The eerie first teaser trailer for HBO’s highly anticipated new sci-fi/Western series Westworld played during Sunday night’s season finale of True Detective, and it’s already getting better reviews than the entire second season of Detective got this year.
The 30-second clip gives us a first look at the futuristic theme-park and its robot inhabitants first made famous in the 1973 film of the same name.
“Westworld is a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin,” according to HBO’s official synopsis of the series.
And the trailer is certainly dark; it features an android Evan Rachel Wood creepily contemplating her own existence as she apparently becomes sentient.
Expectations are sky-high for the series based on the creative minds behind it: the series was created by Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Interstellar) and produced by J.J. Abrams and the late Jerry Weintraub.
The star-studded cast includes Ed Harris, James Marsden, Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood, Rodrigo Santoro, Jeffrey Wright and Anthony Hopkins, who flashes a creepy grin as theme park creative director Dr. Robert Ford in the trailer.
In January, Nolan praised Michael Crichton’s original work (Crichton wrote and directed the original Westworld) and discussed his fresh take on the project in an informative interview with Entertainment Weekly: “What we can tell you is that we intend to make the most ambitious, subversive, f***ed up television series.”
Westworld will premiere some time in the first half of 2016 on HBO. Check out the first teaser trailer above.