The ‘Black Mirror’ Movie Has A Very ’80s Trailer
It's probably set in the '80s, though we've all learnt by now that you can't take anything in Black Mirror at face value.
Netflix has released the last-minute first trailer for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, rumoured to be the anthology series’ first choose-your-own-adventure film. It’s probably set in the ’80s, though we’ve all learnt by now that you can’t take anything in Black Mirror at face value, not even the setting.
In the trailer, young video game programmer Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) works on a video game called Bandersnatch. The game is apparently based upon a fantasy novel by author Jerome F. Davies, who may or may not have gone “cuckoo and cut his wife’s head off”. According to Netflix’s description, Stefan will “begin to question reality” as he delves into his work.
There aren’t too many shots in the trailer indicating exactly what this will entail, but at one point someone sticks their hand into a mirror like liquid mercury. Bandersnatch was the name of a fearsome monster mentioned in Lewis Carrol’s nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’, first published in his 1871 novel Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There.
While Jerome F. Davies is a fictional figure, there was a game called Bandersnatch in development in the ’80s. Unfortunately, despite heavy advertisement and hype, it was never released. Bandersnatch‘s two-year-old British developer Imagine Software went bankrupt in 1984 — the year in which Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is set. The game’s remnants were turned into 1986 game Brataccas, which received a lukewarm reception.
Rumour has it that Black Mirror: Bandersnatch will be a choose-your-own-adventure film with multiple endings. A report from Bloomberg in October stated that Black Mirror was expected to release the first of several interactive stories before the end of the year, and according to /Film Bandersnatch contains 312 minutes of footage. This is more than double the length of a standard film, which makes sense if you aren’t going to see it all in one viewing.
We won’t have to wait much longer to find out what it’s all about. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch drops on Netflix later today.