Bandersnatch: choose your own movie

Film Stuff podcast

We absolutely adored Netflix & Black Mirror's new choose your own adventure movie experience "Bandersnatch." It was incredibly well constructed both technically and narratively, and had all the mind bending hallmarks of our favorite Black Mirror episodes. Leigh explains all about the technology they used to make it seamless. Soo Zee harangues our fellow filmmakers for failing to grasp why Bandersnatch is completely groundbreaking and has the potential to change everything about how we watch and tell complex stories. Both of us also throw out a few ideas for films we'd love to see adapted to the choose-your-own format. We make a pretty strong argument that you don't even need to have multiple endings to make it work. • If you play Bandersnatch a few times, it feels like maybe you're only missing out on a few scenes, but in reality there were several scenes filmed that still haven't been viewed by anyone yet. If you're interested, this feature in The Hollywood Reporter has more details about the Netflix Branch Manager tool and exactly why it's difficult to calculate how many permutations of Bandersnatch there are (spoilers!) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/black-mirror-bandersnatch-endings-explained-1171556 • The fictional games company from Bandersnatch, Tuckersoft, has a whole online world, including this thoroughly '80s ad for programmers (which links to Netflix's career page) https://tuckersoft.net/jobs/ and this fake history of Tuckersoft's library https://tuckersoft.net/ealing20541/history/ you get to via one of the easter eggs in the movie (game?). There's even a playable version of the video game Colin's character is developing you can download. • Leigh mentions a choice between something from the real world and something from the Black Mirror universe. The technical term for this is metafiction; Bandersnatch draws attention it's own construction. Because the story is self-aware — of both the facts that is it a story set in 1984 and also a movie being streamed on Netflix — it holds both of these truths at once, and puts the viewer in a liminal space. While watching we're both the viewer consuming the story, but we're also a character within the story that the other characters interact with. If you're into metafiction and liked Bandersnatch, I highly recommend you also check out the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. • Soo Zee talked at the end about how interesting it was that Bandersnatch is on a streaming service, not a special games platform. It's a movie, right? But somehow also a game? It reminded me a lot about notpr0n, an online website from the early '00s that is also kind of a scavenger hunt/puzzle game. To date, less than 50 people have ever solved the entire thing. http://notpron.org/notpron/levelone.htm • There's a whole topic we had to cut for time about how Netflix knows what you chose. Most choices were pretty even splits, with a few key differences, like how fewer Brits were willing to toss tea over a computer than people in other parts of the world, or how 73% of us wanted Stefan to take the Tuckersoft job offer, even though another character straight up tells us it's the wrong choice. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/bandersnatch-stats-reveal-how-folks-have-chosen-their-own-adventures There's one choice in there that's controversial, made doubly so by the fact that Netflix don't just know what you chose, they actually record that information. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/02/224640/netflix-saved-black-mirror-bandersnatch-choices