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Black Mirror: Bandersnatch Movie Review

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a 2018 interactive film in the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It’s a groundbreaking, but far from great achievement.

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“Sorry mate, wrong path“

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In this interactive film, you as a viewer get to choose your own adventure so to say. Basically, you follow this programmer who is adapting a video game in 1984 and from time to time you get to influence the film’s plot development by choosing one of two options, for example accept or refuse when somebody asks you something, or choose between two places to go as your destination.

I was enamored by this gameplay mechanic as it made the movie very much like a video game. You can only play it on Netflix and it was a perfect way for me to utilize my newly created Netflix account. The movie bridges the line between gaming and cinema incredibly and I loved the groundbreaking quality to it.

However, I liked the idea more than the execution itself. I will elaborate. I got the feeling many times while playing/watching that they only really filmed many different endings to this story, but everything that you choose before will certainly take you back to the already predetermined path, thus effectively rendering some scenes as detours and fillers. They were all interesting, but they were detours nonetheless. And sometimes the choice was just not good, leading to basically a game over screen where you have to go back and play the scene again for better and for worse.

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In terms of its storyline, I loved the various eighties gaming references with the Pac-Man dark backstory idea being fascinating. The twist where the protagonist realizes that you are controlling him as the viewer was amazing. But the entire storyline did not go anywhere unfortunately. I played more than a couple of endings and all are entertaining, but definitely not substantial and none of them were strong conclusions. The characterization is also very slim, though the technical aspects are solid and the dialogue is fine. But for the high Black Mirror standards, I expected much more from this movie.