Black Mirror series

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-12-022023-03-19 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) A novelty experience more than a proper movie, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is an “interactive experience” where you, the viewer, make choices about what you’re seeing on-screen. The gimmick is less disruptive than you may think given a countdown timer and some judicious storytelling/technical choices, including decision paths that often double back on themselves, presenting new opportunities only if you’d gone through them before. Fortunately, form follows function in that Bandersnatch tells us about the psychotic breakdown (maybe) of an early-1980s computer programmer working on a piece of interactive fiction. Obvious yet weighty themes of free will, parallel universes and the illusion of control pepper the narrative, mirroring the work of the filmmakers and the experience of the viewers (in a very funny tangent, the viewer eventually gets the choice of telling the character that he’s in a Netflix offering, leading to the following clip breaking the fourth wall a few times over). It does work, although not as much as a movie than a rough thought-piece, perhaps not as fully realized as videogames have become. Still, Bandersnatch very much fits in the Black Mirror universe as it gets quite dark at times and there’s a delicious shudder of metafictional angst going through the piece. The 1980s setting is lovely—at some point, we even enter a lavishly detailed recreation of a record/bookstore. Acting-wise, Fionn Whitehead does a good job anchoring the piece, while Alice Lowe gets a warm part playing a psychiatrist, and Will Poulter is perhaps at his most sympathetic as a genius videogame developer. It’s far too early to say whether Bandersnatch will lead to follow-ups or whether those follow-ups will be better or worse: Bandersnatch does offer a decent 90–120 minutes of entertainment, but even the rather clever and seamless nature of the branching became repetitive toward the end, leading to exhaustion rather than satisfaction at closing the film. (For the record; I used a flowchart guide to get to the main endings, so I’m reasonably confident that I’ve seen much of the content.) I do have substantial qualms about the future of Bandersnatch—it’s a form of entertainment closely linked to a specific proprietary platform with no way to make a compelling independent distribution mechanism, and it’s easy to imagine Bandersnatch disappearing in the future once Netflix goes bankrupt or gets tired of it. But such is the digital era: A movie can be re-recorded or transcoded, videogames can be run inside an emulator, but this kind of entertainment remains fixed for the moment.

Movie Review

Black Mirror, Season 3 (2016)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-11-092019-04-13 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, November 2017) If this third season of Black Mirror has a subtitle, it would be something along the lines of “bigger budget, growing up, branching out.” After two seasons of almost unrelenting bleakness, Black Mirror uses this third season not just to keep doing what it’s done so far (i.e.: bleak near-future scenarios with horrifying twists) with better production values, but also branches out in dark comedy (“Nosedive,” scathing in its extrapolation of social media culture) and even a honest-to-goodness uplifting romance (“San Junipero”). Once again, the premises may be familiar to seasoned SF fans, but their execution is usually competent, and the final twists usually go far beyond expectations. Once again, the anthology format works well—there are a few Easter eggs that reference other episodes, but nothing to link them in cumbersome ways. The bigger budgets of this third season mean bigger talent names (including Joe Wright and Dan Trachtenberg as directors, plus actors such as Dallas Bryce Howard, Michael Kelly and Gugu Mbatha-Raw), longer running times (“Hated in the Nation,” at 89 minutes, is easily feature-film length) and more ambitious production values. Not all of the episodes work (“Playtest” and “Men Against Fire” are fairly standard, although their closing moments are very effective), but the series does reach a few high notes with “Nosedive” and the exceptional “San Junipero.” Once again, the strength of the series is in its pure science-fictional approach in exploring the human failings exposed by high technology. Some episodes are relatively mundane (“Shut up and Dance” is barely five minutes in the future), while others really dig into a futuristic but plausible premise. Considering that these six episodes are merely the first half of what Netflix commissioned from series creator Charlie Booker, let’s keep our hope up that the fourth season will be just as good. One recommendation: switch the episode order so that you end up with “Nosedive” and “San Junipero” as a way to keep your spirits up and gain a better appreciation of what Brooker is trying to do now that he’s established Black Mirror’s reputation as nightmarish SF.

Movie Review

Black Mirror, Season 2 (2013)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-11-042019-04-13 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, November 2017) Well, if you’re feeling too optimistic about your life, the world or what humans are capable of doing to each other with a little bit of technological help, have fun with this second season of Black Mirror (including the unusually bleak “White Christmas” special). If the first season left you with nightmares, this one won’t be any easier to stomach, with “White Bear” and “White Christmas,” in particular, being particularly able to give you fits of guilt at being part of the human species. “White Bear” talks about our capacity for righteous indignation and how rage can become an entertainment experience (hilariously enough, the credit sequence plays like a hideous making-of), while “White Christmas” simply points out how eager we are to enslave even ourselves. But I summarize too much: part of the pleasure of Black Mirror’s twisted effectiveness is finding out that what we think we see on-screen isn’t what’s really happening. Better production values and bigger names (such as Jon Hamm and Oona Chaplin in “White Christmas”) help make the show even better. Still, there’s more to Black Mirror than simple bleakness. Episodes such as “Be Right Back” show that series creator Charlie Brooker is also able to touch upon more complex emotions than simple revulsion. But then, of course, you have “The Waldo Moment” which, in its critique of cheap populism, rather depressingly anticipates that a buffoon could in fact be elected in a position of power. After the way the first season’s “The National Anthem” proved stomach-churningly prescient, maybe someone should keep tabs on what Charlie Brooker has in store for Black Mirror’s third season…

Movie Review

Black Mirror, Season 1 (2011)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-10-252019-03-25 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, October 2017) The Black Mirror series has been on my radar as a must-see for years … but considering the nature of its acclaim as a modern-day Twilight Zone, it took a while for me to muster up the right frame of mind to tackle it. It really doesn’t help that the first episode is basically a hazing ritual. Here’s one of the best SF shows of the past decade … and its first episode (“The National Anthem”) asks its audience to consider a scenario in which the British prime minister is coerced to have sex with a pig … live-streamed to a population ghoulishly eager to see it all. And rather proved prescient years later when a related story emerged about British PM David Cameron. Yup, there’s Black Mirror all right: a blend of technological speculation and old-fashioned horror at what humans are capable of doing. The horror is that the worst monsters are us. It doesn’t really get any better in the brilliant second episode (“Fifteen Million Merits”) in which the grind of daily work and the lure of celebrity are literalized in a satirical portrait of society. Fortunately, the third episode (“The Entire History of You”) is more humanistic but no less terrifying as a technological innovation exposes very human foibles. Again: no need for monsters when humans do such a good job at self-destructing and being so evil to each other. Black Mirror is not a series to watch lightly. It can be stomach-turning, eerily prescient, and implacable in its extrapolations. The quality of the scripts is high, and the production values are more than adequate. Best of all, this first season is a mere prelude to (so far) two seasons and ten other episodes of similar material. Show-runner/writer Charlie Brooker has managed to capture current anxieties about technology and give them further life is terrifying imaginative scenarios. Don’t miss Black Mirror … but be ready to feel depressed for a while after watching them all.