Think about The Truman Show for a minute, the 1998 movie where Jim Carrey plays an insurance salesman who discovers that his entire life is a television show and that all of his friends and family are paid actors. It’s a movie that makes you think long and hard about the world you’re living in. Is reality, reality? Or is it just a part of something else? Now, think about the opposite of The Truman Show. Imagine entering a world where you know it’s not reality, but the other people living there have no idea that it’s all fake. This is the basic idea behind Westworld, the new HBO series based on the campy 1973 Michael Crichton sci-fi movie of the same name.
To be fair, it is a lot more complicated than that. Westworld is essentially an “amusement park” where guests can pay a lot of money to act out the fantasy of living in the Wild West. The people that populate this park, known as “hosts,” are androids coded and designed to live out their endless lives as people in the Wild West. They have predesigned roles, narratives, jobs, romances, and everything else to make Westworld a genuine experience for its guests. Similar to another Michael Crichton-based movie, something goes wrong with the hosts when an update improving their sentience goes haywire. The hosts start to glitch and diverge from their pre-designed storylines.
What makes Westworld really special, however, isn’t the wonder and awe of a fictional world where there aren’t any consequences; it’s the deep-rooted and classic science fiction question of what it means to be human. 
Founder and creative director of Westworld, Dr. Robert Ford, played by the excellent Anthony Hopkins, has been designing and updating hosts for the park for the past 30 years. Late in the premiere episode, he questions the next step in human evolution: Is it simply creating ourselves, pushing past the limits of artificial intelligence to create fully sentient beings? 
Westworld’s first episode is one of those perfect pilots that manages to introduce about a dozen fully-realized characters, including Dolores Abernathy, thoughtfully played by Evan Rachel Wood, intriguing storylines and deep mythologies all within 60 minutes. 
While the hosts have predesigned stories and movements, there is clearly a depth within each of them that will make you want to keep watching. Even the beautiful cinematography will draw you in with each shot of the wide expanse of the American southwest. What will drive this show to greatness is the discussion between Ford and his head programmer, Bernard Lowe, played by resident nerd Jeffrey Wright, about the next step in human evolution. It’s been said that to err is human, but what if a human consciously creates a mistake? Is the creator at fault for designing said mistake, or is it the mistake’s own sentience that will make it turn against its creator? 
Questions like these are at the heart of Westworld, and the most intriguing one this show poses is, “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” In the pilot, it’s a question for Dolores, but it just as well may be a question for the audience. We’ll have to wait and see how — and if — this question is answered in the coming episodes. For now, we’ll just enjoy this engrossing world that’s been created for us. 
Watch the trailer for HBO’s Westworld below: