Entertainment
HBO’s Cancelled Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is Officially Getting a Movie Reboot, but That’s the Problem
As science fiction gets closer and closer to science reality, the cancellation of HBO’s Westworld seems even more tragic. Debuting in 2016, the sci-fi masterpiece was a reimagining of Michael Crichton’s 1974 film about a Western theme park where the robotic hosts start to malfunction. Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the television series was much more ambitious than the film, tackling themes of AI and bodily autonomy.
Evan Rachel Wood stars as Dolores, a host in the park who embarks on a harrowing journey toward sentience. Westworld lasted for four seasons before getting cancelled and ultimately scrubbed from the platform entirely. Fans had always held out hope that Nolan and Joy would return to finish their series as initially envisioned, but now it seems less likely than ever before because of a new development.
According to Variety, Warner Bros. is rebooting the Westworld franchise yet again. The new film will not factor in the HBO series but instead reboot the original Crichton feature altogether. After four years of hoping for good news, this is the last thing fans wanted and may even hurt the franchise in the long run.
‘Westworld’ Is Too Big For a Feature Film
It was only a matter of time before Warner Bros. returned to Westworld, especially because of the themes that have become even more relevant with each passing day. Concerns over artificial intelligence are paramount in the series as they are in viewers’ day-to-day lives. All the more reason that any return to Westworld should solely take place on television.
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy didn’t even cover everything they planned on in four seasons. A single two-hour film has no chance of substantially addressing this material. Themes such as free will, identity, and sentience are concepts that need television to breathe. Just as Battlestar Galactica explored with the Cylons, Westworld also invested in character arcs with its robot characters.
Westworld does this through the character of Dolores, who, in Season 3, makes several copies of herself. Just as the copies in Battlestar Galactica are all different from each other, so too are the different Doloreses. The more these entities live apart and form different memories, the more they become different people. The complexity of these different identities and what it means to achieve humanity is what made Westworld a masterful series. There is an obvious way to course correct, but it is unlikely that HBO will take a chance on it.
‘Westworld’ Deserves a Return to TV
The best-case scenario for Westworld’s return would be to allow the fifth and final season of the series to come to fruition. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have pulled back on releasing any information about their planned ending, holding out hope that they could one day put it into place. With the duo committed to Prime Video’s Fallout, that hope keeps getting further away.
A television reboot could be the answer to vindicating the missing final season, while also further developing the stories at the heart of the show. Westworld was already topical when it first premiered, but it has become even more so in the past year. Artificial intelligence has developed at an alarming rate since the series was cancelled, and there is even more content to explore in that arena.
Westworld clearly should have been able to finish on its own terms, but the time for that has passed. The only responsible way to course correct is to bring the story back to television and put the Nolan-Joy partnership back in the driver’s seat. From music to dialogue and everything in between, Westworld had a clear vision and one that has had no equal since.
- Release Date
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2016 – 2022
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy
- Directors
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Fred Toye, Jennifer Getzinger, Stephen Williams, Vincenzo Natali, Craig William Macneill, Anna Foerster, Craig Zobel, Hanelle M. Culpepper, Helen Shaver, Jonny Campbell, Michelle MacLaren, Neil Marshall, Nicole Kassell, Tarik Saleh, Uta Briesewitz, Lisa Joy, Meera Menon
- Writers
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Roberto Patino, Carly Wray, Ron Fitzgerald, Daniel T. Thomsen, Karrie Crouse, Wes Humphrey
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