I haven't written a film review for a long time, because I'm better at chasing a moment's emotion than extracting the essence from the various clues, and it's easy to zoom in on the small details and miss the theme, which is unprofessional. But "Westworld", as the American drama I follow most seriously, still wants to leave something for the present.
To be honest, the third season did not have the amazing feeling of the first season. Many people would think that the ending was too sloppy. The ten-episode story line was cut to eight episodes and lost the 90-minute spirit of the finale, only a short 72 minutes. There are too many new tool people who take the lunch box without recognizing their face. I still haven't understood the meaning of the fifth mind ball appearing for ten seconds and then walking away. In fact, he can hide it until the fourth season to control the field. But there is one thing to say, Nolan Ken has been very good at filling the pits steadily, and the completion of other dramas on the shelves at the same period is very good.
Many viewers complained that the loss of the "Westworld" style this season was because of the loss of the editing feature of disrupting the timeline and coexisting multiple timelines, but I can still accept it myself. The environment of the first and second seasons is in a retro park, and the time and place plots are disrupted in the narrative method, so that the audience who likes to solve puzzles can sort out the story with relish, which also corresponds to the meaning of "Maze", showing the same anti-three. The characteristics of the third season; while the activities of the third season are all carried out in the real world of the modern/near future, but return to the classic three-uniform style. Personally, I think this is a little trick of Nolan, exposing the problem to the surface. People can clearly understand, but we don't know how heavy the iceberg is in this water at present, whether it is all or only one-eighth, we can only wait for the fourth season to continue to fill the hole.
Sanyi allows the audience to intuitively feel the progress of the plot, but this also exposes this structural problem, that is, the flattening of characters is more prominent. Except for Hale, most of the other characters in this season stay in a flat or only two-line development route. Although Keller played by Xiaofan has a strong character background, his sense of reality is not enough. Apart from the main line features, there are many other aspects. It flashed by and did not go deep, like chattering and forcing the audience to tell the audience that this is a person with a story, but it makes people feel thin. The double easter eggs at the end of the film are considered to have dug a new hole for the fourth season. Old fans like me are still happy to close their eyes and see what other moths Nolan can make.
I believe that other people are more professional than me in the analysis of the plot, and my focus is on other aspects of my interest.
1. Free will
Regarding free will, it has been discussed since the first season, it is a commonplace, but I have new ideas. In the first two seasons and even the first half of the third season, I subconsciously thought that this was a history of the awakening of artificial intelligence, and that "free will" is relative to robots, but after reading the final chapter, I suddenly realized that I was narrow-minded.
The exploration of free will, the film is more exciting than the academic description. Whether it is "2001 A Space Odyssey" or "The Machine Butler", human beings and artificial intelligence seem to have always been guarded and guarded. In addition to being proud, I have to endure loneliness, and I long for artificial intelligence to obtain more human free will, but I am always vigilant that such free things will threaten my own survival.
Free will defined in the philosophical sense, that is, subjective initiative, is an idealist creed. Liberal arts students who have finished high school will know that in Marxist philosophy, the basic contradiction of philosophy lies in materialism and idealism. What are the two? Primary question. In modern society, most people agree that the world they live in has material characteristics, not pure spiritual power, so even as human beings, the "free will" constructed on the ideal will be subject to considerable material resistance. It is also reflected in Westworld.
When the host climbs from the cornerstone to the top of the labyrinth and obtains free will, this is similar to the empiricism of the old philosophy, that is, human self-consciousness is summed up by the accumulation of perceptual experience, rather than appearing out of thin air. But something different is that the Westworld experience is "revealed", with the words of Ford or Arnold in the head of the receptionist guiding their actions. When they have accumulated enough painful experience, the phrase "this cruel pleasure will end with cruelty" implies that the free will receptionist will end with pain in return. Therefore, the artificial intelligence in the park slaughtered human beings, and Demei launched the bloody revolution
My understanding of this "Revolution", before reading the final article, I think that artificial intelligence wants to gain a place in the real world, I think it is a bit far-fetched, on this point I agree with the new villain Serak's statement, "Artificial intelligence does not have a place in the real world. In the past and the future, only the present exists, you can live forever in the virtual world, and there is no need to compete with humans for the real world." But Nolan constructed a larger world view, and Demei realized that even in the real world, human beings still Without freedom, they are not even as free as artificial intelligence. They have never made decisions by themselves since they were young, and their lives are controlled by a machine. The most ironic thing is that as the owner of the machine, they are willing to surrender to the machine they made.
Two, one yuan and two points
I have a great interest in unity and duality, and believe that this world is a world of duality, and whether it is matter or consciousness, there are traces of division. In ancient Chinese philosophy, Taoism clearly divided the world into yin and yang, black and white, male and female, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, sensibility and rationality, maintenance and destruction, all of which are divided and reconciled, but at the same time we will also see that yin and yang The division of the graph is not a clear straight line, but is curved and transformed into each other. This is the philosophy of chaos, which is disordered but harmonious.
There are two opposite sides of each person's personality. The dark side and the bright side exist in the human body at the same time, but the individual chooses which side will be used to show people. So I don't think that human beings can change, because when a unitary personality is formed, multi-facetedness will exist, and the self can choose what kind of personality/temperament to behave in the world. Change is a qualitative change, a qualitative state. Transform into another, a change in the form of an object rather than a spirit.
