I just watched in owth last night the first episode of "Westworld" a new HBO serie.
It blew my mind off!!!!!!!
It is set in the spectacular Grand Canyon, and it is about a futuristic theme park.
The Park offers rich visitors from the cities the chance to pay $ 40,000 to go back to the Wild West
and take out
their blood lust
and carnal fantasies
on the androids and sexbots inhabiting its bars and bordellos.
"Westworld" provides tempting and exciting scenarios, storylines, power struggles
and doomed romances,
like a mix of The Hunger Games
and The Truman Show,
with some Blade Runner, Deadwood, Humans, Terminator, 1984
or Groundhog Day...
Just that here
we are at the next level,
for adults,
in a heavily stylized
story and set.
Inevitably things go crazy
when some of the androids start to show signs of developing the human traits
they have been programmed with.
So rebellion is munching.
This film is mindblowing
as it succeeds in showing the manipulative wires of fiction,
while still demanding the spectator
to believe
in this all mighty fiction.
It is a clear and ambitious bet that Westworld puts on the table.
It reminds us of why Lost was so mesmerizing
(its co-createur J.J. Abrams is Westworld’s producer).
Here, we are submerged in a virtual Far West,
alongside Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (Thandie Newton), two androïds that each morning wake up without any memories of the horrors they had been submitted to the day before.
Until the machine starts to falter…
And a few drops of real memory emmerge…
We are then drown
into a very captivating vertigo.
The vertigo of the fake
that is able to touch
our hearts.
The question is
whether that's what people want from their enterteinement ...
If erasing the lines
between fantasy and reality
makes the fantasy more satisfying, or less?
After all, why must
the endpoint for fantasy
be as close as possible
to reality?
If you're truly looking for escapism,
does realism serve this purpose?
The meta-textual layer
of unreality in Westworld
can shift how you think
about the scenes that play out in the park.
And perhaps how you think
about entertainment
that relies on sex and violence
to gratify its audience.
Or even more so:
about the relationship
between (any) Creator
and its creations.
About our libre arbitre - an illusion...
Here, the passionate romances, bloody shoot-outs,
and tearful deaths
are actively framed not just as fantasy,
but as artifice.
Hence they deliberately draw our attention
to the hands moving behind the scenes.
Hands and minds
that script and sculpt each moment.
Even as they compel us to respond with genuine emotion…
It's violent, absurd,clever, exciting!!!
A critique of the brutal and manipulative entertainment
that is itself brutal,
sometimes manipulative,
and, yes, entertaining.
Westworld could easilly become nothing less
than THE visual and narrative book of our shifting world.
A world where showtime
and fiction
are both its gravediggers
and its rescuers.
A serie that would teach us
to love
even more
storytelling,
and yet to apprehend it
like the pest..
A film that would awake
our critical spirit…
Westworld draws the frame
for a (not that) post-human world where passion,
this old as the world passion,
continues its works
against all odds.
A new fronteer.
Beyond the West.
Over the rainbow...
by Giulia Ghica Dobre
Lisa Joy Nolan and Jonathan Nolan , the two writers and creators
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