I watched the finale of Westworld yesterday.
The biggest twist in the final episode was one of the best moments of the season. It felt plausible, a little unexpected, and fed nicely into the show's thematic interest in the romance of the speculative horizon of the individual, and the choices that aspire towards it, versus the consequences of those choices.
But all in all I found it underwhelming. It's very characteristic of productions of the brothers Nolan to be overly wedded to the symbolic at the expense of the material, or the fantastically material. Not to mention the elaborate, clockwork toy feel of its emotionally stunted screenwriting.
The abstraction of place, the tediously archetypal characters, the somewhat racialised casting, the lazy and uncommitted blurring of religious and science-fictional themes, and the use of language were creatively leaden and unchallenging.
Visually the interchange between a western milieu as dull as a computer game, and an extremely unconvincingly minimalist, monochromatic lab environment was almost driving my eye away from the screen.
