As Serac’s goons bear down on the driverless Uber he’s hot-wired with Dolores, Caleb’s just trying to navigate a scene out of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.īut it turns out Genre is no mere film noir simulator, and as the car chase ramps up, Caleb’s world changes styles from noir to opera - replete with saturated colors and a score courtesy of Wagner. The bad trip begins with a foray into film noir, and the show really leans into the aesthetic, switching to moody black-and-white photography and a brass-heavy jazz score. “Genre,” as the drug is aptly named, turns the world into a private movie marathon, and when our luckless hero Caleb is dosed by Liam Dempsey, he starts to see everything through a cinematic lens - including the very movie-like blockbuster chase he finds himself inconveniently embroiled in. Whisking someone through an extended action set piece while he’s high on a futuristic designer drug that makes him experience life as though it were a movie is such an ingenious conceit that it’s hard to believe it’s never been done before. If most car chases are boring, this is the exception that proves the rule - and yet another testament to the calibre of action Westworld has been delivering all season.

The complaint was on my mind while watching the fifth episode of Westworld’s third season, because it features one of the freshest, most dynamic car chases I have seen on screen in years. In the documentary about his career that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow made about him a couple of years ago, the great filmmaker Brian De Palma derided the classic movie car chase as little more than “shots of wheels turning and point-of-views out of windshields and cars banging into things,” not only “very boring,” but “ridiculous to even think about doing” after it was already perfected nearly half a century ago by The French Connection.

Westworld season 1 episode 5