HBO subscribers are probably as excited for the upcoming Westworld series as they are sick of seeing the same damn trailer for the upcoming Westworld series. Fortunately, a fresh trailer has just been released, titled “Dreams.” Also featuring Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy, whose life in a Western frontier town will crumble with the realization that she is actually an artificial construct, created to serve the human tourists who frequent her home.
An exchange between Dolores and Anthony Hopkins (as Dr. Ford, Westworld’s architect) highlights not just the soul-crushing experience of perceiving one’s life to be a fiction, but the even crueler irony that “real” people are paying good money to visit your simulated reality. The same dream that allows some to become anything they want also deprives others who might want to be more than narrative window-dressing. What makes those real people so special, anyway? Why can’t high-end sex-bots have agency? Cue Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” and things quickly go south in this sleepy little cow town. And with conflict comes the need to tamp down unrest—enter Ed Harris, as the remorseless, ass-kicking hand of justice (taking up the mantle of “The Gunslinger” from Yul Brenner in the 1973 film).
Heroic quantities of robot-human coitus and bloodshed (or milkshed) appear to be in store when HBO boots up Westworld on October 2.