Writing a short review for this movie is a very brain-burning thing. Because after watching the whole film, there are too many factors that are not the film itself, and they are completely different fields from each other. It doesn't make much sense to write a long review that lists the analysis one by one, because it doesn't really come up with any very useful ideas. So let's take it as an arrangement of ideas.
First let me explain the nature of the film. "Black Mirror: Bandersnatch" is a movie on the Netflix platform that can interactively choose the plot. The director pre-shoots a lot of material, and then Netflix members can make a lot of choices for the protagonist at certain fork points when watching genuine movies online, ranging from which song to listen to and whether to jump off the building. Then according to your choice, a completely different movie content will be played later, and the subsequent plot of the entire movie will be affected accordingly. Even if you let the protagonist jump off the building and kill the protagonist, you can go back and choose again, and then gradually find out the ending you want.
This is very creative in the film industry. People who have never played it can basically ignore the plot itself and immerse in the selection process. But the same technique can be said everywhere in the game field. There is a branch of games called choice-oriented games, which can be said to be booming in recent years. From classical RPGs to "Night Shift", a sketch game shot by a real person, to a huge investment like "Quantum Break", buying a game and giving away the top masterpiece of a live-action American TV series cannot even be said to keep pace with the times. That's it.
One thing that is very certain about interactive movies is that the experience of playing it in person is very different from watching someone else play it. Interactive movies play on the interaction itself, and you need to make your own choices. Watching this small choice take root in the long follow-up plot until it forms a butterfly effect and changes the protagonist's life beyond recognition is the fun. Therefore, the next thing like me, which is equivalent to choosing a story clip, is far more interesting than the experience obtained by playing it in person.
The second is the plot of the movie. The plot itself can be said to be boring, but it integrates a lot of interdimensional elements very subtly. In the current popular saying, it is to break the dimensional wall. This is completely different from the general choice-oriented game. In the game, no matter how you make the protagonist die, the protagonist will do it without hesitation, because you are the protagonist. This movie is different. The protagonist gradually feels that he is "controlled". For example, if you choose to let him pour coffee on the keyboard, he will feel that he doesn't want to do it at all, but has an urge to make him Uncontrollably poured coffee. This inter-dimensional interaction with the audience (player) creates a wonderfully unreal feeling.
This feeling peaked when he interacted with the words on the computer screen. The words "I made the decision for you on the Netflix platform" were actually printed on the computer, which made the protagonist with a background in the 1970s bewildered, and told his father, I fucking let people in the future control it. In the later stage, the protagonist accidentally beat his father to death. I didn't know what to do, so I ran to the audience and asked the audience. After the audience chooses a very speechless option, he will also complain. There are few interactive games in which the controlled person knows that he is controlled and has a sense of resistance. At this time, the player is not simply a commander, but becomes a part of the game. "Inside", "Dry Heat" and "Ashe" in previous years all have similar ideas. Players are also put into the game and become part of the game. This kind of experience beyond the general immersion will be better than letting the protagonist eat shit. It will also eat shit without hesitation, and it will be more able to substitute players into it.
A few years ago, I played a game called "Inside", and I was controlling a little boy to escape from a dark and eerie mind control base. There are a large number of experimenters doing weird mind control experiments. The game has two endings. The standard ending is that the little boy broke into the huge liquid container deep in the base and merged with a huge meat ball with a thousand heads and a hundred hands. The meat balls are actually made of countless human limbs. They have no thoughts of their own, and follow the command of the controller like walking dead. The little boy eventually turned into a monster, crashed all the way from the experimental base, and stopped at the end of the forest outside the base.
And another hidden true ending is that the little boy pulls some plugs in some hidden optional areas along the way. When he pulled the last plug, the entire control system broke. Then the little boy collapses and you can't control him anymore.
This terrifying ending actually shows that the player is the one who really controls the little boy behind his back. I still remember when I hit this part, no matter how I pressed the handle, the little boy didn't respond, and then I realized the feeling of chills all over my body when I realized the real ending of getting out of control. From this point of view, the "Black Mirror" movie version does reflect part of it. Audiences who lead the protagonist's life to a completely different path with the click of a mouse in front of the screen will feel that the protagonist really exists, because he will doubt and resist such actions beyond his control. For the protagonist, the audience is a kind of existence that he cannot understand at all, a high-dimensional creature, just like a person drawn on paper cannot understand the height of an object. They can only see the cross-sectional graphics on the paper when the three-dimensional objects come into contact with them, just like the protagonist can only feel the mental force in his head that he cannot resist.
This feeling of control and anti-control is very similar to the original movie called "Escape from Heaven and Earth". The original English name was called Gamer, but the controller in it was replaced by the audience itself.
There is such a saying in the game "Minecraft". The protagonist Steve is omnipotent in the world, but he stops at a height of only 255 unit blocks. He couldn't imagine that this was actually a simple code from a game programmer, so he felt that he had discovered the limit of the universe, an indestructible law of physics, that the sky was always only 255 blocks high. So why is the speed of light c?
The director may want to create a sense of time and space in which everyone is under the control of others, so that the audience will ask: Is the self sitting in front of the screen also being controlled by an existence that is completely incomprehensible to them? His own life, made at those critical moments, seemed trivial at the time, but many years later found that the choices that affected his life were also made by others using the keyboard to help him choose?
This line of thinking subverts the existence of free will, and even the difference between controllable and uncontrollable factors is smoothed out. Natural disasters, coincidences, and events that are supposed to be uncontrollable factors should be taken for granted. Today, even our own choices may become playthings of higher-dimensional life without us knowing it. This is the intriguing part of this line of thinking.
From this perspective, the God you worship every day, Allah, may also be a gamer. It reminds me of the Super New Testament of coding on an old-fashioned big-ass machine to build humans.
Finally, there is the theory of parallel universes. This is actually not new.
When I first saw Denzel Washington's "Clues of Time and Space", I already felt the charm of the tributaries of time. All the options you didn't choose are in a certain parallel universe, so free will is actually a joke, and the endless branching world line is the ultimate form of the universe.
Of course, what I do in other dimensions has nothing to do with me, so people still have to live honestly.
Movies are more form than substance, and it can be regarded as a further blurring of the boundaries between movies and games. But it is an embarrassing position to treat it as a movie, not as good as other movies, and as a game as no other games are fun. Compared with shooting 10,000 pieces of material and letting the audience play a movie, it is more suitable for most people to play a serious interactive game, and then watch a movie comfortably when you are tired. Of course, if movies become this trend in the future, it is true that the experience of piracy will be much worse.
(over)
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