This text originally appeared in May 2018 after the second “Westworld” relay is broadcast
Six episodes of the second season of “Westworld” have been around, 16 have started since 2016, and the series is still compared to “Lost”. “Lost” has once fascinated for years. Because there were many puzzles, and the puzzles were more followed by episode, and everyone wanted to solve.
The comparison of both formats does not seem to me to be fitting. “Lost” offered a clear situation. You knew pretty quickly what you don’t know. With “Westworld” you don’t know what you don’t know. “Lost” was the island on which different people are stranded who don’t like each other at first. Why these people? What kind of unknown island is that? How do I get away from there? Three basic questions, no matter how many puzzles there were.
“Westworld” currently only raises a recognizable question, not that of the characters, but: How big is the amusement park? The cartography of “Westworld” is constantly being expanded. Wild West in Season one, now also India and Japan.
A lot is spun on the net, everyone wants to know everything better, but if fan and news sites now report less about the goal of a series than about its locations, the discussion runs in a direction that may not have been intended. The theories about the meaning of the search for meaning are less. The admiration of the landscapes is increasing.
Season one focused on the search for the “labyrinth”. That was correct: it was a goal that everyone persecuted. The labyrinth actually seemed to exist. It was drawn under the robot’s skull ceiling. That is why the scalpation of the Western people was not a hideousness of the Indians, but also for cowboys like that in Black (Ed Harris) a necessary thing to get closer to the final line.
It later turned out that the labyrinth may not exist. What Evan Rachel Wood (Dolores), who, as the main actress, should actually have something like a fundamental right to plot knowledge, said on a red carpet, there was reason for concern. She said maybe I only imagined her defensive facial expressions that the labyrinth was a “metaphor”.
You have to let that sink first. With the “metaphor”, films by David Lynch and Describe Alejandro Jodorowsky, you don’t lose your face. But you don’t share anything.
No pity with Siri
The bigger problem with “Westworld” is not the aimlessness, it is the characters. It makes little sense to identify with robots. Identification figures are not important for films, for series because they have to bind the viewer for a number of hours. The main characters of “Westworld” are all computers, they consist of zeros and one.
No matter how much you make an effort, cry, kill, love, you don’t live. If you die, you will be born again – reactivated. This is the dilemma: they are immortal. It is not bad when park visitors slam them down and laugh. You always get your second chance. Your struggle for life, so that the right to memory and biography, is understandable, but it cannot touch.
The park operators demonstrate it in each episode: no “host” threatens to scrap, the machines are far too valuable. We don’t have to worry about Dolores, Maeve, Teddy. We wouldn’t. If I stand on a bridge, I bend over the water and lose my iPhone in the river, then I am annoyed by the loss of hardware and stored photos. But I don’t cry out tears. The artificial intelligence is waiting for me again in the next iOS as if nothing had happened.
And that’s how it is with the robots. The same offer according to Reboot. It also makes no difference that the memories of their families have losses. Because they are only implanted.
One of the few people that the “hosts” keep alive is, of all things, that no viewer likes: “Westworld” designer Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarzerman), one of the largest files in the machines. The poor guy is not dragged out of pity, it is used as a narrator – for the spectators. He has to translate for us what the Japanese tell each other, from a soldier to soldier, from Geisha to Geisha. He explains the story, nothing else. Here, and only here the series makers have functionalized a figure. You are almost happy that you recognize their function.
Maeve (Thandie Newton) in particular shoots out. The robot can recently influence other robots with his thoughts. The decisive factor for this was possibly an external power boost, controlled as normal by controller, which optimized its hard drive on the limit of maximum knowledge and skills. Fabric as from a superhero mythology. Something else only happens if someone like Norman Osborne climbs into their flashing machine and comes out as a green goblin.
So now Maeve thinks things and the others have to follow their commands. I am excited about the explanation of this kind of telepathy, which exceeds our current knowledge of AI. I always have to think of WLAN, even if it has nothing to do with it. In Shogun-Land, Maeve cleans up by means of thought, she has the samurai under control.
Only blood baths
This is also a problem of season two: locations are deteriorated into pure action backdrops. Indian forest or Japanese temple, there is no longer an exotic place that is not entered so that it is only to be left after a bloodbath. As played through the western shootouts in quasi-montana, the sword fighting in Quasi-Nippon is so a thousand times.
The fact that Maeve dominates Japanese out of nowhere and forces people from other cultures to open their will almost has something of “White Savio”, as you know it from “Avatar”, “who dances with the wolf” and of course “the last samurai”. This babel fish method of undisturbed communication is also a missed opportunity. Especially machines that cannot talk to each other offer attractive conflicts. I don’t want to know what happens first, should these robots march in the African bush.
As a samurai you have Hiroyuki Sanada (photo above), who was actually seen next to Tom Cruise in “The Last Samurai”, and, just as Frank Vincent for Mafia-Werke (“Sopranos”, “Goodfellas”) is now the man in all cases , when it comes to roll stereotypes that you like to use in Hollywood.
A realistic theory says that all characters we encounter in “Westworld” are actually robots. Hopefully that won’t come true. Bernard/Arnold (Jeffrey Wright) has already caused difficulties since it was unveiled in season one that he was a machine as a Bernard.
Where to go with Bernard now? Do we suffer with him? In any case, it is no coincidence that his memories of the dead son no longer play a role, no longer appeared in the series after it became clear that this mourning biography was planted.
Nobody should say that the actors do not give anything
It all makes sense somehow, even with “Lost”, not all the threads could be conclusively connected. But “Westworld”, which does not yet want to reveal what should actually be told, offers an invitation to drift away. What follows is the worst thing that can happen when watching TV. You no longer pay attention to the story, but you can see the actors out of boredom.
Why does William (Jimmi Simpson) look like a youthful vacationer in Bad Segeberg who take a cowboy hat as a souvenir thirst? Why is the heroine Dolores always so clean? And can you feel sorry for Luke Hemsworth, whose similarity to his younger brother, Chris “Thor” Hemsworth, is obvious, but who does not look quite as good, and therefore you wish Chris “Thor” Hemsworth snows in? That is the Baldwin effect (Alec number one, then William, then Daniel) or the Fiennes effect (Ralph the one, then Joseph-unfortunately not the other way around). It is probably not to be shaken.
I liked Teddy best. Because he is a machine with clear goals (and James Marsden is the most convincing actor of the ensemble, more convincing than Ed Harris, who now pulls the leather rack number from “A History of Violence” from 2006 in each of his films). Teddy is a gentleman cowboy with just one wish: to win Dolores. His past, his memories, don’t care. He only lives in now. How clichéd that sounds.
Actually, this is a goal that everyone should have. The thoughts of a that could no longer exist or only existed in dreams, just break you.
Perhaps only reads like a Pinterest thinking. But it would be a way to simplify “Westworld”. The series would have deserved it.
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In the two-part HBO film “Phoenix Rising” (to see via Sky), “Westworld” actress confirms her serious allegations to Marilyn Manson in front of the camera. She tells the HBO documentary team that Manson brutally misused her. In the accompanying plot, she leaves old diaries. “At first everything was still totally okay,” she sobs and begins to cry. “With the reading of the diaries again, I realized what happened there.”
According to her, he was supposed to do the frequently rumored story of abuse by Manson: according to her information, raped it, tortured her with sleeping and food deprivation, stored drugs and threatened her with death. All of this during and within an “official” relationship with Manson.