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**1/2 / ****

*This review contains mild spoilers. Ye best be wary.*

About two hours into BLACK MIRROR: BANDERSNATCH, I turned to my wife and said “I don’t know if I can take much more of this.” I was smiling while I said it, but who can tell the difference between the smile of a normie and the smile of a man gone horribly insane?

This is the double-edged ‘storm of swords +5’ spell that BANDERSNATCH lays upon unsuspecting viewers, courtesy of those mad scientists at Netflix who are willing to roll the dice on literally any project on the drawing board that isn’t named HOLMES & WATSON. It’s a movie that is also the legendary arcade game Dragon’s Lair and it’s also – if you don’t choose correctly – a repetitive slog that lurches its ways towards a number of conclusions of sorts, none of which feel particularly conclusive.

BANDERSNATCH opens with Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) as an up-and-coming video game programmer in the mid-80s (because ’80s). Stefan and his dad have a tense and impersonal relationship and the teen spends nearly all of his time coding and creating video games in his bedroom. Hints are given periodically that something awful involving his mother happened when he was a boy (this is delved into deeper if you make certain choices later in the film). Stefan is being courted by Thakur (Asim Chaudhry), the slick founder of rising star video game company Tuckersoft, which also employs mysterious uber-programmer Colin (Will Poulter). Thakur has heard rumblings through the gaming grapevine that young Stefan is working on a game adaptation of the legendary fantasy novel Bandersnatch, a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy, and is angling to bring Stefan in to finish it as part of the team so that his company can market and own it. The fact that the author of Bandersnatch became murderously insane after finishing the book and hacked his wife to pieces doesn’t appear to weigh too heavily on anyone’s mind. At first.

As deadlines loom and lines of code don’t cooperate like he hopes, Stefan plunges deeper down “the hole” – as Colin puts it – frantically coding and recoding morning, noon, and night to deliver the completed Bandersnatch adventure game on time and reap the rewards as the industry’s newest whiz kid.

Or does he?

As Bandersnatch the novel is famous in the film’s mythology for its ‘choose your own path’ style, so too does BANDERSNATCH the movie put Stefan’s fate in your hands. Ostensibly. That word – “fate” – is what makes BANDERSNATCH feel a little deflating in the long run. Director David Slade (30 DAYS OF NIGHT) and writer Charlie Brooker (BLACK MIRROR) appear to subscribe to a reasonably solid interpretation of fatalism, in that many of the choices that the viewer is given will ultimately – and inexorably – draw Stefan back to roughly the same path back in the time stream. Yes, you can choose whether Stefan takes his anti-psychotic meds or not. Yes, you can choose whether he jumps off the roof or not. Yes, you can choose whether he buries the body or chops it up. But the river flows and one must be swept up in its current, whether it’s sooner or later. And sometimes the “choices” literally don’t matter. At one point, you can choose to have Stefan drop acid with Colin to get his creative juices flowing. If you choose ‘no’, he just sneaks it in Stefan’s tea when he isn’t looking. That acid is getting dropped, whether Stefan’s in a good headspace or not.

And then there are the multiple red herring choices. “What if I had told him to eat the Sugar Puffs??? What could I have changed?” Well, nothing. Just as in life, some of BANDERSNATCH’S decisions are window dressing, designed to keep the player viewer entertained and engaged. (I am aware that there is a super secret easter egg at the end if you make the exact certain choices every step of the way, but I’ve got a job and a kid, for Christ’s sake. You nerds do your thing and I’ll do mine. Tryin’ to write a review here.)

I hesitate to delve into my thoughts regarding the broad subject matter and this review is going long as it is, so I’ll leave it alone. Suffice it to say that as a child of the 80s, MAN is the 80s getting mined for every cultural nugget that creators can get their hands on. I thought the execrable READY PLAYER ONE might kill that idea dead, but no this soundtrack is chock full of your favorite radical childhood hits and here we are talking about Commodore 64s and Ataris and blah blah blah. The bottom will fall out of this soon and before you know it, there will be “nostalgic” movies featuring Hammer pants and pogs and the 80s will be, like, SO over. So either enjoy it while it lasts or wait it out, depending on your viewpoint with all this.

