Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Review - Interactive Storytelling in a Movie Done Right

Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an interactive movie about an aspiring video game developer in 1984 trying to finish his first major game release while feeling like his life is spinning out of control. The movie plays like a "choose your own adventure" book or game where, at certain points in a scene, an interface will appear on screen asking you to make a binary choice for the character, which is then played out in the following shots and can lead to a lot of different pathways to over five different endings. As the story continues, the main character, Stefan, begins to realize there are weird forces controlling his life; he begins to relive past traumas, starts having demonic visions and conspiratorial dreams, and slowly descends into a surreal madness as reality crumbles around him, all while struggling with the normal tribulations and speed bumps to meet the deadline to release his first game, Bandersnatch.

For anyone unfamiliar with the series, Black Mirror is a dark science-fiction anthology series on Netflix, a bit similar in tone and style to The Twilight Zone, where each episode explores a concept about the darker possibilities of technology. Iconic episodes deal with being able to "block" people in real life (like on social media), using reality television as a form of criminal punishment, using memory implants for police investigations, and having one's consciousness uploaded to a virtual reality mainframe after you die, among many others. Bandersnatch functions as a feature-length stand-alone episode that can last 90 minutes or more, depending on your choices and how much of it you choose to explore. I don't normally review movies on this blog (although I have on a few occasions, and I used to have my old Video Games in TV series), but this movie deals directly with video game themes and its interactive nature makes it feel almost like a game, so I figured I'd share my thoughts and observations on it for those who're interested.

The movie begins with 19-year old Stefan waking up in his home, where he lives with his dad (his mother passed away when he was five) on the morning that he's to meet with the CEO of a major video game publisher to pitch his video game, Bandersnatch. The game is based on a fictional book of the same name, which followed the "choose your own adventure" format, and is apparently well-known and well-regarded within this fictional world. The book is perhaps more known, however, for the fact that its author was taking a lot of hallucinogenic drugs during its production and later went crazy and murdered his wife. Stefan shows off an alpha demo of gameplay and it resembles a first-person wireframe dungeon-crawler (a bit like early Wizardry games) where the player encounters various things and has to make choices. After striking a deal with the publisher, Stefan is left to finish developing his game with a deadline looming in just a few months, and that's where the interactive portion of the movie gets going and begins to branch in all directions as you make decisions for him, and as he starts to go a little insane.

My video review of Bandersnatch.

In most "choose your own adventure" books and story games, you're capable of going back to previous choices to undo your decisions, if you realized you picked a bad option or just wanted to see a different alternative. In books, this is done by leaving your finger as a bookmark in the previous section, after you'd flipped forward to the next section, and in games you could always load a previous save point; in both cases, your progress is undone and the material acts as if you never went down those routes at all. Bandersnatch (the movie) realizes that viewers are probably going to want to make different choices in this medium as well (in fact, you'll have to as some choices lead to what are effectively "game over" screens, as opposed to official endings), but adds a creative twist where the game remembers certain events that happen along aborted timelines; if you go back to make different decisions, characters will remember things from the future that haven't happened yet, and familiar scenes will be altered or will lead to new, unexpected directions.

The story deals with themes of infinite realities and the idea that free will is but an illusion, because according to theory all of our actions and decisions are preordained to happen in a prescribed way due to an infinite number of parallel universes that exist to account for every possible combination of actions and decisions that might ever exist in our lives. In this universe I watch Bandersnatch and then decide to write an article about it, but in another universe I watch Bandersnatch and then forget about it and move on. In the movie, when you go back to make different decisions you're essentially jumping into a parallel universe where certain things may have occurred or be prescribed to occur differently, and different characters will remember different events. It all gets a bit confusing, but the point of the story is that Stefan is literally not in control of his life because we are making his decisions for him, and so his choices aren't really choices.

The fact that Stefan is developing a video game makes this all more interesting, because choice in video games draws a nice parallel to the subject matter of the movie. In video games, our decisions often times aren't really our own, because we're choosing from a limited selection of options prescribed by the designer, and sometimes we don't even have choices at all. For example, in Ocarina of Time, you simply cannot say "no" to Zelda; you have to say "yes" (at multiple points in the conversation) or else the game simply won't advance. Bandersnatch takes this concept and runs with it, giving you in one instance two apparent choices where only one of them is actually intended to be followed; picking the other option leads to what is essentially a "game over" screen while a character says you picked "wrong path," and the interface tells you to try again. I was a little annoyed with that design at first, but then I realized that it specifically mirrored Stefan's early design in the game where he hadn't even coded a decision path because he couldn't fathom the player picking a particular option. The movie was making a deliberate point about how the things happening to the character are happening to you, as a viewer/player as well, and that you're also feeling the first-hand effects of the type of things the main character is talking about.

