The 1973 movie followed a decidedly conventional monsters-run-amok plotline. (It was, among other things, an almost perfect prototype for Crichton’s subsequent, vastly more successful Jurassic Park franchise.) Tourists visited a robotic theme park based on the Old West to enjoy safe, guilt-free versions of shoot-outs, saloon altercations, and assignations with prostitutes. But the robots inevitably glitched, and, led by a mechanized gunslinger played by Yul Brynner, they began massacring the tourists.

HBO’s Westworld takes this narrative and inverts it by telling the story largely from the perspective of the androids. The series still asks the classic question of what might happen if our creations turned against us, yet it is more interested in the consequences for them than in those for us. The human beings of Westworld are, to a considerable degree, supporting players in a drama of android self-actualization.

This reframing goes hand in hand with a fundamental shift in moral perspective. In the Crichton film, the tourists were the (mostly) likable protagonists. The cast of human characters also included the engineers responsible for the creation and caretaking of the robots—figures out of their depth, perhaps, but in no meaningful way malicious. And there were, of course, the deadly, implacable robots.

In Nolan and Joy’s telling, we again have the morally conflicted middle layer of android-creators and park bureaucrats—by turns hubristic, paternal, and befuddled. But this time out, the sympathetic victims are for the most part the androids, whose memories are erased daily but who begin to retain fragmentary visions of the horrors that are regularly visited upon them. And those horrors are inflicted by the true villains of the show: the human tourists. In perhaps the show’s most wicked inversion, Brynner’s bald, middle-aged gunslinger is explicitly echoed in a figure played by Ed Harris; but whereas Brynner’s character was an android who killed human beings, Harris’s is a human being who takes gruesome pleasure in murdering androids.

Why, after all, would people pay a fortune—one guest cites a rate of $40,000 a day—to immerse themselves in a simulacrum of the lawlessness of the Old West? Westworld answers that they would do so to indulge their otherwise unspeakable appetites for senseless violence and transgressive sex, without moral scruple or legal consequence. The series is remarkably stark in its depiction of the cruelty underlying these appetites. All but vanished are the “shoot-out with a bandito”–type scenarios of the original film. Instead, one bored tourist nails a kindly old prospector’s hand to a table with a steak knife just to make him shut up. Another walks up to an amiable cowboy minding his own business at the bar, shoots him in the back of the head, and crows, “Now, that’s a fucking vacation!”