Westworld series

  • Westworld, Season 4 (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) While Westworld’s fourth season goes back to the initial themes of the series after a dubious third season, I’m still increasingly frustrated at how the entire show doesn’t seem to be under greater control. (Which is ironic, considering its overarching theme.)  Each season seems to zig and zag in another direction, with some great ideas being dashed by wonky execution, very strange concepts improperly executed, and inconsistent interest from one subplot to another. As I edit this review, one month after the final episode aired, there’s still no confirmation of season 5 happening despite putative plans for it—so it would make some sense to consider this a final season. In which case, it does offer some closure of sorts—especially given how nearly every single character dies in the last two episodes. (Of course, much of Westworld’s magic is that death is never final.)  I did enjoy quite a bit of it: This season clearly wanted to replicate some of the mind-bending twistiness of the first two, and so there’s a rather audacious time-skip midway through the episodes, and a gut-wrenching declaration in the final episode that doesn’t seem to leave anywhere to go. Of the returning characters, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) spends much of the season as an enigmatic oracle who has simulated all the possibilities, lending further appeal to an already-complex oracular character. The casting remains as astonishing as it did, with some added appeal if you like a certain type of actress (as I do)—this season features not only Thandiwe Newton and Tessa Thompson on a final collision course, but also Aurora Perrineau and a surprisingly short supporting turn from recent Academy Award-winner Ariana DeBose. (This is what happens when you sign an actor before they get an Oscar.) The series pays itself another visit to a different simulated world (albeit one with the same plotlines), has a few moments of pure visual horror (robot faces come apart in the most disturbing ways!) and even has a somewhat self-contained episode that riffs off a central concept, like some of the previous best episodes of the series. Still, it’s hard to take all of this as seriously as it wants when the world-building seems too sketchy and convenient. Much of the details still feel improvised from one season to another, and I still haven’t figured out how people can get on a boat and travel from California to New York City to Nevada in a few hours. (Yes, it’s probably not “California” and “New York” and “Nevada,” but the series doesn’t clarify that.) There’s also a mean-spirited quality to the series’ objectives that feels off-putting to me, such as playing with the end of the human race in simplistic matters that only make sense if you’re willing to forgive the series’ quirks. There may be a fifth-and-final season and if there is, I will be watching it live—but I’m not sure anything means anything anymore in this series, and that suggests that it took quite a few wrong turns along the way. Maybe, in a few decades, someone will take the best bits of Westworld, polish it to a self-consistent gleam, and remake it all over again. Which would almost be a fitting fate for a series so obsessed with repetition, iteration, legacy and perfection.

  • Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Obviously, Westworld could never stay confined to the park for more than a few seasons, and so this third season of the series boldly takes us to the outside world, with androids not only exploring it but also changing it irremediably. It’s a bold move, introducing a new main character (played by Aaron Paul) and taking up the issues of control versus self-determination into a wider context. The production design of this third season is exceptional, credibly presenting (through shooting in modern East Asian cities) a future vision of 2040s Los Angeles with automated cars, mood-showing T-shirts and oppressive social control. Wait, where did all of that come from? Yes, that’s where Westworld is showing its seams. Down to the new visual motifs of this season, we’re presented with so many new elements in exploring this future that there’s reason to believe that half of it is being made up as the series goes along rather than being part of a coherent plan. There’s little in the first two seasons to suggest Rehoboam the all-controlling AI, except as a thematic counterpart to the morality plays taking place in the parks. As a result, much of this Season 3 feels half-rushed, half-indulgent. Even though the first two seasons’ ten-episode plans had plenty of fat to trim, this eight-episode series still couldn’t keep the series’ worst pseudo-profound moralism at bay. There’s no baseline depiction of the world under Rehoboam—our sole significant new character is an underclass, which doesn’t give us a good yardstick to judge the philosophical conflict taking place in this third season. It probably doesn’t help that I have somewhat significant differences with the series’ morality so far. I’ve been Team Maeve since the beginning; I see Delores as a villain despite a last-minute contrition; I have trouble seeing Serac as a monster despite the series’ insistence that I should; and most of all, I am terribly unhappy with the series’ “light the match, burn everything up, let the survivors choose” approach to global revolution and eventual human extinction event—the best way to effect social change is to coopt the comfortable middle class, but I’ve given up on the series taking such a reasonable technocratic approach when it can play with its characters becoming gunslingers, ninjas and social revolutionaries. But, of course, we’re midway through a six-season arc with no way of knowing where it’s going (except for increasingly loud hints of an apocalypse coming up). At least there’s enough to keep us interested on a micro level. Everyone is turning in decent work on the acting front (although I’ve never been much of an Aaron Paul fan), and there’s something quietly amusing in the way the series’ actors are constantly given different personalities to play. Still, some character arcs (maybe even the season as a whole) feel like throat-clearing and seat warming before later events. While Thandie Newton is a constant delight, her character seems a caricature of previous seasons. Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard also seems to be biding his time until there’s a real role for him to play, and Ed Harris’s William seems increasingly contrived. This season was clearly all about Rachel Evan Wood’s Dolores, but this is wearing thin when you could reliably predict that none of her many enemies would manage to stop her before The Plan was revealed. The series has good ideas and set-pieces (Williams’s self-therapy session being one of them), even though its reach often exceeds its grasp—the “genre” drug sequence didn’t quite match its potential. Still, and this is significant, Westworld remains insanely ambitious and daring for a flagship cable TV show—It could have contrived a way to remain in the park, but chose a vastly riskier route. I may not love the results as much as I did in previous seasons, but I’m still on-board to see where it takes us next.

