Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is the first-ever Black Mirror movie and is an interactive film experience that offers everyone their movie. Stefan has to create a video game called Bandersnatch. That’s all that is the same.

The film has a run time ranging from anywhere between 35 to 90 minutes. How it ends is completely dependent on you. You have ‘complete control.’

Being a Black Mirror film, Bandersnatch will focus on how behavior is manipulated by technology and how people’s actions and thoughts are shaped by it.

Yes, it is possible to watch Black Mirror: Bandersnatch like a traditional movie where you refrain from making a single choice. So then….

Why do we even make that first choice?

If we don’t make it, it will be made for us and we will be controlled.

Just like Netflix offering us the choice of ‘Next episode’ and ‘go back’ and making the choice of next episode if we refrain from clicking on either of the options, the movie too chooses either of the two options if you do not choose within 10 seconds. It’s not that the two options will remain there until you decide. So we choose to be in control, but….

Are we the ones in control, or, is control an illusion?

The film has certain supposed endings that are reset. A reset is when you reach an ending and then are taken back to the place where you made the wrong choice. You are taken back to that place in a manner akin to episodic television’s “previously on so and so show” type of way. A fast forward from the start. Till…. That choice confronts you again.

Infinite loops are real until we accept that we are being controlled.

The film shows us again that despite having control, we are controlled. At times (based on the path you chose) Bandersnatch proves to be an infinite loop. I was repeatedly given a choice between the same password or symbol. At times I was faced with two televisions with two choices from the past, one was the previously ignored one and the other was ‘go back’. At times I’m told stuff along the lines of “try again” or the usual, “the wrong choice.” I’m in the loop till I make the choice they want me to make.

It’s a restart. Like a video game. Like life. It’s up to you. You will be a bit more aware than you were the last time. It’ll show. Make the right choice or live with what your choices, till you eventually learn that what you chose was wrong, or, you can go back make the wrong choice again and stay in the loop. You chose wrong and are stuck. In the end, you need to choose what they want you to choose. Control is an illusion.

Consuming content or consumed by content?

Ideally, the first proper ending (not reset) that a viewer reached which led them to the end credits sequence would be the ending they had chosen out of interest. An actual choice. What if the first ending was the perfect ending (not in the game, but perfect based on how we would control our character). I watched 4 endings. But actually, the first one I saw was the perfect one. The second and the third and all the endings are the result of us wanting to see whether the other choice was better. It was us choosing what we didn’t choose earlier.

The show gave me the option of going to the end credits, or go back, and I chose to go back. Black Mirror and Netflix knew I would go back. We think we control Netflix as we can choose what we want to watch when we want to watch it and how many times we want to watch it. But isn’t it Netflix that is controlling us and attracting us to them, like how the fly is attracted to the sweet scent of the flytrap only for it to be consumed. We know there are five endings and we are desperate to unlock them all And find out what would have been had we chosen differently. Not only with this. We want to know what happens in that new show or movie as well.

We are consumed by the overload of content.

There is too much content online, some of it not even entertaining

The overload of content on Netflix and other platforms and even TV may have been addressed in the show. Why is everything so ordinary. Shouldn’t it be spiced up a bit, isn’t that what we would do. Do you imagine yourself in extremely mundane situations and at those times you suddenly transform into something and spice up the moment a bit? Isn’t that, what would be considered as entertaining? Don’t we watch some show and think, “this is how I would spice it up a bit.” Yet you watch what you find uninteresting or you have changed your definition of interesting to fit in things that are called interesting. Why? Again. Netflix wants you to choose to watch it. Netflix wants me to watch Bird Box. I am inundated with posts about that movie on my feed.

Different routes may lead to the same goal

At the start, we were unaware of the key choices and did do-overs on quite a few of the choices only to go down a different road and reach an ending we had already witnessed.

Every single choice made by every single person is different hence every single outcome experienced by everyone is different. And then there are different routes to reach the same place. Many roads. Audiences the world over would behoove from realizing this.

Is insanity the key to success?

Does every artist need to be damaged and destroyed, non-conforming being? Do they have to have some dark secrets for then to succeed? Can’t they conform or get cured, or even accept and repent and then achieve success. Is every single artist someone who has a dark past?

What’s Good?

Netflix may have found the answer to combat piracy. A new form of storytelling and movie watching had been experimented with. Audiences cannot be unhappy with the ending as every ending they discover is a result of their choices. Subtle commentary about technology and how technology is our masters.

What’s Bad?

A film is something where we go and watch what unfolds before us and not something where we make the choices. Movies are usually enjoyed when one can focus or maybe watch it with a snack in one hand and a drink in the other. You make decisions in your daily lives, you decide to switch on your laptop or open your phone and log onto Netflix in either device and then that’s not the last decision for the next couple of hours as you have to make decisions throughout the movie itself.

I chose an option, I was taken to an ending. And then I went back to my last choice. I chose the other option. Now that choice has somehow resurrected a character I had chosen to leap. How is that possible?

Also a time-traveling sequence? Really? At least the T.A.R.D.I.S. and the waverider are believable time travel devices. But what was used to time travel in this episode was just weird. This is the storyline I didn’t buy into. At least they didn’t mess around with the laws of time travel from popular time travel shows.

The tolerance level of the audience is desperately searching for commentaries of technology that will not mask absurd storylines and will alienate the loyal fanbase.

I felt that making your choice viewing was extremely annoying as the screen just freezes for 10 seconds despite me sometimes choosing within 5 seconds. And the two choice option box popping up constantly on-screen spoils the viewing experience.

Who should watch it?

Watch this movie if you want to play a movie. Watch it if you got nothing to watch for the next 5 evenings and wish to watch 5 different movies. All you need to do is remember the choices you make so that you can avoid making them the next day.

If you think Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is that typical two-hour entertaining movie which you can watch, laugh about and forget. You probably should refrain from watching it. Bandersnatch is filmed, edited and presented in a way to make us all paranoid and to make us think, our choices can end up scarring us as well.

Rating
Just for the first of its kind new format.
3.5/5

Originally published at my blog http://theperspectivesofanintrovert.blogspot.com.