Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Dir: David Slade

2018

**

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch represents the first feature-length edition to the series and something of a first for a streaming service. It is presented as an interactive film. The story begins and every few minutes of so the viewer is asked to make a choice for the main character. They have ten seconds to make choices, or a default decision is made. Once a play-through ends, the viewer is given an option of going back and making a different choice. The average viewing is said to be 90 minutes, though the quickest path is said to end after 40 minutes. There are apparently 150 minutes of unique footage divided into 250 segments and officially there are five main endings, with variants within each ending. However, producer Russell McLean has said there are between ten and twelve endings, some of which are more vague as endings compared to others, and according to director David Slade, there are a few "golden eggs" endings that may take a long time before viewers figure out how to achieve them. No ending is considered true over any other, according to executive producers Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, particularly as they felt some endings were not truly endings in the traditional sense. If it sounds complicated it is because it is. In most cases, when the viewer reaches an ending, the interactive film gives the player the option to redo a last critical choice as to be able to explore these endings, or they can alternatively view the film's credits. In some cases, the same segment is reachable in multiple different ways, but will present the viewer with different choices based on the way they reached the segment. In other cases, certain loops guide viewers to a specific narrative regardless of the choices they make. Some endings may become impossible to reach based on choices made by the viewer, unless they opt to restart the film. This action will erase all stored information about which options they had selected while watching the episode on that device. Before venturing down the rabbit hole you should ask yourself two questions: Do you have plenty of uninterrupted time on your hands and are you so into Black Mirror that you can be bothered with all this? I’m a fan of Black Mirror but I still think the early episodes were the best. I’m not as into it as most fans so all of the many Easter eggs that expanded the Black Mirror universe went over my head somewhat. There is no denying that it is all very clever but I didn’t find it particularly entertaining. The story begins in London in 1984. A young programmer called Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) dreams of adapting a "choose your own adventure" book called Bandersnatch by tragic writer Jerome F. Davies (Played by Jeff Minter, the famous 8-bit video game designer and programmer who created several successful games in the 1980s for the ZX Spectrum) into what he hopes will be a revolutionary adventure video game. The game involves traversing a graphical maze of corridors while avoiding a creature called the Pax, and at times making choices by an on-screen instruction. Stefan produces the game for video game company Tuckersoft, which is run by Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry) and employs the famous game creator Colin Ritman (Will Poulter). Before this point the viewer is asked to choose what Stefan has for breakfast and listens to on his way to work but when we are given the choice of accepting or rejecting help from the company in developing the game, the story takes a very different turn. At least it does for some. I accepted and was told I’d made the wrong choice. This part of the game plays out until you make the right choice. It is also impossible to avoid visiting Dr. R. Haynes' (Alice Lowe) in her clinic for depression therapy and discussing what happened to Stefan’s mother. There are also many confrontations between Stefan and his father – you can kill him if you like but there is no escaping the endless reels of flashbacks. No matter what decision you make, Stephan feels responsible for his mother’s death, and sees completing the adaption of Bandersnatch, one of the books she owned, as a means to atone to her. As the choices increase, the story goes in varying directions. I think I killed Stefan twice in the end as well as his dad. I also made Stefan have an amazing samurai sword fight with Alice Lowe but none of it really made any sense. The scenarios didn’t fit together particularly well and were dismissed with a lazy (but admittedly likable) question of control. However, the philosophy is fairly superficial. It takes one line from many works written by Descartes and covers it in nostalgic bubblegum. The point in my chosen version of the film whereby Stephan learns that he is in a Netflix film and at the whim of the viewers decisions was initially exciting but then fell flat. It is new in that it hasn’t been done to this extent before, but as a concept it is as old as the hills. The term bandersnatch originates from a fictional creature created by Lewis Carroll, which appears in Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark. The film makes several allusions to Carroll's works, what with Stephan's motivation to find his stuffed rabbit toy which leads him to discover deeper secrets, comparable to Alice's quest to find the White Rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Ritman and Kitty take Stephan to their flat for a psychedelic experience which is clearly a nod to the Mad Hatter’s tea party and Stephan can travel through mirrors in some scenarios just as Alice did in Through the Looking-Glass. Bandersnatch was also a genuine game planned by Imagine Software. It was never released as the company went bankrupt on the 9th July 1984 – the day the story begins. Charlie Booker – a real games nerd and former game journalist – clearly played on this. The Davies character is clearly an allusion to Philip K. Dick who frequently wrote on alternate realities and timelines and at one point attempted to kill his wife. Due to the inclusion of drug taking and surrealism to the story you could also compare the Davies character to writer William S. Burroughs, a similar tortured artist who actually did kill his second wife. I was let down due to poor connectivity and quite often I wasn’t able to make any of the decisions in time. I waited a long time between decisions for the right story to load and I found I was forced to go back and make the ‘correct’ decision far too many times for the concept to actually hold up. This is no post-modernist masterpiece. Clever I’m sure but not in the least bit entertaining and god help us if this is the future of television. I personally don’t visit an art gallery to paint the pictures myself and I don’t expect to cook when I visit a restaurant. I do choose the food I eat in restaurants but if the waiter repeatedly came back to me telling me I’d made the wrong choice and that I should choose something else until the chief is happy then I’m not sure I’d go back. It gave me such meta fatigue that I’m not going to be watching any more Black Mirror for some time, which I’m sure wasn’t the desired effect.