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March 28, 2024, 09:43:12 AM

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Black Mirror; Bandersnatch

Started by Dex Sawash, December 26, 2018, 02:44:02 AM

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Twed

Turns out I vaguely know the guy who did all the Speccy visuals for this.

Tried to give it a watch, but Chromecast can't cope with it.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Dannyhood91 on December 30, 2018, 10:53:27 AM
I watched/played this yesterday and thought it was a load of old shit. When I picked Frosties for breakfast I got told it was childish. I don't appreciate being insulted like that.

Yeah, well Frosties are just Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for people who can't handle reality.

Anyone else tried watching this via a console? I watched it on the Xbox Netflix app and was delighted to note that it's set up to make the rumble motors in the controller vibrate as a prompt to make a choice.

Brooker must be trying to get a developer to let him come and make a Black Mirror game, surely?

St_Eddie

Quote from: Blue Jam on December 30, 2018, 05:09:34 PM
Yeah, well Frosties are just Crunchy Nut Cornflakes for people who can't handle reality.

I'd rather have a bowl of Coco Pops.

Norton Canes

Just endured this for about an hour

Chose 'Skip to credits', I win

buzby

Quote from: Rev+ on December 29, 2018, 12:14:05 AM
I know he wasn't at Imagine but Colin was definitely based on Matthew Smith, right?
Quote from: BritishHobo on December 30, 2018, 01:38:11 AM
At one point you can make Stefan take his medication after a breakdown, which leads to his game being a boring load of old shit, nicely implying that really suffering through the worst depths of your mental illness is the only way to make fucking genius, seminal, transcendental art.

Poor bloody Stefan. He'd have pissed his kecks if you showed him Skyrim.
I've not watched it as I haven't got Netflix, but Stefan sounds like the late Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith, one of the unhinged legends of Imagine (he was also a poster on NotBBC).

It's nice that they managed to get the White Bear logo into that QR code on the Spectrum program from the credits.

olliebean

Quote from: Dannyhood91 on December 30, 2018, 10:53:27 AM
I watched/played this yesterday and thought it was a load of old shit. When I picked Frosties for breakfast I got told it was childish. I don't appreciate being insulted like that.

More childish than Sugar Puffs, ffs?

KennyMonster

Watched this for about 90 minutes - 2hours ish, got to the fake credits and real credits with not replay option.

A good ish idea but the story wasn't that original or absorbing so it all got a bit tediously repetitive after a few goes,

There should have been a "skip to the gorgeous Alice Lowe" option.

Noodle Lizard


Rev+

Quote from: buzby on December 30, 2018, 09:14:41 PM
I've not watched it as I haven't got Netflix, but Stefan sounds like the late Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith, one of the unhinged legends of Imagine (he was also a poster on NotBBC).

That might be right, but I didn't get the impression that Stefan was specifically based on anyone.  Colin is someone who has become a ledge in the industry quickly and is considered something of a rockstar, is into acid, and when he disappears completely is just assumed to be on a long bender in Amsterdam despite never resurfacing.  Maybe not based on anyone in particular either, but it is suggestive of Mr. Willy.

Dex Sawash

This is doing my fucking head in. Tried 4 times to make it longer than 20 minutes.

Mister Six

Up to and including the acid trip with Colin (I assume some of you didn't get this bit, but it's very good) I thought it was great. But then I found myself whirling through a string of endings, or possibly fake endings (I'm not sure why some of them have credits and some go to a rewind point) including dying in the psychiatrist's chair after rabbity time travel, the Netflix fight meta-ending, and killing my dad and it all just blew away into nothingness for me.

There seemed to be no baseline reality - whether he's a bloke going mad,  a guy who can time travel, the victim of a science experiment gone wrong, a man trapped between worlds or a fella in a postmodern TV show - and without that the while "is he crazy" conceit seemed more like a lazy way for Brooker to write more or less whatever he wanted without having to commit to anything.

There's a bit early on, if you first accept the deal, and then play again and turn it down, in which both Stefan and Colin seem to be aware - actually full aware - of the parallel timelines and their contents. But that goes nowhere, really, and doesn't fit with Stefan's confusion later on. Shame, because that could have been a really interesting direction to take it in.

TL;DR: needs more Colin.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Head Gardener on December 29, 2018, 09:26:54 PM
I've downloaded a 5 hr torrent of this and it appears one long episode - will this still be watchable? (no, I have not started it yet)

No, of course not.

imitationleather

Quote from: Mister Six on December 31, 2018, 05:19:34 AM
There's a bit early on, if you first accept the deal, and then play again and turn it down, in which both Stefan and Colin seem to be aware - actually full aware - of the parallel timelines and their contents. But that goes nowhere, really, and doesn't fit with Stefan's confusion later on. Shame, because that could have been a really interesting direction to take it in.

Yeah when this happened I thought the conceit was going to be that the characters could remember the choices they'd made before. Which would have been a nice spin on the choose your own adventure thing, but probably an absolute cunt to film.

Dannyhood91

It did my head in how much the glasses man sounds like this https://youtu.be/2Z8pgV74_Hw

Norton Canes

Quote from: Norton Canes on December 30, 2018, 06:51:34 PM
Just endured this for about an hour

Chose 'Skip to credits', I win


Sorry, should elucidate

Three things that really put me off:

1. Just like the recent Inside No.9 Halloween special, it was way too meta. Just because you're making a 'choose your own adventure' style story doesn't mean you have to make it about someone actually making a 'choose your own adventure' style story
2. The filming style was too slow. That kind of glacial atmospheric pace is fine for some dramas but I thought this needed much more pace, it needed to feel far snappier
3. More than either of the above, what really weighed it down was the endless cycling through alternative paths. For me the whole appeal of 'choose your own adventure' style stuff is that all but one of the endings has you dying, and tough shit, that's it, go again. I guess they weren't confident people would start again of their own volition, but, sorry, I'd rather that then be forced through every route in one go.

