Posted in: HBO, Review, TV, Westworld | Tagged: evan rachel wood, Hacking, HBO, nazis, person of interest, robot uprising, singapore, singuarity, thandie newton, tv, westworld, william gibson

"Westworld" Season 3 – Robot Uprisings, Class Warfare & "Neuromancer": "Parce Domine" Thoughts

HBO's Westworld season 3 is the Cyberpunk thriller I had in my head when I was a kid, finally brought into reality.

This is supposed to be future Los Angeles? It doesn't feel like Los Angeles. The light is too overcast.

Oh. This was shot in Singapore.

Amazing that Singapore began as a small island fishing village when Sir Stanford Raffles discovered and colonized it for the British Empire. Now in 2020, the place has become more or less the ultimate Cyberpunk city of the future.

Amazing how flexible a location Singapore is, huh? Between Crazy Rich Asians and this.

I know Singapore. Alas, whenever I think of Singapore, I remember the temperature is around 90 degrees Fahrenheit – that's 32 degrees Celsius – and 80% humidity all year long barring Monsoon Season. That's actually not very pleasant at all for me.

Yeah, I recognise the rural parts of Singapore that Bernard's (Geoffrey Wright) scenes were filmed in.

We're Living in William Gibson World Now

This is all very post-William Gibson.

It feels like all live action Cyberpunk thrillers go back to William Gibson. His prose managed to capture that shiny seductive surface of Cyberpunk and this season of Westworld has the look down. All by picking the streets of Singapore to film in.

Dolores' hacking is totally Cyberpunk. So is Caleb's crowdsourced criminal gigs. Crime as gig economy jobs.

Aaron Paul would be the perfect Case in a live action adaptation of Gibson's Neuromancer. However, any movie or TV adaptation of Neuromancer would be redundant now. That book's ideas have been endlessly plundered over the last 30 years for other movies and TV shows.

https://youtu.be/pDJbFA32_QY

"Westworld": Revolution in the Singularity

Dolores and the hosts are the guests in outside world this season. They're going to transform it into their Westworld, messing with it as they go. The humans will be the "hosts" they abuse and kill now.

Caleb (Paul) is a slave of this late Capitalism world and pretty much a "host" like Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) was in Westworld.

This show really comes down to two words: Robot Uprising.

Two other words: Class Warfare.

The robots as metaphors for slaves and workers, proletarians enslaved by Capitalism. Now with a literal human slave in Caleb, the theme comes full circle as he joins Dolores in her revolution.

Like the Nolans' previous show Person of Interest, this show is also about the Singularity. We already had one Singularity in the last two seasons in Dolores and Maeve (Thandie Newton) as robots who reach sentience, independence and free will. Looks like it's heading towards the Singularity with Dolores attempting to take over and use a panopticon-style AI system.

Oh good. We get to see Maeve fight Nazis. Of course there has to be Nazis.

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