Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie Review

"Is It Now?"

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 9, 2019

(Warning: The following assumes that the reader is familiar with Season One of Westworld and contains major spoilers for anyone who isn't. If you have not watched the show's first season, please consult the Season One review for a spoiler-free introduction. Otherwise, proceed at your own risk.)

The title of this review—"Is it now?"—is a question asked in the opening moments of Season Two by Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), Westworld's chief programmer, and secretly one of the android "hosts" that populate the theme park. The query is repeated throughout the season, and it's central to the intricate narrative puzzle constructed by creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and their talented writers room for the HBO series' sophomore outing. Having staged a massive temporal deception the first time around, Nolan and Joy expect viewers to be wise to their tricks; so they tell the audience up front that they're going to do it again, just as a magician might pretend to give away one illusion while engineering another that's even more startling. Indeed, throughout Season Two, Nolan and Joy manipulate time with such dazzling complexity that you can watch the season repeatedly and still be sorting out how the narrative strands are connected. (Hint: Watch for shifting aspect ratios and Bernard's glasses.)

But here, unlike in Season One, where production had to shut down for several months for the showrunners to unravel their own conundrums, all the pieces are in place from the outset. As the full extent of Season Two's expanded canvas is gradually unfurled, with previously unseen expanses of the theme park being explored and one mind-bending revelation following another, you hold your breath, doubting whether such a high-wire narrative stunt can be sustained. But it is—and then the creators promise even more to come. (HBO has already ordered a third season.)

Much of Westworld's second season plays out in the two weeks following the carnage that erupted at the conclusion of Season One, when the theme park's creator, Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), unleashed his new "narrative". Ford's long-held secret turned out to be the liberation of the hosts from the bondage of their programming. The opening salvo was Ford's summary execution (or was it a suicide?) by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), the gentle damsel from Sweetwater, who had spent decades being raped and abused by the park's human guests. As vengeful hordes of newly awakened hosts descended on the gathering of dignitaries from Delos, Inc., the only human who seemed pleased by this unexpected turn was the so-called Man in Black (Ed Harris), now revealed to be William Grace, owner of Delos and its theme park, and a much older version of the hesitant romantic (Jimmi Simpson) who had fallen in love with Dolores when he first visited Westworld many years earlier with his future brother-in-law, Logan (Ben Barnes). For William, the hosts' awakening was a cherished dream, adding authentic jeopardy to an adventure of which he had long ago wearied, because he was never truly at risk.

Two weeks later, a salvage team arrives led by Karl Strand (Gustaf Skarsgård, another member of the talented Swedish acting dynasty that includes Stellan, Alexander and Bill). Strand quickly pushes aside the park's resident head of security, Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), whose forces have taken heavy losses battling the awakened hosts. But Strand isn't there to rescue surviving guests or Delos officials. He's come for something else, and he reports directly to Delos' cold-blooded executive director, Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), whose reasons for being in the park turn out to be much more complicated than engineering a corporate coup. Hale's interests center on the host named Peter Abernathy (Louis Herthum), who was originally cast as Dolores' farmer father, until he inexplicably malfunctioned and was placed in cold storage. Now all of the hosts from cold storage have been set free, and Abernathy is somewhere in the park's vast expanses—and Hale will sacrifice anyone and anything to retrieve him. It turns out that Abernathy's strange behavior wasn't just a malfunction. Indeed, he's the key to . . . something.

Season Two oscillates between these two points in time, with the writers deliberately obscuring chronology as they jump among multiple story lines that, much like the hosts themselves, have broken free from Season One's repetitive narrative "loops". Familiar faces take on new roles, especially Maeve (Thandie Newton), the former Sweetwater madam, who had almost escaped into the outside world at Season One's conclusion, until she suddenly turned back to search for the daughter she can't forget from a previous life in a different loop. Expanding her as-yet-unexplained power to control other hosts, Maeve gathers a loosely affiliated band that includes both hosts and humans. The terrified narrative director, Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), serves as her guide to the park, while technicians Felix and Sylvester (Leonardo Nam and Ptolemy Slocum) perform repairs and diagnostics in the field. Ruthless outlaw Hector Escaton (Rodrigo Santoro) remains loyally by Maeve's side, his pistol always ready to defend her.

