I watched Squid Game on Netflix a couple of weeks ago and I've been fascinated by the reaction to it. There are lots of casual spoilers below, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.
The primary reaction to Squid Game has been horror at the mass killings of all the game contestants, but that barely made a dent on me because it was so obviously cartoonish. This wasn't Brian DePalma gore, it was just a bunch of pink guys shooting a bunch of green guys, who fell over obligingly with a minimum of bloodshed. It was about as upsetting as watching Wile E. Coyote die at the hands of the Road Runner for the hundredth time.
As for the characters themselves, they seemed faintly ridiculous. They were all willing to endure a 99.8% chance of dying in order to get out from under their debts? Come on. And even if you buy that, they all had the exact same motivation and almost identical back stories. That makes for tedious character development.
And then there was Episode 7, when all the fat cats arrive in masks in order to watch the show and wager on who will die next. This was so over the top that I almost stopped watching right then. I'm no fan of the top 1%, but rich people the world over should have sued for defamation while the rest of us sued for ridiculousness.
Finally, there was the ending. Squid Game suffered from what I've come to call the "Lost disease." That's a show that depends heavily on the reveal in the final episode. If it's good, it makes the whole thing worthwhile. If it's bad, it doesn't. Not all shows depend on a satisfying ending, but a show that's fundamentally a mystery does.
So I waited. And what do we get? The old man confesses to Gi-hun that—ta da!—rich people get bored with ordinary life and need something to rekindle their appetites. That's why he set up the whole game. Seriously? Someone should shoot the screenwriter for that. Aside from being (a) stupid and (b) cliched, it shows that the Squid Game folks never had any real idea of how to justify their whole story.
At this point, I suppose that lots of people will tell me that I'm obsessing over the trees and not appreciating the forest. Fair enough. But what's the forest? That rich people are all psychopaths who casually kill thousands of people every year by making them play a game? There are certainly people who think of this as a profound commentary about how the world works, and more power to them. But I guess I'm not one of them.
so...it's a remake of a cliche. But new to the kids.
Clichés are Clichés for a reason. They resonate with people because they are relatable and they've done so for years. Also the horror in this case is heavily derived from the games being modified children's games so you get the "rosy memory from before adulthood" violated.
Though in south Korea apparently debt to finance a middle class facade is even more widespread than here.
Kevin, thanks for watching so I don't have to. Assuming your description of the show is accurate, and I believe you, I won't spend two minutes watching it.
As for the ending, bored rich people casually killing thousands for poor people, that is happening right now. Just look at most billionaires, grasping after ever more money. Buying off politicians to keep their obscene wealth. If our system of collecting taxes was applied evenly, much less progressively, they would pay much more.
Money that would go toward helping those more in need. Better and more available health care, better educational opportunities, affordable child care, major changes in how we beat back the awful effects of climate change. All of this takes money, and lots of it.
Tell me that a billionaire with $50 billion in assets, will somehow have his life materially worsened by paying a minimum tax of say 15% on every penny earned right the top. What, they might not be able to afford a mega yacht with two heliports? There is simply nothing they can't continue to buy forever.
Better healthcare, better education, and stabilizing our climate will save lives, and more than just thousands of them.
More direct. Billionaires financing anti-vaxxers.
Well, you made it through all seven episodes, so that means it was enjoyable enough, no?
Haven't seen it yet.
I find with sadly increasing frequency I'm "meh" about a lot of buzzworthy shows. Like "Succession"— watched three episodes and I didn't get what the fuss was about. So I gave up. It's the curse of the so-called golden age of television: the bar has been set so high (Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad etc) that one becomes spoiled and jaded. And I I can always find something passably interesting on Youtube. Oh, and I watched Dune tonight — highly recommended.
I have to agree. The ending especially is like...seriously? I watched all this for THAT? The images were gorgeous and lots of homage to Kubrick, Hitchcock, DePalma, and Technicolor was evident. But the characters? Meh. Some were good and I hung on for them. But the violence was not that graphic or real.
But the ending, oh the ending, did indeed make me LOST....
'...rich people the world over should have sued for defamation'
That presumes that the 0.001% would not do precisely something that sociopathic, in those circumstances. And that is not an easy argument to win...
