This new version on cable—written by Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote Memento, The Dark Knight and Interstellar with his director brother, Christopher — is almost embarrassingly better than Crichton’s film, unfurling a beautifully detailed and inviting world from a simple inversion: It doesn’t even try to make the humans sympathetic. Led by a craggy Ed Harris, a guest whose lust for sadism has pushed him ever deeper into the park (and who wears the same black Stetson sported by Brynner in the film), the humans, with a few exceptions, are hyuk-hyukking thrill-seekers who find pleasure in rape and murder. Instead, it is the robots—doomed to die a thousand deaths, their memory wiped clean every day—that inspire all the show’s pathos and poetry. They’re like a cross between the replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the hero of Memento, whose world works perfectly well as long as he doesn’t remember a single thing that has happened to him.
Doomed Robots of 'Westworld' Make New HBO Show Come Alive