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Gaming and movies coming together…
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is currently available to play/watch on Netflix. You can check out our spoiler-free review right here.
Device Support: Available across most newer devices, including TVs, game consoles, web browsers, and Android and iOS devices running the latest version of the Netflix app. It’s not yet supported on Chromecast, Apple TV, and some legacy devices.
Netflix is calling its latest entry in Charlie Brooker’s imaginative Black Mirror anthology series an “interactive movie.” And while the interactive elements of “Bandersnatch” are clearly there – featuring a unique decision-making system that alters how the story unfolds – it’s difficult to not notice the similarities the film shares with video games.
You play/watch Bandersnatch through the eyes of Stefan (Fionne Whitehead), an ambitious young video game developer, who wants to make his own choose-your-own-adventure title, where the player makes key decisions resulting in multiple narrative permutations. (According to Netflix, “given the number of choices, the unique number of variations [in the narrative] are more than a trillion. Note this doesn’t mean there are actually a trillion unique paths or storylines, though.”)
Like the fictional Stefan, Brooker’s own undertaking is highly ambitious, but it’s also influenced by his love of video games, which started over twenty years ago. In an interview with IGN, Brooker, along with co-executive producer Annabel Jones, talked about some of the video games that influenced Bandersnatch’s development.
“I used to be a video game journalist in the nineties, around the time CD Roms came out,” Brooker said. “Everyone was going, ‘wow, this is amazing!’ So I played Under a Killing Moon and Monkey Island. All of those sorts of interactive adventures.”
Even with his busy schedule, Brooker is still an avid gamer, most recently playing Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Like Bandersnatch, RDR2 has an extensive choice-based gameplay structure, allowing players to make vital decisions, which can alter the fate of certain characters. After recalling a particular scene in the game – when Arthur Morgan has an endearing moment with his ex-wife Mary – the sequence of events that followed perplexed Brooker, in terms of Arthur’s character development.
“I was right near the start of the game where he’s [Arthur] talking to a long-lost love [Mary], and it’s an emotional story,” Brooker explained. “This nuanced little scene plays out between the two of them, and she says, ‘will you go and help my brother?’ and he goes, ‘yes.’ And then I walked off, and I got on my horse and accidentally ran into a pig. And then I got off my horse, and I beat the pig to death. Just for a laugh. And then I thought, what sort of character am I playing now? I just had this romantic, aching, yearn-some speech with my ex-girlfriend, and now I’m kicking a pig to death.”
Discussing the issues that can hamstring open-world narratives, Brooker points out, “I think that’s the challenge games have… you’ve set up a character, they’ll have cutscenes where you see their motivation, and then they sort of say all this stuff,” Brooker explained. “But you can make them turn around and beat everyone to death, if you want to. Which means you’re playing the most mentally disordered figure there could be. When you’re writing a script, your characters are defined by what they do, more than what they say. As soon as you’re ceding that control to the viewer … it becomes a very real challenge. So hopefully, because of the nature of our story, we’ve got a setup that allows us to keep a consistent character [with Stefan].”
Keeping track of so many possible outcomes, whether in gaming or cinema, is a difficult task. With five main endings in Bandersnatch, not including myriad other paths and detours, both Jones and Brooker’s creative minds were pushed to the limit. “Even when you’re going down this narrative branch, you’re having to constantly try and predict how other people may be playing it, and what other routes they may be going down, and how this feels if you’ve gone all the way down here first, and then come down there,” Jones said. “Because what you don’t want is to destabilize the whole film, and make it feel disparate and meaningless. So you have to be able to sort of second-guess every possible route before you make any decisions. So in that sense, it’s incredibly crippling. The effort has gone into trying to make it feel like every particular route you take has some truth to it. And that Stefan’s character, feels like he is one character through the whole film.”
What has your Black Mirror: Bandersnatch experience been like? Let us know in the comments below.
David Griffin still watches DuckTales in his pajamas with a cereal bowl in hand. He’s also the TV Editor for IGN. Say hi on Twitter.
Source: IGN
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