HBO has released a new trailer for Westworld, its much anticipated android-apocalyptic-western drama series. With voiceover from the elegantly chilling Anthony Hopkins, the clip indicates that Westworld will tackle fraught, recurring questions surrounding artificial intelligence and what it means to be human.
Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 thriller, the series imagines a future in which robots are enslaved by human programmers and situated in a western theme park. Human visitors can do with the androids as they please.
“You and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of people who pay to visit your world,” lead programmer Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) admonishes Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood).
As EW explains, Dolores was the first android to be created for the park. She has since been resurrected numerous times and programmed to forget her many deaths. Dr. Robert Ford (Hopkins) oversees the programming of the androids and the theme park they inhabit. Referring to them as “creatures,” he denies the possibility of their humanity. “Remember,” he warns, “they’re not real.”
The trailer sets the stage for a bot-versus-human showdown all the while troubling the dialectic of human/nonhuman.
And did I mention Evan Rachel Wood? At 1:43 she stands intimidatingly in cowboy attire, gun holstered at her hip. Not that I made note or anything.
