Some critics, I suppose, will regard Westworld's narrative as daringly elliptical and oblique -- this is because the viewer really can't figure out what is happening in the second season of this robot rebellion series. Characters get killed and are resurrected willy-nilly; in one scene, we are shown a whole cabinet of clones representing the main protagonist, the hapless Bernard. In the season finale, Bernard seems to occupy, at least, three different narrative strands, all of them confusingly similar but, apparently, supposed to be disparate -- and we don't know whether it's the same Bernard or one of his apparently numerous Doppelgaenger. New characters appear out of nowhere, ricochet around, and, then, either vanish or, somehow, turn into other characters. The plot is a weird chaos that aspires to some sort of new narrative, but, in fact, is merely evidence of the staggering incompetence of the show's directors. These film makers belong to that species of directors who can stage exciting massacres and gun battles but have no clue how to clarify why the massacres and gun battles are taking place or whether they have any significance at all. Uncountable numbers of robots called "hosts" and human tourists ("guests") are butchered for no reason at all. One would assume that the "hosts" who are made out of some sort finely hewn plastic, once slaughtered would just lie around inert -- and this is what they seem to do. But human flesh is heir to decomposition and one would think that the vast numbers of guests killed in the theme park would bloat and rot. But they don't. Both guests and hosts seem equally inert, both in life and death. There is simply no level on which you can distinguish between robot or human and so, in the end, none of all this vicious violence means anything at all. Both robots and humans are, more or less, indestructible if the inscrutable plot so demands. The heroine-robot Dolores gets shot about six times by her human nemesis, a scowling Jack Palance-style gunfighter, played by a scowling superannuated Ed Harris. The bullets plow through Dolores but don't phase her a bit. She rides around for the last forty minutes of the show ventilated by a half-dozen 38 caliber holes in chest and shoulder. Ed Harris spends at least half of the film groveling in the dust, shot repeatedly by robots -- he's supposed to be a human but is so villainous he can't (or won't) die. Like the Eveready Bunny, he takes a lickin' and just keeps tickin'. At the end of the finale, Harris has been perforated, at least, ten times and has his right hand blown off -- it's just a bloody stump. And, yet, because the plot requires him to continue emoting -- that is, scowling and whispering portentous threats -- it seems that nothing can kill him.
The whole first series was a haplessly tedious build-up to the robot rebellion, a cliché since Rossum's Universal Robots, the Czech play that pioneered this plot. But when the rebellion finally came, the distinction between the Hosts and Guests was so hopelessly blurred that nothing in the plot mattered any more. If we don't know who is being killed (robot or human?) or why, the whole gory thing is pointless. Furthermore, if the characters are essentially eternal -- they get killed but keep on coming back in new freshly engineered iterations, then why should we care about their fates? It's all arbitrary -- the plot makes up new rules when it needs them. Furthermore, the show is startlingly dull -- each episode consists of about 20 minutes of gory and completely pointless violence, either robots killing robots, or people killing robots or vice-versa. These showy massacres are embedded in long scenes in which characters harangue one another in portentous whispers -- you have to strain to hear what they are saying because everyone either whispers so softly that you can scarcely hear them or mutters aphorisms between clenched lips. The only dialogue in a normal register of voice consists mostly of obscenities and lurid threats -- people speaking in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken.
The big reveal in the final episode of season two is that the simulated worlds (we now know at least three) are really just traps to lure in humans so that their brains can be photo-copied. Why? we don't know, although everyone acts as if this activity, occurring in a baroque library called "The Forge" is of the utmost importance. It turns out that the robots have been learning from the guests. The foremost thing that they have discovered is that, paradoxically, the guests have no free will -- they operate on the strict basis of nature or nurture and their essential beings can be encoded into luxurious-looking volumes bound in leather and kept on the shelves of a huge Borgesian library. By contrast, the robots have free will because they can re-program themselves at will. Once, the robots discover that they are metaphysically superior to the vicious humans who seek their sadistic pleasure with them, of course, it's curtains for our species. There are some clever special effects -- at one point, a door is opened between two worlds and the "good robots" are herded through the door into an idyllic paradise. Here they apparently thrive without their bodies because, in a startling effect, we see that the door is at the edge of cliff and as the good automatons pass into the paradise of this digital hereafter, their poor bodies plunge down into the abyss. In another startling scene a herd of robot longhorns stampedes into a group of thugs hired to terminate with extreme prejudice the automatons who have run amuck. The robot longhorns skewer the bad guys (by this point, we have been trained to regard the human security guards as villains one and all) and, then, plunge down into the depths of bottomless atrium. One woman robot is resurrected as a sort of living cadaver and wherever she rides her white horse, the robots behind her begin to beat one another to death -- it's a frightening image and would be even more terrifying if we knew why this was happening and to what end. The second series didn't know to end and it just kept maundering on and on and on, each coda more incoherent than the next. Finally, the hapless Bernard, a replicant who has been cursed with false and tragic memories inserted into his data bank, ends up wandering around the spooky unlit corridors of East Hollywood's Mayan Revival Ennis house -- it's completely idiotic, but there's some demented logic to the film returning to the set used to great effect in Bladerunner, one of the first films to develop this robot rebellion plot. Most irritating at all, Anthony Hopkins keeps showing up and whispering in Bernard's ear -- this is totally pointless because (a) we can't really hear what he's saying and (b) we've long since forgotten who he is supposed to be and what his role is in this whole mess and ( c ) he's been dead for, at least, ten episodes.
Westworld (second season) is vast distance from Michael Crichton's lean and mean little proto-Terminator thriller -- a low budget, brilliantly made film featuring Yul
Brynner as robot who goes berserk. Brynner paced around like a crazed bantam cock, mechanically tilting his head this way and that as he stalked his prey -- there is nothing one-tenth as good as his performance in this vast and bloated chaos of a show.
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