Squid Games (2021)

A decent entry into the survival game genre while simultaneously fordging nowhere new.

Gory, violent, vulgar, and graphic Squid Game doesn't, as they say, pull any punches. This works in the show's favor as a strong juxtaposition to the candy coated, pastel painted, childlike game world it takes place. And well, that is kinda the whole point. Bookending itself with the very childhood Korean game it is named after "Squid Game," the beginning has it played by children and the ending played by adults. Honestly, the violence exists in both iterations, showing that childhood isn't truly that innocent, and adults are not the different from children.

This idea of "adult children" runs through the entirety of the viewing experience. Our main protagonist Seong Gi Hoon / "No. 456" played by Lee Jung Jae, a middle aged man living with his mother, comes off as a bratty teenager in the first 30 seconds we meet him as he whines about money while stuffing his face with food his mother made him before she heads off for a day of back breaking work. He lives a life of laziness, selfishness, and failures. Being a dead beat father, who claims he loves his daughter, but then does nothing to support or raise her, he instead spends his time stealing from his mother and gambling. Under tremendous amounts of debt to bookies and loan sharks, his debtors finally place a ticking clock to pay up or "pay with his body."

When the mysterious salesman shows up in all his bravado and gets Jung Jae to participate in a game on a subway platform, the audience can see the trap being set with each passing moment. As Jung Jae continuously loses and takes bodily harm as payment for that losing, he maniacally keeps going again and again until he gets that one win. And thus, the mentality of what is to come is shown.

Most of the premier episode deals with just Jung Jae story, and spends a lot of time setting up his place in the world. It isn't until the end of this episode when we get our first game and have glimpses at the other main players we will follow. Is this time well spent, I can't decide. His story does not garner sympathy or paint him as a good person. When he enters the first arena, I particularly didn't care if he lived or died, and well that is a problem. Antiheroes are huge right now, and Jung Jae is most definitely a character that falls in this category. But, unlike Vincenzo, The Devil Judge, or Taxi Driver, he isn't likable. What makes him not-heroic is not "grey morality" it is simply being a bad low life human being. He isn't a criminal, but the story has not shown him to be someone you want to root for either.

Other characters are more clear cut with the exception of Cho Sang Woo / "No. 218" played by Park Hae Soo. He is a foil to our main lead. Raised in the same neighborhood, and a childhood friend and rival, Sang Woo's life has been almost the opposite of Jung Jae. Coming from a single family stall saleswoman mother household, he educated himself, worked hard, and got himself into the most prestigious university in Korea. To most in the old neighborhood Sang Woo has gone on to be a successful businessman and the golden child of the low income world they all live. Well, at least that is the story his mother and everyone back home knows. In a quick backstory drop by our masked game-masters, it seems he has actually spent his time becoming a white collar criminal who is hiding from the police and 6 billion won worth of multiple financial crimes.

The rest of our main rag tag team of "good guys" is filled with a variety of the disenfranchised. Characters that are truly at a larger disadvantage in life than our two already described main male leads. Kang Sae Byeok / "No. 067" is the hardened female North Korea defector who has become a thief to survive in South Korea while trying to make a home for her younger brother. She is a very stock creation to pull at the trope of a soft hearted criminal. Luckily Jung Ho Yeon plays her perfectly balanced in ruthlessness and stoicism versus tenderness and vulnerability, which will likely have you rooting for her more than most if not all the others.

Ali Abdul / "No. 199" is our illegal immigrant from Pakistan with a heart of gold. The physically strongest of the bunch is also the most cuddly, kind, and naive. Anupam Tripathi plays him with such wide eyed youthful trust that you will want everyone involved to sacrifice themselves for his survival. And lastly, Oh Young Soo as Oh Il Nam / "No. 001" finishes our team as an elderly man who is on deaths door with a brain tumor and fighting off the beginning stages of dementia.

