Bandersnatch: DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO

I was excited to finally sit down and watch Bandersnatch this past weekend. Over the last year, I’ve become enamored with games like Until Dawn and Life is Strange, both video games that let you choose how the story is told and what the ultimate fate of the characters will be (for my full review of the excellent Life is Strange, go here). So, when I heard Black Mirror decided to produce something that sounded similar, a choose-your-own-adventure movie, I knew I had to see it. Unfortunately, 15 minutes in, it felt like they backtracked completely and lost all my trust that this would be an experience on par with the games that have done it so well already.

The main story is relatively simple: a young video game designer tries to get his game developed in the 1980s. The game, coincidentally, is about a book that’s also a choose-your-own-adventure. However, something went horribly wrong with the author, and things go awry with our game developer as well. I won’t go too much into the actual plot for fear of spoiling it, but for something with so much apparent choice, you don’t really have much at all. Some of your early choices may get rebuffed and lead you back to the same spot, where the film asks you to click the “right” choice to move on. Right there, I felt as if this story had a problem. If I’m going to watch something where my choices affect what happens onscreen, then let them affect the story in a meaningful way. Let me push my character down an uncertain path and I’ll backtrack myself later if the first iteration is worth following. Even if my choices lead to a similar conclusion, how I get there might be different, and that still has a greater emotional impact on me than making my choice a kind of fake-out. Life is Strange did this very well, working towards an ending that only really has 1 choice, but making everything else along the way affected by my actions. I felt bad about treating certain characters badly in Life is Strange; here, I couldn’t care less.

Now for some spoilers that might clarify what the director might have had in mind: SPOILER WARNING, TURN BACK NOW.

One of the many choices that don't affect anything else. 

So, the whole premise of the story is that the game developer eventually realizes that the audience is controlling him but can’t do anything about it. You can choose for him to kill his dad and that leads to a whole new set of movie choices. These choices all appear to lead to similar conclusions, though, and the movie keeps bringing you back to a given choice, letting you pick a different one, so you can see all the endings, one after another (at least, that’s how I think it works, I didn’t stick around to go back through all my choices). I can understand the high-minded premise that the developer is being manipulated and so is the audience by getting only so many options that all lead back to one conclusion. It’s an interesting premise, if that’s what they were going for. If that was the case, I think they could’ve done something a little more creative with it instead of just having you rewind back to a previous starting point, though I’m not sure how they could’ve made it work better. It also seems like there wasn’t much drama built into the scenario of killing the dad, since the movie ends so soon afterwards, with little suspense as to whether someone will find out or not.

OKAY, YOU CAN COME OUT NOW, SPOILERS ARE FINISHED.

I can see where this type of movie is an interesting exploration of control. I just don’t think they went far enough to really explore anything. Maybe games like Until Dawn and Life is Strange had more resources and time to work with, but they feel like more engrossing experiences, with stories that are written to completion. Bandersnatch felt like it could have used another year in production (writing included), although reading up on how long it took to film, maybe it needed more work conceptually than putting in more time and effort. I can also recognize that there may be 5 different pure endings, but I’m not sure what they are nor was I willing to wait until the end to find out. It’s not the first Netflix show to be choose-your-own-adventure—I know there’s at least a Puss N’ Boots series that has the same feature—but it felt like it desperately wanted us to think about the nature of that relationship. It’s too bad it only really scratched the surface.