Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, out now on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD

Is this the real life….?

There’s a moment in an early episode of Westworld that sums up the series for me. We see a bank robbery, carried out with exuberantly professional brutality by several of the leading characters. A safe is torn out of a building, countless people are gunned down and the whole thing is scored by a colossal, sweeping piece of music that seems oddly familiar.

About ten bars in, you realize why:

It’s Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones, orchestrated as music from a western.

That level of wit, that sense of the show showing you where the card is and then giving you a rabbit instead, is present in every single episode. An adaptation/reboot/remake of the Yul Brynner-fronted classic, the series was plagued with delays and arrived with the inevitable cloud of rumors about it being a mess.

Far from it, Westworld may be the tightest plotted, most thematically complicated piece of genre TV you’ll see this year. Unlike several of its contemporaries, there’s no padding whatsoever in its ten episode premier season, just the sense of a complicated, horrifying world unfolding in front of you at the same measured pace as that player piano pounds out tunes.

Ultimately, there are three stories here. The first is a thriller exploring multiple perspectives on a colossal open park inhabited by Turing-test proof robots. You pay the price, you can go and rape and murder your way through it with impunity. We see several guests do just that, as well as several Hosts, the robots, struggle with troubling memories of their past lives and the true nature of their world. This part of the show is equal parts science fiction/horror and astoundingly grim workplace drama. It’s also the foundation for everything else the series does, using the park as both a destination and a start. A loop of narrative inside a series about breaking narrative loops.

That process of breaking the game is the second level of the show. Delores, played superbly by Evan Rachel Wood, is a Host who begins a journey toward self-awareness that takes her to the heart of the ‘maze’ that is supposed to be the center of the park. The Man in Black, an exuberantly nasty Ed Harris, wants the same thing for different reasons. He’s been playing the game for a very, very long time and he wants to win where Delores wants to live. Elsewhere, saloon madam Maeve, played by a career best Thandie Newton, wakes up to the true nature of her world and begins to take control. All of them can see the game they’re playing. All of them are trying to beat it so they can win. None of them are going about that the same way.

That brings us to the third level of the show; the stories we tell ourselves and the way fiction is used as a tool to understand life. Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jeffrey Wright do stunning work as Ford and Bernard, the two men in charge of the park. Ford is one of its creators, Bernard his loyal right hand man. At least at first. As the series continues we understand just what the park means to Ford and why Bernard is there. Their stories diverge and come back together in the closing moments of the finale in a scene which is profoundly moving and finally unpacks the series in a manner that’s measured, humane, savage and deeply satisfying.

The same is true of Delores’ story, of Maeve’s, of the Man’s. Everyone, Host, Guests or Staff tells their story to themselves. Everyone finds that story changed forever by the end of the series. Whether that’s a good thing, and whether the change is a forgivable crime or one that can never be forgotten is one of the very few questions the show leaves unanswered. As the final episode ends, everyone’s music is being played in a very different style, some characters have become part of the composition and others are finally conducting the orchestra. Seeing what they do with that will be the heart and drive of season two, due in 2018. Based on this stunning opening run, its going to be more than worth the wait.

Notable Bluray extras include an interview with composer Ramin Djawadi and an excellent half hour piece with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy discussing the finale.

Verdict: Simply excellent. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart

WESTWORLD IS AVAILABLE ON 4K ULTRA HD, BLU-RAY™ AND DVD NOW