So is Bandersnatch, Netflix’ interactive Choose Your Own Adventure style movie the future of entertainment?
I sure hope not.
I had high hopes for the latest installment of Black Mirror but it failed to live up to the hype, both as a innovative concept and as a stand alone episode of the hit series.
Here are my criticisms:
- The choices you have to make were way too frequent. Only major points where the plot could have diverged should have been up for choosing. Picking a breakfast cereal is not one of those moments.
- Some of the choices weren’t really choices at all, but rather just two ways of saying the same thing.
- Sometimes, no matter what you wanted to choose, you were forced to eventually choose a certain path to continue the story the way it was intended. The choices weren’t really choices then so much as annoying, non-essential tangents. It would have been better if your choices actually caused the plot to diverge in more radical ways, making it so that no two people saw the same movie.
- Making a choice quickly didn’t actually save any time. You still had to wait for a set amount of time, during which the characters would annoyingly tell each other (and therefore you) to hurry up.
- If you’re going to do this concept and force people to re-watch several scenes then the content should be more interesting and action-packed, a fact that the movie actually touches on in one of its multiple endings.
- The plot was way too meta. Even for Black Mirror. A fan of a Choose Your Own Adventure story goes to work for a company to turn it into a video game about the illusion of free will, during which time he realizes that he doesn’t have free will because his actions and impulses are being directed by people playing/watching an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure game/movie on something called Netflix. This gave me the feeling that this entire movie was just an advertisement for Netflix and not the work of art that it could have been.
All in all, watching Bandersnatch felt a little bit tedious, as I found myself wondering when it was going to end, and if I was ever going to know for sure that I watched all of the possible paths. Not to mention the fact that it was kind of annoying to have to hold the remote control the entire time I watched.
Hopefully, this was just the first step and the future of interactive entertainment improves. Maybe even to the point where movies could scan our brains and make the choices for us so that we can just sit back and enjoy the ride. The way we’re supposed to do with a good movie.
Are interactive shows the future of entertainment?
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