Westworld Season 1 Review - Part III (Binge in the time of Corona)

I was recently persuaded by several reviewers to give the first season of Westworld a shot and it was terrible. I wasted my time so you don’t have to. These are the reasons why Westworld Season 1 is not worth your time:

Westworld Mesa Hub (The Underground Facility)

Glass office walls are an overused and ugly cliché. They look bad and require constant plot contrivances to explain why everyone doesn’t know what’s going on in every room. That cliché is enhanced by the constant nudity of the hosts in the Messa Hub for a lazy metaphor of hosts being transparent to man as man is to God and zzzzz.......

This is a workplace with different functions in different rooms, why do the body washers need to see the new constructions, or the technicians crafting hosts, or the testers teaching the hosts? It’s not stopping the technicians from raping hosts when everybody is looking. This is a badly designed work environment for the staff, as they are exposed daily to rape, murder, and the consequences. The creators do realize that work that requires ignoring one’s humanity to this degree can only be done by hosts or SS officers? This work in this environment will trigger mass psychotic breaks. People need walls to pretend that what they can't see isn't happening, is not their fault, and really isn't that bad. They are demons torturing the hosts in robot hell, they need walls to be able to exercise denial.

But wait, it’s also badly designed for the hosts. How are the hosts ignoring the world around them when they are practicing scripts and having conversations with technicians? Wouldn’t the natural testing environment be similar to the park? “They cannot see the things that would hurt them.” says Ford, to which I’d answer that the hosts seem to see the people shooting and raping them pretty well. And regardless, hosts in glass room, naked or clothed, keep breaking immersion because you have to keep reminding yourself why they can’t perceive their environment.

Why are the hosts kept standing in leaky unheated rooms with open eyes? Standing requires a lot of energy, wouldn’t they be falling or require constant charging? They have human-like flesh tissue and eyes, so many things can go wrong with prolonged exposure to storage conditions. They should be lying down, in personal storage bags (presumably they don’t breathe), eyes closed, on shelves, like the carefully kept products that they are.

All of this eerie imagery keeps raising questions that get trampled under the rule of cool. The only thematic reason for these conditions is a metaphor for how we are naked in front of our creators, a God metaphor with Adam and Eve in their childlike innocence before the fruit of wisdom, which is Depth for Morons 101. The visuals would have been fine for the occasional scene, but this constant lack of restraint just shows a massive disrespect for the audience that has to see jangling keys constantly or they will switch the channel. I just felt cold for the extras in this transparently pandering unfocused visual mess.

Bullets Changing Velocity

To quote the great George Carlin: "This one is just plain fucking stupid". The bullets change velocity when sensing humans? Are you taking the piss? This is a park filled with guns and bullets, if one of the malfunctions or lags just a little, just for a fraction of a second, that’s death and lawsuits, a lot of them. In the original movie guns simply could not fire at humans, simple and easy. So why mess with a winning formula? The rule of cool.

That look on Ed Harris’ face as he shakes off the lowered impact of the bullet, and the terror of the hosts as they fire repeatedly, and their shots do nothing, are genuinely terrifying. To the hosts, every guest has the perceived ability to soak up bullets like a horror movie monster. But after the first time a guest walks through a hail of bullets, the terror is over, and you are left with the question of who would willingly enter, and bring their family, into a live firing range?

All hosts are equipped with the good Samaritan instinct to prevent guests from being hurt, so why bother with sticking a supercomputer into each bullet to process proximity to a human in the nanosecond before impact? Because it looks cool, logic be damned. The slightest mistake in the bullet and the guest is dead. And what about a shot fired while pressing the gun to their head? What about two guests trying to kill each other without any hosts around to be good Samaritans and defend them? Also, the Man in Black is almost killed by hosts as they leave him to be killed indirectly, showing that hosts can allow a guest to die by default which the good Samaritan instinct was made to prevent. But we needed the Man in Black to be in danger, creating an inconsistency that makes us ask why isn’t the death count in the park really high? Hosts should be killing guests in this way regularly, and the Man in Black is the boss of Westworld, if there's no security on him to make sure this doesn't happen, guests should be dropping like flies.

The Stakes

The hosts can’t die, any human can be a host that can’t die, human memories can be backed up and put into a host that can’t die, and guests can’t be harmed by hosts. Congratulation, you’ve made violence boring. But wait, the creators are not done draining the challenge from all obstacles. Any host can pull any skill out of their ass since they could be updated, upgraded, hacked, or have been previously infused with another personality that can get them out of trouble. Want to watch Westworld for the gripping narrative? Oh, you sweet summer child. Memories are unreliable and you never know where you are on the timeline, so you can’t know what happened, when, if it really happened, if it will have an effect and whether or not you yourself even exist. There is no cause and effect by established rules so there are no stakes. No narrative consistency, no adherence to the rules of the world, deus ex machina all over the place, unreliable narrator, no consequences, no stakes, and no immersion. Just look at the scene below, a robot that can't shoot hold a gun with bullets that can't injure the human its aimed at, and Anthony Hopkins will say something cryptic about it, truly Shakespearean, as in "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."