On Sunday night, HBO concluded its run of the second, and largely dismissed, season of True Detective. The finale clocked in at a whopping 90 minutes; yet in a mere 30 seconds, the teaser for the network’s highly touted series Westworld stole much of that show’s thunder.
It’s really no wonder: Westworld comes from the powerhouse duo of writer Jonathan Nolan (Interstellar, The Dark Knight) and producer JJ Abrams, is based on a property created by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, and boasts one of the starriest ensembles ever put to celluloid (Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, Evan Rachel Wood, James Marsden, Thandie Newton and Jeffrey Wright all star).
Also, it sounds insane.
Like the 1973 Crichton-directed film on which it’s based, Westworld is a sci-fi/western hybrid about an American Old West-themed amusement park where robots are programmed to act out any fantasy or scenario that visitors desire. Of course, this being a Crichton project, something goes wrong in the park, causing the robots to revolt.
As seen in the teaser, Wood plays Dolores, a young woman who doesn’t fidget when a fly lands in her eye, which leads us to suspect she’s a robot. An eerie male voice asks her to “question the nature of her reality”, which gives solid indication that Dolores is in for a rude awakening when all is eventually revealed to her.
Elsewhere in the rapidly cut promo, Newton sucks on her pinkie finger provocatively, Marsden smolders as always, and Hopkins – playing Westworld’s creative director Dr Robert Ford – terrifies with the menacing grin he perfected as Hannibal Lecter.
Judging by the footage, Nolan wasn’t joking around when he told Entertainment Weekly in January that he intends Westworld to be an “ambitious, subversive and f--ked up” series about “things that keep you up at night ... or trouble you”. The teaser manages to check off all those boxes in under a minute.
The series will debut in 2016.
