‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ Review: Netfix’s Choose-Your-Own Adventure Experiment Is Entertaining Enough – At Least The First Time Through
Black Mirror: Bandernatchis probably (hopefully) the closest we’ll come to living through aBlack Mirrorepisode — and that’s not as bad as it sounds.Black Mirror: Bandersnatchis a choose-your-own adventure story that makes the viewer culpable for the doomed destiny of its protagonist: a young programmer named Stefan Butler (Dunkirk’sFionn Whitehead) who attempts to adapt a sprawling fantasy novel into a video game in 1984. But as he dives deeper into developing his game, itself a choose-your-own-adventure game set to revolutionize the industry, his mental state begins to dangerously unravel.
It’s a cautionary techno-tale typical of the bleak anthology series created byCharlie Brooker. But rather than allowing its audience to be a distant, apathetic voyeur,Black Mirror: Bandersnatchmakes the viewer part of the experience, offering up various binary choices throughout the film that can change the story — sometimes to drastic effect. The result is an entertaining, and at times thrilling, immersive experience that transforms a gimmick into a game, and simultaneously compels and condemns the viewer for daring to be involved.
Bandersnatchhas made headlines for its choose-your-own-adventure story structure, a storytelling gimmick that became popular in children’s books in the ’70s and ’80s but never really evolved beyond its charming childish roots. Other than video games where choice becomes the rule apparent, choose-your-own-adventure in its purest form was never truly possible in other mediums like movies and TV. But thanks to new technology implemented by Netflix,Black Mirrorhas made an interactive feature film that is effectively the antithesis to everything that film stands for. But in this decade, where movies have already becometelevisionandcomic books, why not video games?
Part personality test, part screenwriting experiment, part meta-commentary onBlack Mirror’s pop culture impact itself,Black Mirror: Bandersnatchgame-ifies the movie-watching experience into what feels like the next-step evolution of the sci-fi horror series. The viewer gets to make a choice frequently throughout the film, the first of which takes place merely five minutes into the film: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs? Eventually the mundane choices grow into mammoth, world-ending choices, each taking you to one of at leastfive alternate endings. The choices you make can reveal your personality (are you a white hat or a black hat?) or how familiar you are with storytelling tropes (does choosing to accept or refuse the job offer make for a more compelling story?).
Yeah, it’s not really a movie, but it is fun.Bandersnatchtakes a passive viewing experience and makes it active, making the viewer responsible for poor Stefan’s life, and even communicating with him as his mental state further deteriorates. It’s the godlike omnipotence of playingThe Sims, nestled into aBlack Mirrorexploration of alternate universes created from every choice we make.
ButBandersnatch’s ruminations on free will would becomes quickly tiresome if it weren’t for the cheeky meta-asides and — yes — Easter Eggs inserted into the film. The Netflix storyline — in which the viewer gets the chance to explain to Stefan what a streaming service is — is a funny, tongue-in-cheek piece of corporate synergy that doubles as the meta-commentary on technology thatBlack Mirrorjust loves to hammer in. Another subplot involving the eccentric video game programming prodigy Colin Ritman (a magneticWill Poulter, doing his best Brad Pitt inFight Club) has Stefan going on a surreal drug trip where Colin literally describes all the major alternate endings. And several times throughout the film, the characters will over-emphasize the themes of choice, such as Stefan’s therapist (Alice Lowe) opining, “The past is immutable. No matter how painful it is we can’t change things we can’t choose differently with hindsight.” It’s dangerously on-the-nose, but then again, whenisn’tthat the case for aBlack Mirrorepisode?
There are no wrong choices forBlack Mirror: Bandersnatch— the only mistake you can make is really not to choose at all. When you let the film play straight through without rising to its prompts to make a choice,Bandersnatcheventually takes you through all five major alternate endings, which instantly zaps the fun from the experience. It becomes apparent how thinly plotted the film is when you experience all the somewhat derivative endings back-to-back. There, that ending is ripped straight fromPerfect Blue; another ending offers shades of Netflix’s other ’80s set series,Stranger Things. Many of the endings featuring the cheery talk show become progressively absurd to the point that they feel like joke storylines that Brooker, who wrote the episode, threw together on a lark.
The first time I “played"Bandersnatch, I had a blast; the second time I watched the entire thing all the way through, I was bored. By not treatingBandersnatchas a game, the film is exposed as an over-long, overly simplisticBlack Mirrorepisode. The appeal is in the choices, or in the words ofBandersnatch’s Colin, the illusion of choice.
/Film Rating: 6 out of 10
