I’m no technical expert, but has anyone ever considered disconnecting Westworld for 30 seconds and reconnecting it?
I ask for it because for a show where no one can really die, or if they die, they can be brought back as robots, and after the third season, apparently, anyone can change their identity just by touching a switch, HBO. Westworld is extremely bad at recovering.
Westworld
The Bottom Line Great cast, super visual effects and, as always, pregnant with the inevitability of disappointment.
Broadcast Date: Sunday, June 26 at 9 p.m. (HBO) Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, Luke Hemsworth, Aaron Paul, Angela Sarafyan, James Marsden Creators: Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy
As its fourth season begins, Westworld has settled into what is now a comfortable routine: take a couple of episodes to establish new normalcy, even if that amount of exposure is completely unnecessary or sadly insufficient. . Find an interesting rhythm for a few mid-season episodes. Develop yourself in a tangled chaos, in which it is clear that nothing makes enough sense to remember you or it becomes even clearer that there is no way to develop meaningful bets on a show in which no one (possibly possibly Anthony Hopkins ) has never disappeared permanently and anyone can become someone else with a blast of techno mumbo-jumbo. Foam. Renew. Repeat.
And here’s the funniest part: you may not agree with every part of this last paragraph. Maybe you like building the world of entertainment. You may vividly remember all the details that happened last season because you re-watched each episode two or three times, accumulating evidence and discovering codes. You might think it’s a provocative meditation on free will or robotic ethics or fungible identity in an NFT world.
Then this review is not for you. I can’t tell you how good or bad the first four new episodes of Westworld are if you like the show. I can only register on behalf of viewers who, like me, are very intrigued by some aspects and perpetually enraged by many others. So I’m not even sure if it’s frustrating or strangely reassuring to point out that the fourth season of Westworld is as usual. These are two episodes of extended comic repositioning of the pieces of this futuristic chessboard, followed by two episodes in which some of the ideas are provocative or at least funny.
Will everything come together in a narratively sensitive and emotionally satisfying way? Cheat on me three times, shame. Fool me four times, shame Westworld.
So when creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy left things … who cares. Either you remember or you don’t, and if you care, there are snippets of flashbacks and talking soft drinks. But at the same time, it really doesn’t matter. Why be perplexed by the old business when the new business offers new things to be perplexed about?
It’s been seven years since it happened at the end of the third season, which aired in May 2020. Aaron Paul’s Caleb lives with a woman (or girlfriend, I guess it doesn’t matter much) and things have returned to normal. normalcy, So much so that one of his co-workers is unable to understand what the meaning of the revolution was seven years earlier, which is more or less how I felt watching it unfold.
Maeve (Thandiwe Newton), whoever Maeve is these days, finds herself in a peaceful retreat in a remote cabin until that peace is violently broken. Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), whoever Bernard is these days, is in the dusty place where we saw him after last season’s credits. Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), or whoever Charlotte is these days (Dolores, if you don’t remember, but probably not), is conspiring in a nefarious way. He also ominously plots William (Ed Harris), whoever William is these days, who has put himself fully in Man in Black, making offers to people he hopes will refuse so he can kill them.
Oh, and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) is no longer Dolores, because who is who they were before? The person who looks like Dolores is now called Christina and is the writer of a virtual reality video game, who shares a narrow apartment with Maya (Ariana DeBose), who mostly wants Christina to come closer.
Because so many pieces of the show’s cast can go from good to bad, depending on its schedule, and because so many pieces of the show’s cast are in their hundredth or thousandth permutation of what is considered “alive “, there is very little opportunity for new faces to appear. Along with Aurora Perrineau and Daniel Wu, as figures within the human resistance that gives the season its “plot” – DeBose is the new main figure, and it’s almost amazing how she’s wasted during those first four episodes.
Am I sure DeBose’s character keeps some secrets that will eventually give him at least a minimum of reward? For sure. I still think it should go against the law to grab a performer as versatile and galvanic instantly as Ariana DeBose and give her four solid episodes of nothing more than “Worried roommate who wants her friend to come over? ” Yes. Illegal.
If all Maya does is try to get Christina to finish, instead of taking her to boring wine bars to do so, why not go to a karaoke bar or an online dance bar with the same purpose? Or have the two characters go to MusicalTheaterWorld, whose hosts are just classic musical characters, which was basically Schmgadoon’s plot! anyways. Ariana DeBose doesn’t require singing or dancing to be charismatic, but she’s too good for that.
Of course, not getting the most out of great actors and sometimes great ideas is what Westworld knows best. I’m still angry with the episode of the third season in which Paul’s character took a party drug that made him experience the world through the filter of different movie genres, but the show had so little fun with that seemingly juicy premise that the characters had to explain. what was each new genre.
Westworld features first-class special effects and a solidly polished aesthetic and too many good ideas to count on, and yet it’s a visibly misdirected show, which revolves around visuals that atrophy the impulse and stagings of anticlimatic action.
That’s why I find it hard to invest even when Westworld does interesting things. As the third and fourth episodes go on, there are a lot of interesting things going on as two characters go to a reopened theme park inspired by classic gangster movies. The park offers Westworld the opportunity to comment on the culture gap of the reboot.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think the show was getting involved in metacomments about putting beautiful new skin on something that didn’t work well before and waiting for anyone to notice is a recipe for repeating the same disasters. perhaps even apologizing for previous narrative errors. No, it’s more than a critique of how nostalgia makes us fetishize even the ugliest aspects of the past, treating even something like the Westworld massacre as a reproducible version of The Good Ol ’Days.
Speaking of The Good Ol ’Days, what will keep me watching are the same things that have made me stay with Westworld for so long. Newton is a ruinous treasure like Maeve, though I don’t know when the writers decided to make this character so simple and joking. Wood continues to do subtle and complex work, though if he didn’t suspect where the show was going with “Christina,” he would think it was a boring character introduction. Wright makes a pensive sternness and Paul makes a tired torment better than anyone. Add in the perpetually shocking and perpetually underused Thompson, the eternally thick, gray-haired Harris, and a bunch of fun calls, and presumably I’ll keep watching Westworld until its resumption next season.