HBO is ramping up the promotion for its much-anticipated adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Westworld, with a new trailer earlier in the week, new images breaking and now a new poster. At this rate we checking our boots for robo-snakes by the weekend.
The poster puts the emphasis on the show’s sci-fi elements, offering up the playful tagline ‘Every hero has a code’. We’re not sure it’s the heroes who have the coding issues in this one: looks likely that the heroes will be the ones frantically calling IT when the A.I.s in Westworld theme park start to go rogue.
Loosely – in terms of basic concept – on Crichton's 1973 sci-fi thriller, the new series explores the moral dilemmas of a massive, entirely convincing theme park realm, one in which in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged via some extremely realistic artificial life forms.
“I’ve always felt in adaptation you have to be a bit of a heretic,” explains co-writer Jonathan Nolan. “What we keep is the brilliant, subversive idea of the set-up: what if there was a place you could go and act out your darkest fantasies with no consequences.” Except, there are consequences. In Western terms, the robots soon want to drink the human's milkshakes.
The ten-episode first season, which stars Evan Rachel Wood, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsden, Thandie Newton and more, debuts across the pond on October 2, and should be making its way here via Sky Atlantic shortly after that.