On the pus side there were some nice 80's home computer game in-jokes, and it's got me listening to Phaedra.   

(Was there any reason the character was named after John Ritman? He never seemed particularly like an acid casualty drop-out type)

BritishHobo

Quote from: Dannyhood91 on December 31, 2018, 01:55:06 PM
It did my head in how much the glasses man sounds like this https://youtu.be/2Z8pgV74_Hw

Ha ha, I thought the exact same thing! I think it's just another nice example of how absolutely fucking perfectly Matthew Holness captured a specific type of spoddy, know-it-all tech enthusiast.

I'm kinda bummed because I love Will Poulter (Will Poulter, as me and Noodle Lizard call him) and I was proper excited to see him in Black Mirror. Unless I'm missing some major pathway, he didn't get loads to do.

buzby

Quote from: Rev+ on December 31, 2018, 12:38:22 AM
That might be right, but I didn't get the impression that Stefan was specifically based on anyone.  Colin is someone who has become a ledge in the industry quickly and is considered something of a rockstar, is into acid, and when he disappears completely is just assumed to be on a long bender in Amsterdam despite never resurfacing.  Maybe not based on anyone in particular either, but it is suggestive of Mr. Willy.
From that I'd say Colin is definitely based on Matthew Smith.

biggytitbo

Quote from: buzby on December 30, 2018, 09:14:41 PM
I've not watched it as I haven't got Netflix, but Stefan sounds like the late Jonathan 'Joffa' Smith, one of the unhinged legends of Imagine (he was also a poster on NotBBC).

It's nice that they managed to get the White Bear logo into that QR code on the Spectrum program from the credits.


Dunno if you've seen it but Kim Justice has a new video out on who the various characters might have been inspired by and she mentions Joffa Smith as well as a few other candidates.

BritishHobo

Seeing people really stick up for this by saying it's shit and pointless by design and that at the end you're meant to realise you were never in control and there's no free will and all the endings are basically the same because there was only the illusion of control but really you're just another part of the game and life is pointless oooooooh spooooooky

Nah, fuck off.

neveragain

I wouldn't say that. It's just a bit of fun, though a well-produced and - to me anyway - engrossing one. Someone above (was it you? I'm not sure. Happy New Year!) said the fact there was no fixed underlying narrative harmed the film and I would agree, although the mixing up of all the different explanations did make the time loop quite effective.

buzby

Quote from: biggytitbo on December 31, 2018, 07:32:48 PM


Dunno if you've seen it but Kim Justice has a new video out on who the various characters might have been inspired by and she mentions Joffa Smith as well as a few other candidates.
I endured that voice to watch the video (Matthew Smith was from Wallasey, not Manchester). It probably was a bit more interesting to the youth who weren't around at the time it was al happening.

Jonathan Smith/Joffa/Frobush was a bit of a tragic character. Apparently intensely talented, but completely unable to deal with social interaction. The story of some of the ex-Ocean gang going down to appear at the Byte Back convention in 2009 and his 'turn for the worse' was infamous at the time, but when more of his close friends began to share stories about him after he died it became pretty clear that that getting off his face was basically an act of self-sabotage so he wouldn't have to deal with people

biggytitbo

Very sad to see how many of those spectrum era bedroom coders ended up so fucked up that they committed suicide or had tragically early deaths.


I guess that color clash was just too much for anyone to deal with :(

Ja'moke

Quote from: BritishHobo on December 31, 2018, 09:34:15 PM
Seeing people really stick up for this by saying it's shit and pointless by design and that at the end you're meant to realise you were never in control and there's no free will and all the endings are basically the same because there was only the illusion of control but really you're just another part of the game and life is pointless oooooooh spooooooky

Nah, fuck off.

But I mean... that was the point wasn't it? It pretty much states that outright at one point.

Whether you still think it's shit or not is a separate issue.

St_Eddie

I've not even seen this and still, I think that it's total shit.

10 out of 10 - An amazing revelation in technology.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I love the concept (it's like getting a computer game for free) and I enjoyed it overall, but I must echo some of the frustration over the execution. The first time I made a choice, only to see the story come to a seemingly arbitrary halt, was very disappointing - not to mention confusing, when Stefan mentions doing things again. Not every fail state can be as dramatically final as having a character die, but it feels half arsed to just cut off plotlines like that.

Golden E. Pump

I think from a technical point of view it's very well done and an interesting concept. However, if it was just an episode of Black Mirror without the gimmick of being an interactive episode it would be panned as the worst episode they've ever written. It doesn't know what it wants to say about anything.

I hope we get more episodes but I hope they don't add gimmicks for the sake of it.

Head Gardener

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on December 31, 2018, 06:54:05 AM
No, of course not.

awww bugger, is there a right way of watching this without Netflix? like a 90 min torrent I just saw offered?

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Head Gardener on January 01, 2019, 03:08:42 PM
awww bugger, is there a right way of watching this without Netflix? like a 90 min torrent I just saw offered?

'fraid not, as it's an interactive episode specifically designed for use via Netflix.

batwings

Watched a torrent of Dragon's Lair once. Plot was all over the place. Worse than Pulp Fiction.

notjosh

Quote from: justin_bennett on December 28, 2018, 02:16:20 PM
Someone on Reddit has already mapped it on a flowchart.  I'm not studying it closely until I've watched it at least another twice.

Reading this, it looks like there are some interesting divergences, but they mostly happen in the latter half of the story. Not sure I fancy sitting through the first 45 minutes again just to watch Alice Lowe turn into a wolverine???