To say that we will lose some of these characters along the way is a given. While I won't go into when, how, or why, just suffice it to say that the only character with plot armor is our ML (Remember the whole 1st episode is dedicated to him) and of course one other player, the antagonist evil player, Jang Deok Soo / "No. 101". Both are given equal protection to make sure the push and pull between their characters remains until we reach the end. Heo Sung Tae plays the character with ease as at this point if you have seen any Korean dramas you will know how incredibly type cast he has become.

The first game Red Light/Green Light, shows everyone involved of what they have become a part. With an oversized head spinning porcelain doll that counts in a girls childish voice with everyone inside a painted arena-looking like a sandbox on a sunny day-as masked guards in pink suits stand idly with machine guns, the almost 50's Americana design (aesthetics used in video games such as Fallout) are clearly painted.

In the first episode more than half of nearly 500 players are mowed down with gunfire, in what is easily the highest body count of the show. It affects the remaining player-base so much that the survivors demand to be released, setting up a voting that is in the rules of the game. If more than 50% of the players want to quit, then they will all be freed. BUT, before the voting begins the reward for staying and competing is revealed. 100 million won per player dead. Meaning the pot, in the end, will be around 45 billion. If they choose to quit, then the money will be sent to the families of the deceased each getting the 100 million that was put in the pot. This, to say the least, changes the game, and the mind of many who were only moments before begging to go free.

Now here is were the show, I think, makes its greatest fault. That is, in a nail biting vote that comes down to a single player difference, the group is freed and all go back to their lives, but under the condition that if more than 50% want to return the games will recommence. Of course since all this takes place in the first and second episode, it is not a spoiler or remotely unclear that all the players will return. Well at least 187 out of the 201 freed will return.

While the show is trying to make a social statement between the real world and the game, it is hazy in how it draws this comparison. The idea is that these people are so destitute, forgotten, at wits end, and put upon by an unfair society, that ultimately playing in a game to the death for money is not so bad, or at least equally appealing as to living their actual lives. That is, the world itself is a game (Or rat-race) and the only way out of it is death, so why not take that chance at becoming a billionaire by playing an actual game with your life.

Unfortunately, this only holds up if you are morally bankrupt already. Yes, life is hard, it sucks a lot of the time, and there are disadvantages and advantages to it based on simply where you are born, with what color skin, looks, and wealth. However, each person has the choice of what they do with their life and who they choose to become. Look at our main two leads mothers. These are women, that as far as we know, have raised their sons mostly alone. Without wealth or privilege, they have created homes for themselves and opened businesses, and had families. Was it hard, yes. Do we wish their lives were better, of course. But these women show their strength of will and character and do not take shortcuts and thus have created something for themselves as small as it might be.

We can talk about the cop Hwang Jun Ho, played by heartthrob Wi Ha Joon, and how he become a police officer versus his missing brother ( who as far as we know is likely amongst the dead that played in the first game), while raised in the same house, the same family, with the same advantages but ended up in VERY different t places. A persons character, morality, and code matters and it isn't simply the world and society is bad. It is flawed and broken, and needs social change, of course, but this show doesn't show how to accomplish that change. It wants to show what depraved people will do to each other.

Outside of our Pakistani Ali, whose life takes a truly fateful turn in these few days of release as his intentions of leaving Korea and going home are destroyed while being preyed upon by a Korean businessman who uses him as a virtual slave because of his illegal status, everyone who returns to the game returns of their freewill knowing what lies in wait, what they will be forced to do and be a part of, and most importantly with a plan to win. These players that in the beginning where being selfish children and looking for easy money but found themselves in heinous game of mass killing and demanded freedom now become as equally complicit and active agents in the slaughter.

As a viewer, it made me no longer care if any of them lived or died. They are there because they choose to be. They are there because they want the prize. They are there because they are no better than those who devised the arena in which they play. Thus, it is a story of bad people playing with and killing bad people for a huge pot of blood money. And well, that made the show fairly depressing to get through, and gave me very little in the way of wanting to root for a winner antihero or not. If they simply had not done this, not made it where these characters actively choose to return, as a viewer I could have gotten behind and rooted for people I really didn't like, and forgive them for acts they transgress. But that is based on the idea, they were unknowing forced into a bad situation and must do what they can to survive and get out of it. Every character could have been written the same way they are, and I would have rooted for some of them regardless of their faults. In the end, as it was done, I held them responsible for their own deaths and the deaths they cause.

