Ramsay B. Posted September 13, 2016 Share Posted September 13, 2016 New "Dreams" trailer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The BlackBear Posted September 13, 2016 Share Posted September 13, 2016 Anthony Hopkins looks delightfully unsettling in this. I haven't seen the film so am going in with no real expectations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AncalagonTheBlack Posted September 14, 2016 Author Share Posted September 14, 2016 ‘Westworld’ Showrunners Have a Plan in Place for 5+ Seasons Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
red snow Posted September 14, 2016 Share Posted September 14, 2016 5 hours ago, AncalagonTheBlack said: ‘Westworld’ Showrunners Have a Plan in Place for 5+ Seasons I guess Anthony hopkins dies in season 1 if that's the case It's nice they have a plan - I sure hope it's successful enough otherwise I guess a lot of people will be left with an incomplete story. Assuming it's good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The BlackBear Posted September 14, 2016 Share Posted September 14, 2016 I'm OK with a plan, but maybe not five seasons? That's quite a long time. There's something to be said for a show that has the end game in sight and gets there and tells the story without being rushed by cancellation, or bloated by unwarranted renewal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slurktan Posted September 15, 2016 Share Posted September 15, 2016 On 9/13/2016 at 7:43 PM, The BlackBear said: Anthony Hopkins looks delightfully unsettling in this. I haven't seen the film so am going in with no real expectations. If you've seen Jurassic Park and its sequels, you've seen Westworld. Crichton copied himself and added dinosaurs and kids to make it more sellable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arch-MaesterPhilip Posted September 15, 2016 Share Posted September 15, 2016 5 minutes ago, Slurktan said: If you've seen Jurassic Park and its sequels, you've seen Westworld. Crichton copied himself and added dinosaurs and kids to make it more sellable. That's how I've been explaining it to people who have never seen the film. In fact when I was a kid and Fox first aired the episode of the Simpsons when they went to Itchy and Scratchy Land I thought it was a spoof of Jurassic Park. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martini Sigil Posted September 16, 2016 Share Posted September 16, 2016 7 hours ago, Slurktan said: If you've seen Jurassic Park and its sequels, you've seen Westworld. Crichton copied himself and added dinosaurs and kids to make it more sellable. It's a shame that those stuffed Amy the Good Gorilla Dolls never caught on. They were adorable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nictarion Posted September 18, 2016 Share Posted September 18, 2016 Early reviews are very positive! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AncalagonTheBlack Posted September 18, 2016 Author Share Posted September 18, 2016 7 hours ago, Nictarion said: Early reviews are very positive! All raves! Quote IGN: “After a lot of build-up and some much-discussed production delays, would it deliver? The answer is a big yes, as those high expectations were met with a terrific, gripping premiere episode (airing Oct. 2 on HBO) that quickly draws you in… its standout cast to its excellent visuals to one hell of a hummable score by the great Ramin Djawadi (the composer of Game of Thrones and Person of Interest), this is top-notch television in every respect. The juxtaposition of life inside Westworld and life for those who are creating Westworld allows for an excellent entry point into the show, allowing us to invest with these artificial life forms from the start, while getting to also see the motivations of those behind-the-scenes.” The Atlantic: “What would happen if or when the day came that humankind created an intelligence so powerful that it turned against us? It’s a scenario that’s been visualized a thousand ways… But the scenario has rarely been developed with the sophistication and ingenuity on display in HBO’s upcoming series Westworld …. The series doesn’t merely present androids as protagonists or victims. It grants them the defining victory of the outsider: the right at last to tell—haltingly, given their emergent capacities—their stories for themselves.” The Guardian: “… for those of us who just like story – lots and lots of story! – Westworld will hit the spot as hard as GoT ever did. Gosh, there’s a lot going on… There’s the real world full of robot-wranglers, some of whom are jostling for position inside whatever just-possibly-malevolent company owns the park, others of whom are busy tinkering with their charges’ software and trying to decide whether to make the skinjobs more realistic or quit while they’re ahead. ‘Y’know, before everything goes a bit, like, Skynet on us’ nobody ever quite says, but clearly should.” Collider: “The series — with a solid logical foundation and world-building — is lovingly crafted, marrying its Wild West aesthetic with cold sci-fi elements of the labs that run the park in a way that feels believably connected … The series even broaches philosophical musings, à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as to whether it would be better to live a safe life where our pain is erased, or a life of free will with all of its mistakes and hurt. The choice is not always clear. Like Game of Thrones, Westworld is a sprawling story, but it’s never as disparate as the world of Westeros and what lies beyond the Narrow Sea. What matters here is the notion that everything is contained, intimate, and carefully crafted, and fans of Crichton will immediately feel the familiarity with his most famous stories’ themes: