Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Short description
In 1984, a young programmer named Stefan Butler sets out to turn a fantasy novel into a video game. The book, written as a choose-your-own-adventure story by an author with a troubled history, draws him into a project for the company Tuckersoft, where its head Mohan Thakur and a celebrated game designer, Colin Ritman, take an interest in his work. As Stefan builds the game, he begins to lose his hold on what is real, and the choices he faces start to mirror the ones the game asks its players to make.
David Slade directed the film, which followed his work on Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and preceded Nightmare Cinema and Dark Harvest. Charlie Brooker wrote the screenplay, Russell McLean produced, and Fionn Whitehead leads a cast that includes Craig Parkinson, Alice Lowe, Asim Chaudhry, Will Poulter and Tallulah Haddon. The interactive format lets viewers make decisions for Stefan, leading to several different outcomes.
Released in late 2018, the film runs about ninety minutes and sits within the Black Mirror series. On IMDb it holds a 7.1 rating from roughly 143,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 6.8 from around 4,270 votes, so viewers on both platforms rate it favourably but not without reservation.
What's left behind the scenes
- In one of the episodes, the words "Hudson" and "Imagine" can be heard – these are the names of computer companies from the early 1980s.
- Jerome F. Davis is played by Jeff Minter, a British video game developer and programmer.
- The cover of Crash magazine, which Colin is reading, was specially drawn by artist Oliver Frey – the author of all the magazine’s covers during its publication.
- Stefan visits a psychiatrist at the San Junipero Medical Center. "San Junipero" is the title of the 4th episode of the 3rd season of "Black Mirror", which aired on October 21, 2016.
- The word "brandashmyg" was invented by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).
- "Brandashmyg" is a game that Imagine Software once planned to release, but went bankrupt in 1984.
- At the beginning, Colin shows Stefan his new game, "The Dive" – a reference to the episode of the same name from the 3rd season, which aired in 2016.
- Stefan is listening to the Sony TPS-L2, the first in the Walkman line.
- In one of the endings, you can hear a tape recording of computer data sounds; loading the sound into a ZX Spectrum provides the viewer with a QR code, which leads to a fictional website where a playable copy of the ZX Spectrum game "Nohzdyve" can be downloaded.
- The symbol shown on screen is the same one the viewer saw in the 2013 episode "White Bear".
- The character in the game Colin is working on is constantly falling. This is a reference to one of the storyline variations in which Colin jumps out of a window.
- In some storyline variations, Colin reads Crash magazine or 2000 AD comics.
- The fictional company Tuckersoft is based on the bankrupt company Imagine Software.
- The film does not have a fixed runtime; its duration depends on which storyline the viewer chooses. The shortest version of the film lasts 40 minutes. The total amount of footage shot is 5 hours 12 minutes 13 seconds.
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