In fact, what's most unbelievable, is that the richest people on the planet would actually be willing to watch the vast number of people that they kill off, actually die.
I am so glad that I do not have TV and do not go to movies. I read books. Good books. My life is far too full for drivel like this. Oh yes, and I am perfect.
Weird take. IMO, this was a brilliant bit of television. Each one of the games set up a different moral quandary. First, there was an incentive to help each other. Then, it because advantageous to withhold information. Then, it required actual violence against rival teams. Then, it required violence against your friends. Each step of the way sent the contestants deeper into the cynical world of the game's creator. The ending was a test to see if humanity was redeemable.
Anyway, don't listen to Kevin on this one. He's just wrong.
Er, then it "became advantageous"
The degenerate rich people in masks was borrowed straight from Kubrick (“Eyes Wide Shut”) as were a few other elements of the show, but the whole thing was just too boring and too conventional-TV to bother listing them in detail.
So recently in August, the heir of Samsung (but defacto head of the company since 2014) was paroled after being jailed for bribing the former president. I think it was the president who was in thrall to a witch. Upon his release the government released a statement that said "yes, this is bad but we need samsung to help with vaccines and the economy."
The company essentially remained in a holding pattern and made no big decisions waiting for him to be released.
So yeah, this might hit a bit differently in South Korea.
Of note, the US chamber of commerce lobbied for his parole (which was legal) to help with the semiconductor shortage.
Squid Game reviews have followed the same pattern as Ted Lasso: Everyone loves it! But we need a different angle for our story - so tell everyone it is awful. Now everyone says its awful.
Critics are like hipsters in high school - once everyone likes the band you "discovered" you have to hate that band.
Quite true.
Come now, don't be tedious, Squid Game was quite fun (although granted the plutocrat's segment was something out of a silly Bolshevik cartoon, and could have been far stronger and/or more fun if not so Bolshy cartoon plutocrats).
As insightful commentary of course it's not particularlly brilliant, but if one watches it for the fun of it, quite fun.
I rather liked the over the top quality of episode 7. It was so cartoonish, but admit it, sometimes, in your heart of heart, you picture these bastards as being exactly like that.
No, actually I don't because in my work I deal with such people directly so.... no.
The cartoonish aspect there was just to 1921 Bolshy cartoon.
You gave it a lot longer than I did, Kevin. I stopped watching after 15 minutes.
Squid Game? There's an honest trailer for that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akm4BdBIMXQ
From the WSW review:
"South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, especially among the elderly. Unemployment for young people in 2020 stood at a staggering 22 percent. Household debt, at over 1,800 trillion won ($1.5 trillion), now exceeds the country's annual economic output. South Korean workers have their own unique history, one that includes dictatorship, war, government repression (the Gwangju massacre among the most prominent).
In one episode it is revealed that the main character, Gi-hun, ran into financial troubles after he was laid off from Motor warehouse. In a flashback, the audience sees strikebreakers busting down doors and brutally assaulting striking workers, killing at least one. [Director] Dong-hyuk has said that the character was inspired by the 2009 Ssangyong Motors plant strike."
You did not need to see the final episode to understand the plot. Seriously. It's a very basic plot that was hinted at, several times. The gore and the plot have been done many times over recently, in fact. It's just that you haven't watched many Japanese and South Korean shows.
What makes Squid Games stand out are the visual cues to Western values. The triangle, square, and circle are Euclidean geometry; the colors are Western pastels, and the internal stairways are Escher.
Battle Royal is way more fun since the characters are all 14-15 and you get hormone overdrive along with the murder and tragic back stories. Also Beat Takeshi and Bruce Springsteen.
I thought maybe what drew young men to Battle Royale was Chiaki Kuriyama.
Alice in Borderland is very similar in plot to Squid Game, and so is Gantz.
It is terrible.
The acting is bad.
The main characters are not good people. They are unappealing and do not bring about any sympathetic feelings about them.
The premise is silly.
I don't see the appeal.
What is “ Squid Games”?
It's like the Westminster Dog Show, but for molluscs.