where what we overly-confident Homo sapiens create and try and control quickly spirals out beyond our abilities. We are not gods, only tinkerers, and the characters of Westworld are starting to learn that trying to control what we don’t understand can lead to catastrophic effects.” The Telegraph: “…we’re thrust into a complex, visionary world that is pleasingly in no rush to rapidly churn out its storyline. Like the on-screen robots, its pieces are meticulously put together, its capacity to unleash hell brimming beneath the surface. And it’s beautiful to watch. Utah’s tourist industry best be ready for the swell in numbers this series is likely to create, for its dry, epic spectacle of a backdrop has been rendered to almost as jaw dropping effect as seeing it in real life.” The Globe and Mail: “In fact, for all its brutal violence and sex – some of the visitors merely want to kill, rape and pillage – the series is a gorgeous exercise in profound melancholy. What horrors has humankind wreaked with a mass devotion to perfection, personal satisfaction and entertainment? At times terrifying bleak and cynical, Westworld is lugubrious. It can have characters announcing, ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here,’ and set out to illustrate that.” Games Radar: “About 15 minutes into the Westworld pilot, you’re left with absolutely no doubt that this could be a genuine contender for the HBO’s next smash hit. In one breathless gunfight sequence, show creator and writer/director of the first episode, Jonathan Nolan, manages to nod to Michael Crichton’s original 1973 movie, completely smash your early preconceptions, ask some fairly deep ethical questions, and even court a little controversy. … If the first episode is anything to go on, you need to watch this show — it’s the next big thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RUSSELL BELL Posted September 23, 2016 Share Posted September 23, 2016 Couldn't find a thread for this anywhere. But anyway I'm really looking forward to the premiere of Westworld. This could and probably is HBO's next big hit. So far it has a ton of critical acclaim and hype behind it. The last time a new HBO show had this much hype and anticipation before it even started was sometime in spring 2011. I feel like it has all the potential to be the one of the biggest show on television for the next couple of years. What do people think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arch-MaesterPhilip Posted September 23, 2016 Share Posted September 23, 2016 40 minutes ago, RUSSELL BELL said: Couldn't find a thread for this anywhere. But anyway I'm really looking forward to the premiere of Westworld. This could and probably is HBO's next big hit. So far it has a ton of critical acclaim and hype behind it. The last time a new HBO show had this much hype and anticipation before it even started was sometime in spring 2011. I feel like it has all the potential to be the one of the biggest show on television for the next couple of years. What do people think? Bottom of page 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The BlackBear Posted September 24, 2016 Share Posted September 24, 2016 On 23/09/2016 at 3:00 PM, RUSSELL BELL said: Couldn't find a thread for this anywhere. The sites search feature isn't that great but you can use google to search the site for you, that usually works well. You type in for example: 'westworld site:westeros.org' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zorral Posted September 30, 2016 Share Posted September 30, 2016 Today's commentary that perhaps others besides myself will find of interest: On Vulture -- September 30, 2016 10:02 a.m. "4 Things Westworld Will Remind of You of (and One Thing It Won’t)" By Kathryn Van Arendonk What Westworld Is Not It is not Game of Thrones. Oh sure, it’s a big show, with lots of characters and story lines (although frankly not that many) and it’s got a not-our-world flair and there’s violence and sex and sexual violence and lots of good costumes. In the way it sets up its world, and in the way it goes about telling its stories, though, Westworld is a different ball of wax. Game of Thrones capitalizes on the sense that anything can happen. Part of that is the size of its fantasy world, and part of it comes from knowing that every one of its dozens of characters has his or her own desires, history, and agency. They are all equally capable of impacting the world, and the result can sometimes be hundreds of individual variables that feel like they’re spinning out of control. But that’s also why Game of Thrones is so overwhelmingly impressive when it does work — it is like a 1,000-person orchestra, each in a battle to control the melody, but somehow, occasionally, aligned so they’re all playing the same song. Westworld often grasps for a similar feeling of expansiveness. One of its favorite devices is a sweeping view of the landscape, something that its characters also mention frequently. “This world is so much bigger than you even realize!” one guest will regularly say to another. At least in the first several episodes, though, it’s not. Especially after it becomes clear that one of the series’ plots will be the park’s creator and his quest for new narratives, the series feels less like a massive world, and more like an intricately designed, obsessively constructed diorama, with far more detail than initially meets the eye, but which is also constantly viewed in relation to the size of the box it’s inside. