TV Review: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) written by Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade

When I was a kid in the early 1980s, I loved reading the "choose your own adventure" books. Every couple of pages the reader would have to make a choice for the characters, moving the plot in different directions and to alternate endings (though I do remember one book where you were lost in a cave and kept going back and forth between pages 84 and 125). I had fun exploring various choices and endings.

In imitation of those books, the Netflix movie Bandersnatch is a "choose your own adventure" story where viewers make choices for the main character. The early choices, like what he has for breakfast, are fairly inconsequential, more of a practice run at making choices and using the controller (I watched it on a iPad, so I could just touch the choice, I didn't need to use a TV remote). As the story moves along, more important decisions must be made. In the story, young programer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) wants to create an adventure computer game called "Bandersnatch," based on a fantasy novel of the same name. The novel was a "choose your own adventure" work (though the book in the movie is much, much larger than any " choose your own adventure" book I have ever seen). The book was written by a brilliant but ultimately insane author. Adapting it for a home computer (the story is set in 1984, so a very early home computer) is more of a challenge for Stefan, especially as he deals with the anniversary of his mother's death and a looping narrative where he relives scenes from the past and the present.

The movie is very self-aware. It starts to deal with big issues like free will and responsibility. Stefan feels responsible for his mother's death (though what happened to her is much more complicated than such a simple interpretation). That more interesting narrative gets drowned out by the desire of the creators of this show to be cleverly self-referential. Stefan has a growing awareness that he's not in control of his life. He comes just short of staring at the camera and asking the viewer what we want him to do. I found that distracting and made the story more mechanical than engaging. In a typical movie, viewers identify with a main character (like Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones) and while it seems intuitive that choosing actions for the main characters would strengthen that identification, the opposite happens in Bandersnatch. The viewer and the main character are deliberately divided, making this an exercise in narrative manipulation rather than an immersive experience. Stefan is a fictional character who really does not have free will precisely because he is a fictional character. The movie is self-aware to a fault.

Throughout the movie (and even at the end), there are opportunities to go back and try different branches, which I appreciated since I was curious about different elements of the story. With a book, it's easy to backtrack and try different routes. This movie was able to do that to some extent, though not in as satisfying a way as with a book. I felt that a few of the endings were lazy or poorly written. Often, these unsatisfactory endings immediately send the viewer back to an important decision point, presumably to make a different decision along the intended narrative track.

Overall, I was disappointed. The idea is great but the meta nature of the narrative worked against it rather than for it. Also, it definitely comes down against free will since the character really doesn't have it (the viewer seems to have control of almost everything) and the viewer is constantly shuttled back into a main narrative that the filmmakers seem to prefer (so the viewer doesn't really have control after all).

Not recommended.

This is currently (April 2019) streaming on Netflix.