When robots achieve sentience, they will enjoy a luxury that humanity has been denied since Adam and Eve frolicked in paradise: They will get to converse with their godlike creators. In film and on television, our mechanical progeny—from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the rebellious Cylons of Battlestar Galactica—grapple with the same existential questions that continue to bedevil us: Who are we? Who made us? Why are we here? But will real-life androids, when they finally meet their makers, like what we have to say?

The new HBO series Westworld opens with an unsettling interrogation between a malfunctioning robot and a concerned programmer: “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” In this instance, reality is an enormous theme park: Human “newcomers,” guests who pay $40,000 a day for the experience, arrive by steam locomotive, stepping off the train into a picture-perfect Old West town populated by android “hosts,” who are programmed not to question this constant stream of strangers in their lives. “The newcomers are looking for the same thing we are,” the glitchy robot explains. “A place to be free. To stake out our dreams.” Westworld, in fact, runs on a loop of sleep and wakefulness: Each night the robots have their memories wiped, arising the next day refreshed from their beds. If they die, they are reborn while they dream.

Every morning, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) opens her eyes, dresses, greets her father, and goes about her day, which is made up of a choreographed set of permutations. Sometimes she runs into her lover (James Marsden), sometimes she’s raped, sometimes she’s shot. The park plays out a complex repetition of more than a hundred interconnected, scripted narratives. (“You pull one character, the overall story adjusts,” explains an administrator, facing a breakdown in the system. “You pull 200 at once and it’s a fucking disaster.”) The maddening loop is a familiar one: Westworld was created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, whose short story “Memento Mori” was adapted into the 2001 film Memento by Nolan’s brother and frequent collaborator, Christopher Nolan.

The original Westworld (1973), written and directed by the novelist Michael Crichton, was very much a product of Vietnam-era angst about men becoming too soft. It belongs to a cluster of films, including Deliverance (1972) and Jaws (1975), in which idyllic destinations are menaced by uncontrollable monsters in the form of demented hillbillies, a vengeful shark, or robot gunslingers gone haywire. The implicit message of these films is that men can’t afford not to be men—not at home, not in the workplace, and certainly not on vacation. It’s no accident that Westworld is a theme park based on the mythology of the Old West: In Crichton’s film, the valor of the cowboy isn’t just entertainment, but an American value to be recovered in daily life.

Crichton had no interest in the philosophical questions of artificial intelligence that fascinated other science-fiction writers and filmmakers; Yul Brynner’s relentless killing machine is scary because it has no soul. The most suggestive aspect of his Westworld was the way its theme park setting anticipated the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose research into consumerism led him to see Disneyland as a model for a world in which simulacra and simulation would displace nature.