brm50diboll
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OK. So I'm sure that not every aspect of Bandersnatch has been analyzed publicly yet, but enough has for me to go ahead and make my review. Bandersnatch is certainly not the first interactive movie, but it is still a phenomenon new enough that it is worth analyzing.
Charlie Brooker, the creator of Black Mirror, likes being "meta" and self-referential, so there is definitely a lot of that in Bandersnatch, most (but not all of it) coming from the character Colin Ritman (who acts as a sort of mentor to the central character, Stephan Butler.)
Basically, the general theme explores the limits of free will and considers that we only have the illusion of free will. Bandersnatch in a way demonstrates that to the viewer in that, despite any choices he/she may make along the way, no truly happy ending for the movie is forthcoming.
Stephan Butler is a 19-year old who is designing an interactive computer game. He lives with his widowed father and is in therapy for emotional trauma he still experiences from the death of his mother when he was five. He blames himself for his mother's death, as she was scheduled to leave to visit her parents on the 8:30 am train with him, but he refused to go with her because he was trying to find his missing pet toy rabbit (that, unbeknownst to him, his father had taken and hidden away) and delayed her, so she had to take the 8:45 train instead (without Stephan) and it derailed, crashed, and she died.
Stephan gets the opportunity to push his game idea, also called Bandersnatch, in the offices of Tuckersoft, a video game company in 1984. His idol Colin Ritman works there. The boss of Tuckersoft, Mohan Thakur, is impressed with Stephan's demo of his incomplete game that he based on the book Bandersnatch, that is an interactive novel with multiple endings possible depending on which path you follow. The author of the book was unstable and had killed his wife as he was writing Bandersnatch.
There are multiple references to Alice in Wonderland in the movie, and, of course, Bandersnatch was a character in Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (if you're interested, Google it as I did.) So as the movie progresses, Stephan "goes down the rabbit hole" much as Bandersnatch's author Jerome Davies did.
Now, as the movie progresses, from time to time, you are given choices which you can select (by touch on my cellphone using my Netflix app, or other methods if you are using a computer or gaming console). In most cases, you are given two choices and you pick one. If you do not pick, a choice is picked for you. Which choice you pick changes the course of the movie, sometimes in minor ways, sometimes in major ways. Sometimes the choice is an illusion, because regardless of what you pick, the same thing happens, but most of the time, there is at least *some* noticeable change.
The first choice you are given is which breakfast cereal you want to eat. This choice is minor, as the only difference it makes is which cereal commercial you end up seeing much later in the movie. The first *major* choice you get to make is whether to accept Mohan Thakur's offer to let Stephan complete his game in-house at Tuckersoft or not. I am a conservative, so I tended to always choose what I felt was the "safest" option in each case, which generally turned out to be the "wrong" option, as the movie tries to force you to choose the more radical options. I'll try to explain. If, as I said, you accept Thakur's in-house offer, the movie (seemingly) ends very, very prematurely with a scene saying Bandersnatch (the game) was too short and boring and got a 0/5 star rating. Then you are "restarted" and given the option of choosing again. You basically can't see anymore of the movie unless you "choose" to reject Thakur's offer (the more radical choice.) As the movie progresses, similar things keep happening. Choose the conservative option, and the movie "ends" prematurely (but you get go back options) with boring ending sequences and low game ratings. But (as I eventually was "forced to") choose to kill your Dad, chop up his body, take LSD, etc, then you end up getting a game with a 5/5 star rating (before being pulled off the shelves and destroyed) with Stephan in jail.
There are several possible endings, two of which are worth discussing at some length. As I'd said, Charlie Brooker loves being "meta". At one point, you get the option to choose "Netflix" on Stephan's computer. Choosing that leads to an ending where Stephan fights his psychiatrist and his dad with martial arts and, if you then choose the "jump out the window" option, the movie ends with you discovering they were all just actors playing movie roles. This ending was probably the funniest ending, though not exactly happy.
The time travel ending, where Stephan goes through the looking glass (mirror) back in time to when he was five and is given the option (which he did not have earlier in the movie) to go with his mother on the train is very sad, but appears to be the "preferred" ending, as his mother is still late, still has to take the 8:45 train, and she (and now Stephan) still die in the accident. But the movie shows 19-year old Stephan after passing out and suddenly dying in his psychiatrist's office with his Dad and psychiatrist unable to revive him, so apparently his "time travel" was just a delusion.
One of the most "meta" things about the movie is the breaking of the "fourth wall" where Stephan frequently appears to be directly addressing you the viewer, who is "controlling" him. Another is that when you choose to "redo" a timeline differently than you did it the first time, the character Colin always seems to know what had happened on the previous "erased" timeline.
There are various side options which can be unlocked, depending on your choices, including killing Colin, jumping off a skyscraper balcony, and killing Mohan Thakur. I'm sure there are other, rare options, that have not been discovered yet. The one option that has more than two possible choices is when you enter the psychiatrist's phone number. The correct option is 20541. There are rumors on the internet that certain other numbers may unlock "secret" pathways, but most of them just give you a "wrong number" scene and the story skips ahead without the call to the psychiatrist.
The fact that there is no truly happy ending bothers me. The fact that the movie seems to argue there is no such thing as free will, only the illusion of free will, also bothers me. I didn't like feeling "forced" to choose violent, detestable options (neither did Stephan, from his "fourth wall" rants).
Some people have argued on the internet that Bandersnatch violates the usual Black Mirror formula that focuses on some aspects of technology. To them I say: "What have you guys been smoking? YOU are the technology! You (in 2019 on Netflix) are controlling a character from 1984. Can't you see that?"
So, in the style of the video game reviewer in the movie, I'll give "Bandersnatch" 3/5 stars. Could've been better, but worth exploring, if you like Science Fiction and gaming. If I were to compare it to one of the old classic Twilight Zone episodes, I would say it is similar to "Back There" in which the main character (played by Russell Johnson, best known for playing the Professor on Gilligan's Island) goes back in time to Washington DC on April 14, 1865 and tries to prevent Lincoln's assassination, but fails, only to change some minor things about history. Rod Serling's closing narration in that episode is most informative.
Or the famous Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" in which Kirk discovers he must prevent McCoy from saving his girlfriend Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins) from dying in a 1930 traffic accident in order to straighten out the timeline and keep the Nazis from winning World War II, which is what would happen if Edith Keeler lives. The argument is that there are certain vitally important events in the timeline that cannot (or *must not*) be changed, but that there are other, less important events that can be changed without altering the timeline irretrievably, though still distinctly in some ways. Or the "time is a river" argument Spock makes to Kirk in that episode. We see hints of that from Colin's LSD-inspired ranting in Bandersnatch, but the Twilight Zone and Star Trek both covered this theme (better, in my opinion) many years before. |
Reply #307. Jan 02 19, 5:32 PM
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