Gallery: 'Westworld' HBO series is Blade Runner meets Deadwood Gallery Gallery: 'Westworld' HBO series is Blade Runner meets Deadwood + 2

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HBO has released the first teaser trailer for its upcoming AI thriller Westworld, a television remake of the classic sci-fi movie.


Despite the Old West look, everything seen in the trailer is terrifically advanced. The series centres on a theme park that recreates periods of history and fills them with likelike androids, allowing human guests to engage in the debauchery and violence of the era with no actual risk -- until things start going wrong.

Described by HBO as "a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin", the series will feature Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Robert Ford, the creator of the machines that populate the park. Westworld will also be Hopkins' first regular TV role.

The original Westworld was a 1973 movie exploring early fears surrounding artificial intelligence. Yul Brynner appeared as the Gunslinger, a now-iconic robot who implacably hunted tourist Peter Martin (played by Richard Benjamin) through several android-filled domains after a virus overrides the park's safety protocols. The film was written by Jurassic Park's Michael Crichton too, "theme parks going wrong" being a favourite sub-genre of his, it seems.


The new version looks to delve even deeper into the nature of AI, and is set to focus more on the robots than the human guests. With James Marsden set to play Teddy Flood, "a newly arrived gunslinger", he may be the updated version of Brynner's character, while Evan Rachel Wood appears as Dolores Abernathy, a young woman who discovers her life is an intricate lie. The implication seems to be that the robots don't know they're robots, and realisation may cause a similar disaster to the classic film; existentialism as a computer virus.

At the press tour of the Television Critics Association in the US earlier this month, HBO president Michael Lombardo said of Westworld that "I think the visitors to the park are really not the primary focus of our show at all. Without giving more than that away, I think all I can say is only one character that you saw in the clip is a visitor to the park. And yeah, it resembles the film in name and in spirit and but really is, I think, otherwise not much of a reference point."

The show is co-created and executive produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and set to appear in 2016. No UK broadcaster has yet been announced, though given the relationship with Sky for Game of Thrones, the satellite broadcaster seems likely.