EVIL SHOGUN FULL
If you thought the cover of Kanye West’s “Runaway” (coincidentally the week he went full MAGA) or the “White Stripes: Indian Edition” version of “Seven Nation Army” were hard to take, wait until you hear faux-Japanese versions of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” The former, at least, is a callback to the show’s first use of the song, during the Sweetwater bandit raid that ShogunWorld has recycled for its own setting. What’s the point of all that precise blade-wielding if you don’t actually get to see the damn blades?Īlso, true to the show’s programming, cringeworthy music cues are abound here. Since neither of those factors appear to apply, it comes across like sheer addiction to the murky, somber lighting and color palette of Prestige TV. This is usually either a cost-cutting measure (you don’t need to pay for details you can’t see) or a way to hide sloppy swordplay. For starters, despite what looks like very strong fight choreography and a behind-the-scenes budget bigger than a small country’s GDP, all the combat is shot in the dark. The flow from East to West is simply reversed here.īut – listen, this is Westworld, there’s always a but – enough baffling decisions remain to knock you out of the action faster than a katana to the face. encounter are recycled completely from Westworld (a running gag with narrative department chief Sizemore, who’s apparently as lazy as he is sleazy), you even get a bit of the Japan/Western cross-pollination vibe found not just in Kill Bill but in cowboy remakes of samurai classics like The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars.
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Kurosawa, Misumi, Tarantino – regardless of who’s pushing your drug of choice genre-wise, ShogunWorld is a mainline hit of it.Īnd since the characters and storyline Maeve & Co. But if you just love the ring of steel on steel and the pitter-patter of ninja feet across wooden rooftops, your response here is guaranteed to be Pavlovian. That may or may not be your thing, naturally.
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Whether you’re talking about the park’s designers or the show’s creators, this environment is clearly engineered not for strict, dry historical accuracy – it’s all about entertaining paying customers/subscribers who like samurai and ninja movies. Then, of course, there’s Shogunworld itself. Remember in The Matrix when Neo suddenly starts seeing in code? It’s that kind of “holy shit!” moment. Then, on the verge of being strangled to death by one of the black-clad attackers, she mentally commands him to impale himself on a nearby spearhead. First, she senses the arrival of the shogun’s ninjas before their attack begins, narrowly saving her from an assassin’s knife. So she spontaneously manifests a new talent: telepathy. If there’s a language barrier, or if she gets choked or gagged, or if her intended targets have their ears burned off by a crazed shogun (hey, it happens), the transmitter and receiver can’t connect properly.
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Her voice control over other hosts is impressive, though it’s started to prove spotty. Maeve, for example, is not just one of the park’s two Patient Zeroes when it comes to the robot revolution (the other being Dolores) – she’s slowly manifesting the powers of a superhero, or even a messiah. This is Westworld in peak pulp-thrill mode. But plotwise, it’s the breeziest, most action-driven episode we’ve seen in a long time. The dialogue still feels stilted, the pace slow. As both her robotic and human companions keep telling her, this is a hugely unnecessary risk for Maeve to take …which is what makes it worth taking. Set in a simulacrum of feudal Japan, it revolves around Maeve‘s quest to help a local madam named Akane (whose gig and personality are based on the former saloon-dwelling alpha female’s own template) rescue her adoptive daughter Sakura from the clutches of an evil shogun.
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For proof, look no further than tonight’s sword-slinging episode – “Akane No Mai” – in which Westworld officially goes East. What’s true of Grand Theft Auto or The Legend of Zelda is true for the occasional blockbuster TV series too: Sometimes, a side quest can be the best part of a game.