I'm excited for this simply because of the actors. However, I'm still not quite sure what it's about. And I've read a bunch of stuff on it. Let me see if I get this right. Anthony Hopkins creates a VR dream world using people he creates. This world is then an attraction park for the uber rich to live out their fantasies. However the people he creates start to become self aware and chaos ensues. Does that sum it up?
Woah.... Have you never seen Westworld before? Shit, man, watch that on streaming ASAP. It's a classic icon of 70s sci-fi (and you'll recognize immediately that it's basically inspired a large sub-genre of our modern sci-fi).
So Westworld is about a theme park that's a sort of hybrid between Jurassic Park and Logan's Run -- a vast, enclosed environment that's split into several sections, which includes "westworld" and "medieval world" (we don't see the others).
It's the near-ish future and people pay through the wazoo to spend their vacation in these closed environments (which appear to be well out in the middle of a desert, though some fans suggest that they could be on another planet). The parks are populated by androids who play out all the expected roles for the benefit of their human guests. So there are prostitutes, outlaws, sheriffs, etc. You pay for a package where you can either just be a wandering cowpoke, or you can get involved in a classic old style western shoot-em-up and save the town adventure (which our two main characters in the movie do).
The entire park is run by a massive underground complex where the androids are constantly monitored and repaired and so on. Subplot B is the park owner, in classic park owner style, ignoring his scientists who are telling him that the androids are malfunctioning more and more often and they're not sure why.
These malfunctions, of course, lead to the androids going insane and they start exterminating all of the human guests. The control center gets shut down (apparently by a maniac computer, but I never really understood why) and everyone is killed. Our heroes now have to fight android Yul Brenner. (It's The Terminator, basically. In fact, in some respects, it's exactly, shot-for-shot, The Terminator.)
The sequel, Futureworld, introduced an element of conspiracy to all this. The perfectly human-like androids were being used by a corrupt corporation to infiltrate the world's governments and an intrepid reporter set out to stop them. This was basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers redux.
The first TV show ran with the Futureworld take on the franchise -- evil organization running a theme park but really using the human-like androids to take over the world. Rinse, repeat.
So I don't quite know the theme of the new show. We have Jacob from Lost entering Westworld like in the movie, we have androids and all the stuff from the original movie playing out. But it looks like the androids don't know they're androids, which is very modern sci-fi of them. So perhaps, once they become self-aware, they go on the rampage? (They are androids, though, not VR constructs, as you see in the latest trailer where we get Terminator hands and the dead android dumping ground.)
