Westworld

Last night, Michal and I finished HBO's Westworld season 1. HBO gives the following, less-than-useful description of the show:

Follow the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin in this dark odyssey that begins in a world where every human appetite can be indulged.

I suppose that if you were describing it to someone who had never heard of the show, I think it might be described as a science fiction western.

A word or two about the movie. I believe I am one of the few people who also saw the Michael Crichton film that inspired the show on the big screen back in 1973. I was too young to really know what to make of it. Apparently, the movie, was the progenitor of computer graphics in movies. As David A. Price said in a 2013 New Yorker article:

The rise of the pixel in cinema may feel like a recent development, but this year actually marks its fortieth anniversary. It began in 1973, with the release of a low-budget science-fiction film, Michael Crichton’s “Westworld.” The movie’s use of a digital effect for a total of two minutes—a now-routine process called pixelization, commonly deployed on Gordon Ramsay cooking shows to obscure a contestant’s cursing mouth—was the unlikely launching point of this revolution.

The television show is slicker with a bigger budget than the original movie and more philosophical with its musings about the nature of consciousness. I enjoyed the show and thought it was well done. But I do have some minor issues with it. I think some of the episodes drag, some of the speeches are too long and ponderous, the violence lasts too long in some of the individual episodes -- at least for me. I think the show would have been better if not every episode were an hour long and if it had just seven or eight episodes rather than ten. Still, I do recommend the show to adults -- no one would call this a family show -- interested in serious television drama.