Do you remember "choose your own adventure" books from when you were a kid?
The general premise takes you through a story where you have the ultimate power to choose the path of the protagonist. The story leads you to a point where you can choose "Option A" or "Option B" which each decision leading your story to a different outcome.
Well, Netflix in association with the super popular series Black Mirror has taken that concept and last Friday they released a choose your own adventure movie titled "Bandersnatch" and it's entirely fascinating!
With five different possible endings and trillions of potential story lines that you could build with your choices, Bandersnatch will take you on a journey that leaves you questioning your morals, second guessing every decision and completely messing with your head!
In typical Black Mirror fashion, the episode takes you through a potential crossroads between technology and humanity that appears as if it could occur in our not too distant future. In this sense, actually the past.
I "experienced" Bandersnatch last night and took in the hour or so episode before falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of following different pathways to see what choosing the other timeline would change. The results were mind blowing. They flip the narrative on itself multiple times and leave you questioning every decision down to the very first of which cereal to have for breakfast. Two hours later, I had sufficiently explored all five endings and much of the other storylines, but there still remains some of the 5 1/2 total hours of final footage they put into the entirety of the project.
The story is great, gripping and compelling from start to finish but it's the technology in play here that really blew my minds. They way that they were able to seamlessly weave these stories inside and out of each other, the way they did the recaps, the way that they steered you while letting you choose, it was truly groundbreaking.
I couldn't encourage you more to at the very least check it out.
Check out the preview in the player below...