep coming back to play exactly the same repeated scenarios? Sure there are many narratives to be played but there's still a limit. The designers have gone to the lengths of creating fantastically realistic humans and creatures, so why is the artificial intelligence lagging so much that virtually every move needs to be scripted? These automaton have sophisticated (?) reasoning capabilities so surely some leeway and delegation to their reasoning ability would create more random progress through each narrative and thus hold the interest more for the player. It's almost as if they're playing with the version of AI that was thought possible back when the film played out in 1973 as opposed to the far-more advanced capabilities now. Perhaps I'm simply missing the point and that they are simply just supposed to be fairly dumb robots which have to have their very move programmed (and of course they start to become self-aware and go off script), but perhaps a little more finesse to their reasoning could be snuck in.
Yep, I picked those two out myself. When I first heard Black Hole Sun, it instantly sounded familiar but I couldn't place it straight away as the musical style disguised it. I kept repeating the melody inside my head, until it finally clicked. As for Paint it Black, that was more instantly recognizable, but still well camouflaged for the period piece. What does the 'black' motif mean? Well, I think it's meant to symbolize hell/devil as the father-bot started to talk about it at the end. There were also a few 'white' scenes - with the milk being spilled. The milkiness mirrors the white fluid in the lab out which a body is assembled and then sculpted into human form. This alludes to 'creation' or heaven, with Humans as gods (also touched upon at the end). I thought the opening episode was excellent and I loved the philosophical ramifications of how a sufficiently intelligent lifeform can rationalize a reality based on what they experience within certain narrow parameters. Everything looked pretty amazing and the acting was good too, except for the British prat whom I wanted to smack in the face! I was surprised just how much story was packed into a single episode. I expect to have at least one ep where they just show the world and how things work, etc, before major glitched started manifesting. We also know that there's more to the place than meets the eye, so all in all, a very busy episode. The question I have is, how do the 'guests', ie humans, tell which characters in the game are human and which are bots? Wouldn't there be potential for all kinds injuries or deaths resulting through mistakes identity? P.S. I wonderd what the show's obsession was with flies, which we saw in the opening scene and throughout the ep. They brought it home in the last scene where the girl is asked if she'd ever harm a living thing and she answers no, but in the next scene, after the reset button was pressed and she returns to her reality (with a different father), a fly buzzes by and she swats it dead!
Sure, but I guess what struck me the most was the focus on the exploitation of the hosts, the hints that the behind the scenes workers might not be human themselves, the potential for competing "-worlds", the (maybe a little too on-the-nose) speech about how this all means one thing to the guests, another to the hosts and yet another to the people funding all this. The element that the park was created to fulfil a larger purpose just screamed "Rossum Corporation" to me. Plus, it seemed to me that Ed Harris's character was pretty obviously an "alpha" more than, you know, just Yul Brenner not following Asimov's three rules. 'Dollhouse' specifically focused on the exploitation of the "workers" (so to speak) and how that breaks down the entire social environment. If this follows the same path (which, really, neither 'Westworld' or 'Futureworld' did), I hope that it at least ends up in different (unexpected) places.
No, I don't think so. The first scene with the fly walking over the cornea was kind of a surreal image to show the artificialness of what otherwise looks like a normal human. But by the end it was used to signal that all is not well, by the bot killing a living creature and presumably lying about it previously. Well, okay, I guess you could say it symbolizes a software bug, but the way it played out had a lot more depth to it than just a lame joke.
I thought it was referencing the final scene from 'Psycho.' I'm pretty sure he's an android. Or at least; not human.
I think the fly motif was used to show how the androids are programmed to not kill or harm living things. Dolores casually swatting the fly dead at the very end of the episode suggests that, although she is the oldest and, seemingly, the most stable of the androids in each of her incarnations, something is different with her now, also.
I love the Phil Dickian themes here of "what is real" and "what is human." And I love how this is exploring the human nature of fantasizing about violence and having power in sex. It's about time that a TV show took a Phil Dick world view and worked it this successfully (so far). (Man in the High Castle didn't imo). I'm in.