Episode seven is a divisive one that uses homosexuality as the benchmark of the truly depraved and the ultimate bad guy amongst an arena of bad people. Its South Korean entertainment, what can you expect from a homophobic country? It also continues the South Korean trend of using low grade actors whenever a westerner needs to be on screen and paints white wealthy westerners as sexual deviants and the lowest of the low. Whatever, just like The Devil Judges flaw of using the west as homosexuals in a salute to homophobia when sentencing a sexual predator, Squid Game just follows in line.

The aforementioned cop Jun Ho, finally has something to do in this episode, but his entire character seems misplaced and unneeded. How his story unfolds, and where it ends, makes him a character that lives fully in subplot story lines that never lead to any fruition or tie into the main plot of the series. Why did we meet him and spend time with him? What did we learn from his snooping? How did his character impact anything about the story? While his last scene seems to leave some open ended storytelling on the fate of the Squid Game operation, and the fate of himself. The time jump in the last episode of the series seems to answer all the open ended questions that left dangled. And that is, we didn't ever need him as a character.

By the end of the series, there are some twists that MOST will see coming long before they are revealed, and the ending itself is odd and weirdly uncathartic. Maybe that is the point, life isn't cathartic. Crap happens, and then we go on. This was in the end just a "slice of life" etc. As a viewer, you don't buy it, and while it hints there may be a sequel, you wonder if there is a point to it. Very few if any of the cast can return. So it will basically be all new characters to meet if we go for round two. And seeing the games again, will be very "Hunger Games" number 2, a not as fun go around of the first time. As for the games themselves, we learn very little. Who were all the men in masks? Why are they playing their role? The few that are unmasked are shown to be young and basically psychotic. What do they get out of and how did they get roped into being masked game masters? How do they move through the ranks and get either a lowly circle, gun blazing triangle, or master square ranking?

The main black masked man, is he just evil? After he does what he does and the little we learn about him, his character is basically a walking problem. Being a winner of the games, who chooses to live in virtual poverty in the real world even though a billionaire, but comes back to this world to run, design, and watch others die in games, seems to suggest yeah, he is just a bad guy. He is a confusing mess of a character, and we didn't even spend much time with him unmasked for all these issues to arise. Is season two going to be basically about him? Is that why we have the limousine scene between the winner of these games and him in the end?

Why did Squid Games become so successful? I can't answer this for you. Like the masked game masters that are just there because, this show is the greatest Netflix success, just because it is. While the acting is better in Squid Games, Netflix's Alice in Boarderlands is much stronger in individual game designs for the players, and in dissecting morality and the condition of the human animal when placed into a survivalist world. You also clearly have characters you can and want to root for, even if they are morally dubious. While its premise isn't as grounded and believable as Squid Game's, Alice does create a world that is even more terrifying and allows your imagination to run amok on how it is all happening. Yet Alice, though getting a season 2, has gone mostly unnoticed by the world at large.

Squid Game is worth a watch, provided you can handle the material. It is a solid entry in survival storytelling and creates a generally unique aesthetic to tell its tale. It is very strongly acted, and the Korean Drama plague of caricature side characters or characters written just to be comic relief are mostly if not fully absent. The directing, while straight forward, does keep the story moving and refrains from allowing the actors to have soap boxes, overly dramatic melodrama scenes, or annoyingly cloying moments. The production shines, and is generally in all regards a very top notch experience.

But, do not go into this with unrealistic expectations or with the belief you are going to travel unknown roads. You have seen everything here before, The Purge, Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Alice in Boarderlands etc are just a few from the modern age that travels where this series goes. It does it with more gore than the kid friendly versions but is on par with Alice or The Purge in that department. There are unneeded subplots, unneeded side characters, and a lot of questions that never get answers. In short, it isn't perfect, or mind-blowing. But it is good. 3.5 Stars (7) overall B. Better than the bulk of content Netflix has to offer, but forgettable and in the end not a must see.

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