Westworld Review

Season one is a legitimately great piece of construction. Nolan and Joy hide the maze, the Man in Black and William's timeline in plain sight, and the reveal recontextualizes rather than cheats, which is the difference between a twist and a trick. Anthony Hopkins plays Ford as a man enjoying his own cruelty, Thandiwe Newton turns Maeve's awakening into the most watchable arc on the show, and Evan Rachel Wood carries two Doloreses at once without signposting the seam.

Ramin Djawadi's player-piano covers are a design idea rather than a gimmick. Paul Cameron's pilot photography sets a cold widescreen formality that treats Monument Valley and the mesa lab as the same architecture. Then the series mistakes its puzzle for its subject. Season two fragments into timelines nobody asked to reassemble, season three swaps the park for a flat future Los Angeles, and season four spends its hours discussing a plot instead of having one. The A is for a first season few dramas match, and for craft that stayed high while the story dissolved.