Regardless of how much “power” the viewer truly has over Stefan, it’s apparent that the creators of BANDERSNATCH tried hard to make the concept an absorbing one. The film is packed with a number of clever in-jokes and, assuming you follow a particular thread correctly, a VERY strange meta strand where you can choose to have the movie tell Stefan on his 1980s computer screen that he is being watched and controlled by a person on something called ‘Netflix’, a 21st century entertainment streaming platform. Of course, this causes the already fragile Stefan to go further out of his mind and frantically tell his bewildered father that he’s being controlled by people from the future.

All of these choices – whether it be which mix tape Stefan listens to on the bus or if he decides to talk about his mother with his shrink or not – will ultimately coalesce into plots of a sort and bring you to one of several ‘endings’, all of which generally having to do with whether Bandersnatch is ever released, if it is released to either rave reviews or mild disappointment, and what happens to Stefan afterwards (spoilers: gulp). So yes, you have control of the story… up to a point. But no matter what you do, don’t spend too much time following threads searching for the Wayne’s World ‘Super Mega Happy Ending’. It ain’t there, man.

That being said, let’s get to the point of this article – is BANDERSNATCH 1) a movie and, if so, is 2) it good? That’s a tough nut to crack. It’s a movie in the sense that there are scenes that go together and form a story. But unless you’re a svengali who can somehow sniff out the optimum choice to take at every juncture, then you’re in for a very herky-jerky ride. Much like the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books, if you choose poorly, you will come to an end of sorts, but more of a dead end than a true ending. If you haven’t made it far enough for the movie to have deemed this a reasonable “ending”, the movie zaps you back to a prior point in the story and replays an extremely abridged collection of scenes that had led you to that point, where you will have the opportunity to essentially try again. To BANDERSNATCH’s credit, this is all done cleverly and very tongue in cheek, with characters in connective scenes offhandedly telling Stefan that he chose wrong or should “start over” when they’re really talking to you, you dunderhead. Now this time, chop up the body DUH.

Is it good? I’m still not sure. If the creators of BANDERSNATCH had decided to forego the novelty of controlling Stefan’s decisions and just followed one of the ‘main’ threads and made a movie, the movie ‘as is’ would be pretty light on content. This is to be expected when you have to film scenes seven different times depending on what some dope on his couch has chosen the main character to do up to this point. As amusing as the interactive aspect of BANDERSNATCH is, once you’ve seen it all (or think you’ve seen it all), all of the main threads are actually kinda benign and by the numbers. Some are sadder than others, some are creepier than others, but there’s nothing here that’s mindblowing or particularly inventive. And as I’ve said a couple times throughout this piece, none of them are wildly different from each other. This isn’t a ‘you either become the next Steve Jobs or a psychotic mass murderer depending on what YOU do” situation. They all generally follow the same line, give or take a few brief forays off the path. And the creators know it, so even THAT is given some brief meta airtime in BANDERSNATCH. In one plot thread, Stefan proudly proclaims that he solved a problem in his game when he realized that he had given his player too many choices, so he gave them the ILLUSION of choice instead. Wink wink. So it’s the VEHICLE of content that is the real star here. Fionn Whitehead is really great as Stefan, but is hamstrung a bit by the gimmick that hovers over everything. And all the other characters recede into the background pretty quickly, regardless of which choices you make.

Ultimately, I’m not against this. I’m not ‘old man yelling at clouds’ this idea, despite its shortcomings. My daughter and wife and I were entertained and amused by this old/new idea, until we finally stumbled our way to a couple different endings and couldn’t take any more rewinding and re-choosing. And I’d watch more of these, especially tied to a world like Black Mirror, which already engages in screwing with its audience’s heads on a regular basis. Do you need to have seen the Black Mirror television show to understand what’s happening here? Absolutely not, which is good because I’ve never seen an episode. So don’t let that put you off if you don’t watch it either. But this is definitely an acquired taste and after you see someone bashed in the head with a heavy glass ashtray and horribly murdered for the fifth time and the movie still hasn’t “ended”, you’ll probably be waving the white flag and BANDERSNATCH will have missed its chance to tell you the whole story.