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Limitations in storytelling can be good — great, even — and I tend to think that a smaller world with an interesting rule set and deeply drawn characters is more appealing than size and freedom for their sake alone. (This is true for TV content and for form). And if it really leans into those limitations, embraces its weird video-game DNA, and digs in, Westworld could easily resemble a multilayered, endlessly complicated, thoroughly satisfying piece of clockwork. If it doesn’t, it could quickly look like a one-trick pony. Also, in today's NY Times (paywall, but its the end of the month so that probably won't matter) -- this one describes the episodes and the show in much detail: " ‘Westworld’ Is a Provocative but Flawed Sci-Fi Shoot-’Em-Up" By JAMES PONIEWOZIK SEPT. 30, 2016 In HBO’s “Westworld,” Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) runs a theme park where wealthy “guests” live out frontier fantasies among lifelike robot “hosts.” In the fourth episode, a colleague points out to him what viewers will have already noticed: Those fantasies almost uniformly involve murder, rape or torture. It’s true, Dr. Ford admits. In the beginning, he says, when the park’s creators wrote its first interactive narratives, “We made 100 hopeful story lines. Of course, almost no one took us up on them.” And this one too, also on Vulture, "The Layered, Self-Aware Westworld Is Perfectly Suited for This Pop-Culture Moment" by Matt Zoller Seitz, he for whom there was and can be anything ever better than everything that was Sopranos -- The scripts draw on theories of simulacra, spectatorship, life-as-performance, and the late-capitalist consumer as both royal and serf; leaven them with an almost spiritual yearning for redemption (expressed by robot and human alike); and fold it all into a series of recursive situations, like loops in a computer program or levels in a video game. Visitors adopt different moral stances depending on what they hope to gain from an experience, secure in the knowledge that if the story doesn’t satisfy them, they can always come back and be someone else next time. Some visitors never leave the Westworld “arrival” set, a dusty frontier town, and hang out there as if it were a very expensive version of Las Vegas or Bangkok, getting drunk and bedding synthetic but physically realistic sex workers (the most popular HBO dramas feature brothels, and Westworld seems keenly, at times disapprovingly, aware of this fact), but others go on adventures in the surrounding deserts and canyons that test their capacity to resist corruption and cruelty or tempt them to release it in atavistic bursts of assault, thievery, rape, and murder. The show all but demands that we ask certain questions of ourselves, and of Westworld, as we watch. There’s quite a bit of HBO-brutal sexual assault (offscreen, thankfully) and casual nudity — both male and female robots are examined “backstage” without their garments, as if they were automobiles with open hoods — but is it exploitative? These are not people; they’re nonhumans played by people. Ditto the violence, which poses the same conundrum as the wanton destruction of zombies on The Walking Dead; in both series, we’re watching actors playact getting shot, stabbed, burned, and torn apart in a “fantasy” context, but is this really so different from watching “human” characters who never existed being treated as if they were talking piles of meat? What is bad, what is good, and are the binary categories embraced by the park’s directors ironic or sneakily sincere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
red snow Posted October 1, 2016 Share Posted October 1, 2016 the hype has definitely sunk in. I'm looking forward to it. Not expecting or even wanting it to be GOT but would like HBO to have another big success on their hands. I still think there may be a strong "humans" vibe in terms of humans revealing their dark natures through their interaction with human facsimiles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mladen Posted October 1, 2016 Share Posted October 1, 2016 Due to getting yet another professional responsibility in October, I promised myself not to watch any new show save Luke Cage. But, this seems too good to pass. Just looking at casting from Hopkins and Harris to the likes of Santoro and Barnes, it has everything. It looks interesting, it seems people like it. Damn with the lab work, give me some good HBO to watch (It's been a while, HBO ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ruhail Posted October 2, 2016 Share Posted October 2, 2016 Looks like another bland piece of shot from HBO. Let me guess the main character is alcoholic, chain smoking sex addict? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mexal Posted October 2, 2016 Share Posted October 2, 2016 12 minutes ago, Ruhail said: Looks like another bland piece of shot from HBO. Let me guess the main character is alcoholic, chain smoking sex addict? More that she's a robot who relives the same torture on a daily basis before awakening. But close. Great guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RumHam Posted October 2, 2016 Share Posted October 2, 2016 30 minutes ago, Ruhail said: Looks like another bland piece of shot from HBO. Let me guess the main character is alcoholic, chain smoking sex addict? I'm not sure what HBO show this even applies to? Though I skipped Vinyl so maybe that? But thinking of their iconic shows only McNulty from The Wire comes close to fitting that description. But I don't think he smoked and I wouldn't even call him the main character of that show. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted October 2, 2016 Share Posted October 2, 2016 I'm ready and actually have HBO as the bonus for getting cable after the move...so bring this on. Looking forward to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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