Maeve's quest will take her to regions of the park we haven't seen before, including Shogun World, of which the existence was previewed in the closing episode of Season One. There, she will find a bloody world of ritual and honor that is entirely foreign and yet oddly familiar. (Shogun World is described as a destination for guests who found Westworld's violence too tame, and it lives up to its billing.) Later, Maeve will come face to face with the Native American warrior Akecheta (Longmire's Zahn McClarnon), who has haunted her nightmares but who turns out to be a far different character than she (or we) imagined. The history of Akecheta's Ghost Nation tribe is recounted in Episode 8, "Kiksuya", which is one of the season's finest. (It also answers a few riddles left over from Season One.)

But Season Two doesn't confine itself to the two-week period that Bernard struggles to recall when Stubbs and his men find him unconscious on a beach. (They don't yet know, as we do, that he's a host created by Ford to mimic the inventor's former partner, Arnold.) The story also jumps backward in time to show how Ford and Arnold initially persuaded Delos to invest in their audacious project, arranging real-life demonstrations for Logan and his ruthless industrialist father, James Delos (Peter Mullan), a self-made billionaire who needs to be convinced that the park is a sound investment. We also gain insight into William's gradual takeover of Delos after Logan persuades the Grace family to invest in the venture. As James Delos weakens from a terminal illness, William pushes aside both father and son—but he isn't yet done with the patriarch. We also meet Logan's sister, Juliet (Sela Ward), to whom William was engaged when we first encountered him. Not surprisingly, the marriage hasn't been a happy one, as William keeps abandoning his family to disappear into the Western fantasy land whose mysteries have become his obsession.

Season Two is subtitled "The Door", and the narrative contains numerous doors leading to unexpected places. These include subterranean facilities of which even Bernard was unaware. Westworld turns out to be more than just a theme park. It has other purposes, which is why the hard-headed James Delos was persuaded to invest a fortune to perfect it. (What follows may be considered a minor spoiler, though it's hardly a surprise.) As Logan said in Season One, the park reveals who you really are, but the guests aren't the only ones discovering their true selves. Just as Google learns from your searches, or Alexa from your commands, or Facebook from your likes, or Siri from your requests, Westworld has been silently gathering data on its guests for years—uniquely intimate data about the choices people make in their most naked and primal moments, when they are freed from all consequences and are able (as Delos promises its guests) to "live without limits". That information is priceless for any company, and one of Season Two's doors leads to a treasure trove of it that Charlotte Hale is desperate to protect. Another door leads to a haven created by Ford for the hosts that Dolores calls "the Valley Beyond". Yet another door leads to the world beyond the park, where the conclusion of Season Two opens limitless possibilities for Westworld's future. And be sure to stay past the final episode's credits, when one of the main characters opens a door for which they've been searching throughout the season—and finds exactly what they deserve.

Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Westworld continues to be the rare contemporary TV show shot on film. The principal cinematographers for Season Two were John Grillo (Preacher) and Darran Tiernan (Star Trek: Discovery), but arguably the most critical contributor to the show's distinctive look was colorist Shane Harris of the Encore facility owned by Deluxe. The footage from each shooting day was scanned at 4K by Encore and color-corrected by Harris in both SDR and HDR, in consultation with the cinematographers and showrunners, with the goal of producing masters suitable for broadcast, Blu-ray and UHD. According to Harris, care was taken to preserve the look of Season One for sequences set in familiar environs like the mountains, forests and deserts of Westworld itself and the underground control rooms, fabrication facilities and programming bays located within the formation known as "the Mesa". However, for entirely new locations like Shogun World and Raj World, Harris and the cinematographers aimed for new looks, with Shogun World subjected to a digital version of the "bleach bypass" technique from the days of analog film to desaturate colors, shifting the image toward black-and-white, and Raj World rendered warmer and more golden. Several other new environments are given their own distinctive palettes, but these cannot be described without spoilers.

As with Season One, Warner has spread the ten episodes over three 1080p, AVC-encoded BD-50s, and the presentation is uniformly excellent, with superb sharpness, detail, color reproduction and densities, solid blacks (deep blacks), and a complete absence of noise or distortion. While the extensive digital processing has eliminated most indications of the image's origin on film, it retains the distinctive look established in Season One reflecting the desire of the series' creators to recall classic Westerns by Ford, Eastwood and Leone (and, in Shogun World, the samurai films of Kurosawa). The Blu-rays handle the constant shifting among warm and cool palettes with aplomb. Average bitrates hover around 19 Mbps, which is consistent with Season One's presentation, and the compression and encoding have obviously been done with care. Westworld's Season One dazzled on Blu-ray, and Season Two is its equal, with even more to see.

Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Westworld's Season Two Blu-rays reproduce the 5.1 soundtrack with which the episodes were shown on HBO, but here encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. It's a feature-film-quality soundtrack in impact and dynamic range, and the amped-up violence of Season Two will give your sound system a good workout, especially in scenes of heavy gunfire and explosions, breaking glass and the occasional crashing vehicle. Subtler noises (e.g., Maeve's voice "whispering" to other hosts, as she learns how to direct them) are woven into the mix, often echoing quietly through the surrounds. There are moments of silence that are, by their contrast, as striking as any sound effect. The dialogue is consistently intelligible and well-prioritized, which is no small achievement in some of the louder and more chaotic scenes.

Ramin Djawadi's score remains a highlight of Westworld's soundtrack, from its haunting opening theme to the recurring motifs associated with various characters and environments. The soundtrack of Season Two also continues the show's creative appropriation of other composers' work. "Paint It Black" makes a timely reappearance, and another Rolling Stones classic, "Play with Fire", provides an ironic commentary on a critical sequence (so does Roxy Music's "Do the Strand"). Even Beethoven gets a nod in one episode. With Djawadi leading the way, Westworld's musical accompaniment has become as distinctive and memorable as any of its characters, and the Blu-ray reproduction represents it faithfully.

Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras can be found on disc 3 (though they are listed on each disc). Many are new, although some have already appeared on HBO's streaming service, HBOGo. A few additional brief extras appeared exclusively on the streaming service, but most will disappear by the end of January 2019.

Nolan, Joy and the cast and crew are interviewed. Nearly every extra contains major spoilers, and none of them should be viewed until after watching Season Two. The titles are appropriately descriptive, and the discs provide a short pop-up expansion when each one is highlighted on the Blu-ray menu.

• The Truth Behind Delos (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:40): The focus is on James Delos and his company's ultimate objectives.



• These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends (1080p; 1.78:1; 11:11): A closer look at Season Two's increased violence quotient.



• Bring Yourself Back Online (1080p; 1.78:1).


• Reflections on Season 2 (14:51): A reunion roundtable among Jeffrey Wright ("Bernard"), Evan Rachel Wood ("Dolores"), James Marsden ("Teddy"), Leonardo Nam ("Felix") and Ptolemy Slocum ("Sylvester").


• Of Love and Shogun (15:19): A second reunion roundtable hosted by Nam and Slocum, this time with Thandie Newton ("Maeve"), Rodrigo Santoro ("Hector") and Simon Quarterman ("Lee").


• Journeys and Technology (15:19): Yet a third reunion roundtable hosted by Nam and Slocum, here with Luke Hemsworth ("Stubbs"), Ben Barnes ("Logan") and Angela Sarafyan ("Clementine"). For those still puzzling over Stubbs' ambiguous dialogue at the end of Season Two, Hemsworth supplies an answer in a spoiler of epic proportions.



• Creating Westworld's Reality (1080p; 1.78:1)
• The Drone Hosts (3:23)
• An Evocative Location (3:23)
• Fort Forlorn Hope (5:31)
• The Delos Experiment (5:59)
• Shogun World (12:57)
• Inside the Cradle (4:47)
• Chaos in the Mesa (5:28)
• Ghost Nation (3:19)
• Deconstructing Maeve (3:31)
• The Valley Beyond (11:42)

Westworld: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I was mildly critical of Westworld's Season One for overusing sex and violence in what sometimes appeared to be an effort to match the excesses of, e.g., Game of Thrones. Season Two offers even more violence, but now the violence makes more sense in the context of what amounts to a war between humans and the hosts rising up in rebellion (and often emulating the sadism they learned from the theme park's guests over many years of enslavement). As for sex, there isn't time for such indulgences in a world where, to echo the Man in Black, the danger is real and so is the thirst for survival. Season One tracked the general plot outline of Michael Crichton's original 1973 sci-fi thriller, but Season Two takes us far beyond. The show truly came into its own this year. Where it goes next is anyone's guess, but Nolan and Joy will have to work hard to top themselves. In the meantime, the Blu-ray discs are well-engineered and highly recommended.