I've missed you, but my aim is improving.

I’m back. I’m not going to sugar-coat it; I needed the break. It may be the first time writing a mildly amusing, needlessly disgruntled but grammatically sound movie review blog has ever been compared to the gambling industry, but when the fun stops, stop. Which I did, because dragging myself through movies purely for the sake of moaning about them was becoming laborious and unfulfilling. The good news, or at least news that is mildly less depressing than finding your beloved family pet has been diagnosed with a rare incurable liver disease, is that I have returned to fill your Mondays with a close approximation of the concept of joy. Whether it’s the new increased dosage of meds or the enforced exile (during which I barely put finger to keyboard) or just a lingering festive spirit (it’s not, I didn’t have any to begin with, let alone enough for it to linger), it doesn’t matter. I have once again donned the mantle of Anger in a Man Suit and am resuming my crusade to be snippy and self-righteous about other people’s artistic endeavours. Not all heroes wear capes.

If you’ve seen enough action movies where the protagonist gets dragged out of retirement to save the world one more time (that is a very lofty comparison I realise, but bear with me) you’ll know that it is usually the most devastating or momentous event that provides the catalyst for the change of heart and ensuing carnage. The killing of John Wick’s dog for example, or finding out your ex-wife has been impaled by a hex key whilst engaged in a desperate attempt to flee a giant prehistoric shark. Dangerous things those hex keys, I won’t have them in the house (I have the same rule about any sized shark but strangely it comes up much less often). What then, you must surely be wondering by now, was the potassium permanganate to my hydrogen peroxide (science bitches, look it up)? Don’t lie to yourself, you’ve missed these pre-ambles.

Bandersnatch.

Come on now, did you really think something of this magnitude could escape my ever scathing gaze? Of course not. In and of itself, I wasn’t personally that bothered about watching it. Black Mirror has quite the fan base, some of whom are the type of obnoxious, toxic bastards who simply cannot understand why anyone would not fap over a new episode and would defend a seven hour cut of Charlie Brooker screenwiping his arse and sneering directly into camera should that be what his next project would entail. What got me was the sheer number of unrelated and unsynchronised posts from across the four corners of my social media accounts all suddenly proclaiming it was genius and the future of television. Genius is a word that gets rattled around with far too much ease these days, to the point where it has lost much of its meaning, but proclaiming something is the future of television is fairly high praise indeed; are we really witnessing a glimpse of what might be to come? Yeah, no. Bollocks are we.

The big deal about Bandersnatch, or rather its only gimmick is that it pertains to be an interactive TV experience with multiple endings where the viewer dictates the action. Now as much as this is a feat of logistics and takes a serious amount of time, preparation and planning, it’s a bit misleading for one and a bit shit for another. It’s misleading because although there are five distinct endings based on what choices you make, you’re literally prompted to go back and rework your choices if you take a path that doesn’t move you to the next set of decisions meaning that I managed to get through all of the decisions and all of the endings in about an hour and a half. Also, most of the decisions are so completely inconsequential that it patently doesn’t matter what you choose. It’s a bit shit because none of the five endings is particularly satisfying; at least three of them sort of fizzle out leaving you feeling empty inside like when people continue to defy logic and reason by persisting that Die Hard is a Christmas movie (it isn’t, but I’ve done this bit already. I just wanted to trigger some of you. You know who you are, pack it in).

Bandersnatch suffers from a couple of fatal flaws. Primarily, the acting is ropey at best. By ropey, I mean appalling and by appalling I mean someone needs to go and collect up this lot’s Equity cards and recycle them into low carbon impact re-usable collapsible coffee cups, because then they would be worth something. It is nice to see Madeleine Wool isn’t actually buried somewhere in the Eastern Bloc, but other than that, only the walking embodiment of a Jamie Hewlett drawing, Will Poulter does his parts of the script any justice. The other big problem with Bandersnatch is that it simply isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.

Now, I understand that you could read that statement as me bragging about how much more clever than the writers/directors/production team I am, but that isn’t the case. As a technical feat, putting together all the paths, writing all the alternative scenes, all that stuff is obviously nightmarishly hard to do and kudos to them for that. What I really mean is the concept of it, the whole Meta theme of control just feels forced. It may be interactive, but it isn’t immersive; you’re probably supposed to feel some sort of empathy when the character gets given the choice to kill or not, but it never feels important. Partially because so many choices in here aren’t important and partially because there isn’t really any true choice; like I said before, you end up being able to re-make your decisions over again so you never actually feel like you’ve lost anything and it just becomes a tedious trek through the same footage to go back and collect all the endings. Honestly, you could leave the controller alone, allow the movie to pick for you and it would probably give you all the endings anyway, like a normal movie without having to go through the gimmick. It even slips a reference to this into the script, the illusion of choice (someone should call a song that) but at that point I was past caring. Besides, a lot of the themes here were done much better nearly 20 years ago in Donnie Darko.

Black Mirror on a whole gets way more praise than I think it merits, but Bandersnatch is by far the worst offender. Bear in mind that you can only even watch it if you have the most up-to-date tech in your house (my 2 year old smart TV wouldn’t play it, so I had to play it through the PS4) which feels counter-productive and a touch hypocritical for a TV series that makes its name riffing on the increased role of technology in our lives, but that’s their cross to bear. It might have been an interesting experiment, but if this is the future of television I’m out.