There are even instances where the movie gives you an apparent choice with similar options that will seemingly (and inevitably do) lead to the exact same outcome, and one instance where it actually takes away the binary choice interface to give you but a single choice that you have to pick. That last example occurs in a flashback, and another character talks about how we can't change the past, but the game is all about changing what's already been done, and later goes back to let you change that scene, so I think that's supposed to be a contrast between actual reality and video game reality while the movie starts becoming increasingly meta and the character starts realizing that he's being controlled by a strange being from the future called Netflix. It's this breaking of the fourth wall that makes this movie so fascinating to me because it makes an effort to involve you, the viewer, in the narrative. You play an active role in shaping the outcome of the story, and the characters begin to acknowledge your presence and you even get to interact with Stefan fairly directly, talking to him through his computer monitor at one point.

The interactivity seemed like it would be a gimmick early on, and some viewers might even wonder why it needed to take this approach, but I feel like it's almost necessary to drive the point home about free will. Stefan doesn't feel like he's in control of his actions, but at times you're not even in control of the decisions you make in the episode; the movie calls attention to subtle design tropes in video games and then shows them in action in the form of an interactive TV episode. It felt like the more I went back to try and change things or see different outcomes, the more twisted and psychotic it became, almost like the movie was forcing me to go down the darkest paths to advance the story, which is kind of reflected in video game design about how players are sometimes railroaded into specific choices to make the story play out the way the developers intend, and to do that they effectively take choices away from you. Since the show Black Mirror is supposed to be all about the sometimes darker interaction between technology and humanity, it's cool to have an extended episode that makes you feel and experience some of the very themes and subjects that it's dealing with in its story.

The movie is set in the 1980s, but unlike a lot of other popular media these days, the fact that it's set in 1984 is almost incidental. The movie doesn't call attention to its setting too much, except for one scene where Stefan goes to a shopping mall to buy albums and we're treated to a wider swath of fashion, hairstyles, and music, but it does feel like authentic 1980s thanks to the appropriate use of technology and clothing styles, without coming off as a gimmicky nostalgia trip. In fact, a story of this nature almost needs to be set in the 1980s, because that was the time when a person could design a major blockbuster video game all by themselves in their bedroom. A story like this, for instance, wouldn't work in 2019 because games nowadays are made by teams of 100+ and cost millions of dollars to produce -- the only way a popular video game is being made by one, singular person is if it's a super small indie game, and I'd imagine those types of games don't have enough critical demand from publishers to make life stressful for the designer (the type of thing that leads Stefan to his psychotic breakdowns), especially since these days independent developers can self-publish their games online.

It's also pleasing to note that the episode handles the subject of video games with care and sensibility. The series creator and lead writer, Charlie Brooker, is a gamer himself, and so the script doesn't go for any of the usual misguided, uninformed stereotypes and cliches like I'm used to from bad serialized TV shows. There are no depictions of gamers as obsessive fanatics who can't tell the difference between video games and reality, and although the movie invents a lot of fictional games, what little actual gameplay we see seems genuinely appropriate for the era. They even use and reference real systems -- I was a bit surprised when the story skipped forward to modern times and someone mentioned playing older games from the 80s with an emulator, naming RetroArch specifically. I'm no programmer, but what Stefan programs for his game looks reasonable to me, and the one line of techno jargon describes a crash as being because certain animated sprites were overloading the video memory, which makes sense.

The story is perhaps not the most exciting thing that Black Mirror has ever put out, but the interactive nature adds a lot of depth to the experience which kept me deeply engaged for far longer than the suggested 90 minute run time. I think I watched/played it for three hours, or more. This isn't the first time we've seen an interactive movie before, but it's probably one of the better executions, and it's also likely the most popular and widespread instance of an interactive movie. It kind of reminded me of FMV games from the 90s, actually, but with far less actual gameplay. I liked the interactivity of this movie, and I like Black Mirror a lot, so it's something I'd probably welcome in other settings and series, but it's so novel in this instance that I might actually prefer not to see it for a while; this seems like the type of thing that would be easy to screw up, and that wouldn't feel so interesting or satisfying if it's not in the right hands. Making choices for the character, for instance, probably wouldn't work as well if it's not directly paralleling what the character is going through in their own world.

So if you have a Netflix subscription and you're someone who enjoys video games and science fiction, then Bandersnatch is something I can easily recommend -- the video game subject matter is touched upon in an interesting way, and watching the movie almost feels like playing a story game, at times. Couple those aspects with the usual dark sci-fi tone and execution of Black Mirror, and I found it so engaging that I had to keep exploring as much of it as I could, until I eventually ran out of things to see. Seriously, check this movie out.