In "Westworld", there are a lot of monadic and dichotomous, the typical receptionist's dualistic mind, divine enlightenment and reverie exist in the mind ball of a host at the same time, in the last episode, Demei's sentence "All of you are My Replica" is also a very classic dichotomy operation. All the people who appear in the West World are the minds of Demei, and they are injected with different stories and backgrounds to make them look different, but they are all the same personality in the core. They all follow the original Demei insisted that "some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, those disorderly chaos. I choose to see the good", so I was not surprised when Maeve finally turned against the water, because the deepest Memory is to choose the truth, the good and the beautiful, so to a certain extent, Westworld can be said to be a "virtuous world", so she did not deliberately choose which mind orbs to take away when she left the paradise, because they belonged to her own, she and Hale The phrase "you are mine" means not only that you are on my side, but also that you are just a copy of me.
Other dichotomies, such as the good and evil in William, the identities and memories of Arnold and Bernard, the schizophrenia of Brother Serak, Rehoboam and Solomon, the park is just another time-line reality, and reality is just a large amusement park , and so on, all imply the law of dichotomy or even multi-division in this world, which is also the famous saying "No one is perfect", people can't be a perfect and pure person, there are always other impurities mixed into it, decomposing perfection. Just as human beings are almost obsessed with being round, it is the greatest degree of perfection, a commanding height that cannot be achieved by artificial intelligence.
The subject of death
As we all know, I am a person who likes to discuss death, but also the person who avoids death the most. Because death is a chasm that I cannot cross, other theories and conjectures are all traceable. And death, like birth, seems groundless and lawful. Human beings not only have the instinct of life, but also have the instinct of death, and they are all self-instincts from the heart. "The life instinct includes the self-defense and sexual instincts of man. The death instinct refers to the urge toward destruction and aggression in every human being." (Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle")
In the last episode, Bernard took Arnold's memory and briefly talked to Arnold's wife because of the arrangement of the German sister. As a human, his wife has gray hair, and Bernard is still middle-aged. This is probably a hidden hint. Although human beings will age, their inner spirit will not change. Although artificial intelligence can last forever. , but the memories and feelings they carry are not really owned, but given by the maker.
In another lyrical essay I wrote the other day, "Death is the only departure I can't accept, for me, as long as I live, every second has infinite possibilities...everything I care about." People, I'm not too worried about whether they are doing well or not, and whether they need my help when they encounter troubles, because these are all things that I can handle. The moment I determined that they were within my scope of attention, it was already determined, and I only need to meet in the future. It's not the cold corpse, I have countless ways to try to solve the problem." Death is one of the most cruel and irresponsible separations. At the current level of research, death means the end of the individual, but it is related to the dead. memories, forced to be carried on their behalf by the living, good or bad. If changes can be made, I would prefer that at the moment of the individual's death, all the memories and imprints of this person's existence in this world will disappear, and the preserver of the memory will become the dead person, whether it is a soul or always silent in the ground, You can look back on the memories of when you were alive.
The reason why I made a fuss about a little detail that has almost nothing to do with the plot is because I suddenly thought that I often dream of the death of a person repeatedly in my dreams, the only person I can't be free and easy, like a fate must meet The right subject, the cycle of death repeats itself. I was very close to him, watching him die again and again in despair, with no room for change. Watching him lose his breath of life, it was like a hundred extremely thin knives, one by one slowly inserted into the heart, and then slowly pulled out one by one, starting a new round. As Arnold's wife said, "When he died, I remember it as if the sun went down and never rose again".
Whether it is philosophy or academia, the interpretation of death is a qualitative change in another way, but no one can understand that this qualitative change is good or bad, mysterious and realistic, cruel and powerful.
4. About selection
Undoubtedly, Demei played a big game this season. She didn't just want to start a coup, but wanted to give all creatures a chance to choose.
Every step she takes is the result of her choice. Even though the world is riddled with evil, she still chooses to see beauty. In the last field, even if William has been abused for decades, in her memory Only the beauty of the first sight remains. She asked Maeve to stand on a team, but did not force Maeve to support herself; Hale chose to leave Demei, and humans chose to leave the control of machines, just as the host chose to leave the cage of humans. She chose Taylor as her leader not only because of his extraordinary character, but also because of his courage to choose. He did not choose the plan given by Rehoboam, but followed his own plan. Ford also left the receptionist with a choice, whether to stay in the virtual world or create a new one, apparently Demei chose the latter.
Choice is a subjective behavior out of free will, which means that if the receptionist wants to obtain the right to choose, he must first awaken, and now it is known that there are very few awakened receptionists, so more receptionists who have not awakened have been deceived by German sisters. Arranged in the Pure Land of Bliss.
Now that he has completed his awakening and made a good choice of the host, Maeve is one. Bernard in the easter egg should have made a decision after exploring the virtual world. There is a high probability that Demei will be resurrected in the next season. After all, all mind balls are Hers, but in what form is not yet known. Like the saying "existence is worth", there must be a reason for the choice. One of the doctrines that I am very disgusted with is "natural selection for the survival of the fittest". It is true that organisms compete with each other and can promote the optimization of species, but it is not nature or the creator who should be screened and eliminated, but humans themselves. Whether it is gender objectification or class solidification, it is a social behavior and should not become a standard for self-judgment. Just like the daughter of a farmer set by Demei from the beginning, she can become the leader of the artificial intelligence revolution. Chose the form of life instead of being stuck with computer programs.
V. Summary
In general, I can still give four and a half stars to the third season. As a giant that has not abandoned the audience during the epidemic, it is still worthy of praise. Regarding the imagination of the fourth season, the topic will probably still be deducted, "This brutal joy will end in brutality", I don't know in what form Demei returned, and Keller, who joined forces with Maeve, went to another path Hale, William whose throat was cut (there is no possibility of death if he did not see the moment he died), the fifth replica of the still alive German sister, Bernard and the chief security officer, there are enough characters, and it is not ruled out There will be new villains in the next season, but I don't know which world the artificial intelligence will survive in after the end. As long as William's hair doesn't fall out, I have the confidence to pursue it. Looking forward to 2022~
(The picture comes from the Internet, invaded and deleted)
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