  • Westworld, Season 2 (2018)

    Westworld, Season 2 (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2018) The problem with second seasons of high-concept shows is that you don’t quite have the same element of surprise in reserve. In Westworld’s case, it means that the dizzying timeline tricks and character revelations of the first seasons can’t be exactly reproduced, and that the show has to work within known parameters. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t try to keep things interesting. Set in the few days immediately after Season 1, this second series follows characters as they react to the events of the first season, revealing new secrets along the way and digging even deeper in mind-twisting questions about personalities and predetermination. Thanks to the endless wonders of flashbacks, simulations and body/mind separation, nearly the entire cast is back (yes, even those confirmed dead), meaning that the solid acting talents of the series are once more on display. Tessa Thompson gets a deservedly more prominent role, while Ed Harris, Thandie Newton and Rachel Lee Evans all keep on doing what they did so well the first time around. While I was initially disappointed by the series’ renewed focus on the park (I expected the hosts to escape in-between seasons), the park’s uncovered secrets made things even more interesting. And while this second season is straightforward about its dual-timeline structure, it does experiment with storytelling in focusing certain episodes on specific characters (some of them peripherals) and taking trips in other theme park areas to hilarious parallel effect. My pick for most-improved character goes to Lee Sizemore, formerly an annoying writer here transformed into the incarnation of everything he wished for (including a late empathy boost for his own creations) in a neat commentary on the relationship between creator and characters. Meanwhile, the season’s best episodes (setting aside the season finale that features so many character deaths that it feels obliged to have a few resurrections as well) has to be the eighth, in which a relatively unsophisticated character discovers the true nature of his world in a mostly self-contained episode that spans decades of series history. There is, once again, a lot of material to digest in Westworld—the storytelling is challenging, the themes are explored to the point of pretentiousness, and the science-fiction devices used in generally compelling fashion. It all amounts to solid TV—worth following as it airs, episode after episode.

  • Westworld, Season 1 (2016)

    Westworld, Season 1 (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Early word on Westworld was not good. Hyped by HBO as their next big-budget SF&F show now that Game of Thrones is on its way out, the show suffered ominous-sounding production delays while scripts were re-tuned, which didn’t bode well in the wake of Vinyl’s failure. But while this first season definitely has its issues, the result occasionally reaches delirious peaks of peak TV goodness, playing with savvy audience expectations and delivering reality-altering perceptional shift. While the show begins and more or less ends where Michael Crichton’s original 1973 movie did, there’s a lot of complexity under the surface, and the attitudinal shifts in the show’s sympathies for artificial humans is notable. In-between Inception and Memento, show-runner Jonathan Nolan is known for mind-warping scripts and Westworld is occasionally no different: the first episode is a fantastically twisted introduction to a familiar concept, while the end-stretch of the series delivers solid revelations about the nature of some characters, narrative time-play and unexpectedly philosophical rambling. It’s hardly perfect: much of the stretch between episodes 2 and 6 could have been compressed in half the time, while the so-called deep thoughts of the conclusion feel both ponderous and nonsensical. But when Westworld works, it really works. Episodes 1, 7 and 10 alone are worth the long stretches in-between. Top-notch actors such as Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton deliver good performances, the script cleverly plays to an audience that demands more from their TV miniseries and the visual polish of the result can be astonishing. Even the most pretentious aspects of the script can be seen as a plus given how high it aims. The sympathy of the series for its synthetic characters is a notable representation of the maturing of media Science Fiction—especially when humans act this rotten, can we really blame the robots for turning on their masters? I’m not sure where season 2 can take us, but as far as HBO is concerned, it’s mission accomplished for Westworld—expectations run high for the follow-up.