Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

As an experience, Bandersnatch is fairly entertaining—it’s not going to blow anyone’s socks off, and I don’t think it will convince someone who doesn’t like Black Mirror that they’re wrong, but if you’re up for some paranoid dark humor and video game nods, you won’t be too disappointed. But as a story? There’s nothing really here.

There is a lot to appreciate within the many iterations of Bandersnatch, which is not just a mystery box show, but a mystery box show about mystery box shows that’s trying to play three-dimensional chess with its audience.

Bandersnatch’s do-overs lighten the weight of our decisions, which in turn lightens the gravity of the whole. It’s an exhilarating experiment, not least because it’s played out on such a major stage, and on one of Netflix’s prestige properties. Much of the episode’s success, however, relies on the clever marriage of theme and mechanism. Without this, the flimsiness of the supporting framework, more gimmick than revolution, would be exposed.

It’s admirably executed, tightly organized, well-thought-through and a lot of fun, if not particularly frightening or profound. The interactive mechanics are splendidly handled and designed; it runs seamlessly, whatever path you take.

As always, the series dances on the line between satire and sermons with merry aplomb. Under the care of creator and writer Charlie Brooker and director David Slade, that dance consists of considerably more style than substance in Bandersnatch. But the film, which you can think of as a luxuriant aperitif before Black Mirror season five (which currently has no known release date, though it will presumably debut sometime in 2019), is interesting enough from start to its five different finishes that you probably won’t be too upset by its lack of larger thematic cohesiveness.

With every click of a button, the story begins to snowball in weird and confusing directions, and the panicked sense of making the wrong pick every time increases the stakes. ... I’m sure there are many more rabbit holes for me to tumble down, but the overall darkness of the story (Stefan is frequently being pushed towards madness) might make it a slog to watch over and over again.

Black Mirror‘s stories are often effective without being subtle. At their worst, they merely recapitulate omnipresent popular anxieties, but at their best they compel critical reflection on the technologies that structure our lives. Whatever assemblage of parts make up an individual viewer’s experience of Bandersnatch, it will likely be a mixture of both.

Bandersnatch can be fun, if you’re entranced by its puzzle structure, or if you’ve always believed TV episodes would be better if only you could spend hours grinding through them again in order to watch 45 seconds of new footage. But it doesn’t make for much of a story. This is partly because the core plot is uninspired. ... It’s occasionally genuinely moving. But it’s not haunting in the way that comes from reaching the end of a story and realizing that the only “What now?” answer you get will have to come from you.

This “event” gives us an admittedly unique experience but little to hold onto after the fact. It doesn’t even measure up to the bar the show itself has set.

The bottom line is that despite the promise of becoming a participant in the storytelling process -- and the allure of wedding games and narrative fiction -- a well-told tale, watched passively, still trumps a so-so one that fosters the game-like illusion of putting the viewer in the driver's seat.

I suppose there might be a path I could have taken that would have satisfied me more. And I also suppose Netflix would love if I went back and tried to find all five endings. But every ending should be satisfying. Every story should be equally strong. That's a hard hat trick to pull off with this kind of storytelling. But they certainly get a lot of points for trying.

The interactive aspect of the viewing experience is seamless, and each adventure manages to be tonally unique and narratively distinct. But it turns out that when television starts to become a video game, the integrity of the story is muddied by the thrill of choice and control.

I think Bandersnatch--yes, technically a movie rather than an episode for Emmy purposes--will rank somewhere below the middle of the pack when all is said and done.

So why do I feel kind of hollow at the end of “Bandersnatch”? It’s not really a game, in which you invest multiple hours and get deeply involved with the characters whose narrative you’re authoring, and it’s not quite a movie either. I tried to imagine watching someone else “play” “Bandersnatch,” making the choices instead of me, and it’s simply not as well-written or involving as the best episodes of “Black Mirror.” Several of the thematic ideas are underdeveloped no matter how you branch the story, and it ends abruptly.