As a US citizen who has seen over a hundred K-dramas in the last four years, let me say that this is a very Korean show. First it's a pastiche, which a lot of K-dramas are, this time a mashup of Hunger Games, The Prisoner, and My Mister. Second the terribly done over-the-top westerners are typical of K-dramas. The actors are always horrible and their English dialog always atrociously written and delivered. Since Squid Games makes the westerners central to the plot, their idiotic portrayal weakens the show almost fatally. Third, what still made the show work for me was the emotional honesty that is a hallmark of the best K-dramas. The cynical and ironic tone of so many US shows just isn't there. Ultimately the real villain of the show isn't the western billionaires but unfettered capitalism itself, as best exemplified by the protag's childhood friend, who was someone who had supposedly already succeeded climbing his way up the meritocratic ladder but turned out to be the nastiest character in the show.
Very Korean.
Unfettered capitalism couldn't happen without the plutocrats pushing for it.
Also: are streaming platforms part of endstage kapitalism?
Succession is better.
So Trump is a pink guy, and Jeff Sessons, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham et al are green guys. Got it.
Nah, the jailers -- they guys in the pink suits -- weren't much better off than the players. At least they were not destined to die.
Still looks like dank memes Teletubbies to me.
"They were all willing to endure a 99.8% chance of dying in order to get out from under their debts? Come on. And even if you buy that, they all had the exact same motivation and almost identical back stories"
Not really, in fact out of the characters they focused on, not a single one of them decided to participate to get out of their debts. I guess you didn't pay too much attention to it. The main reason for those participating was that they all found themselves in extreme situations in their lives without any hope of improvement.
The main character was a gambling addict without a regular job, living with his sick mom who needed medical attention, already had his life threatened by his bookie, and was on the verge of losing his daughter forever.
His childhood friend who on the surface everyone saw as a successful man and was the pride of the neighborhood, was facing a long jail sentence for frauds committed and was terribly scared of the shame he'd bring to his mother.
The main female character was a North Korean refugee who was regularly insulted or attacked because of her origin, and all she wanted was money to get her brother out of the orphanage where he lived, and to smuggle her mother out of North Korea.
The gangster had stolen from his gang, and as a result of that even his closest friend in the gang turned against him and tried to kill him, so he already had a death sentence hanging over him.
The Pakistani immigrant was an illegal immigrant with a wife and newborn to support, who worked for a crooked boss who refused to pay him what he was owed for his work despite him suffering a serious injury as a result of the companies corner cutting, and then to make it worse, he accidentally caused his boss to suffer a gruesome injury, so he was also facing certain jail time.
The younger female player had just been released from mental health prison facility, where she spent most of her teenage years after killing her abusive father, who had in turn killed her mother. She specifically mentions how she had no one and nothing to live for, which is why she decided to enter, and why later decided to sacrifice herself to let the other player with a worthy reason to win to go on.
The doctor assisting the guards with their organ harvesting side gig was a disgraced surgeon facing multiple investigations for the deaths of his patients due to his negligence.
The organizers even explicitly goaded them when they voted to leave after the first day, asking if they really thought they had any hope of ever changing anything in their lives, and telling them they'd be welcomed back when they realized that. If your choices are a one in three hundred something chance (or whatever the number of players left after the first game), versus a zero chance outside, it is no longer such a crazy gamble.
We see people taking those kind of odds daily with immigrants and refugees who decide to leave everything they have for a chance at something better, even if they risk death in doing so, and if the chance of success is very small.
"I'm no fan of the top 1%, but rich people the world over should have sued for defamation"
You really think no one would behave like they do? We already know that a few dozen of the world's richest and most powerful men were happy to fly to a private island to abuse minors, and human trafficking rings rely on people (typically those with a lot of money) willing to abuse and commit horrific acts for self pleasure. Would something like this be that far fetched? The main personality characteristic of the VIPs was that they didn't see the players as humans. For them they were like toys or things there to provide some entertainment and then to be thrown away. Plenty of the super rich act like that on a daily basis.
In the end the main theme throughout the series was not a criticism against the rich, but a critique against human selfishness, regardless if you are poor or rich. The reason the old man started the game wasn't just because he was bored and wanted some excitement, but because he realized that humans didn't really cared about each other and would always try to do what was in their own self interest without caring for others unless there was something to gain from it.
The entire game was built on that premise which is why it encouraged and forced people to turn on each other at every opportunity out of self interest. It showed as villains not just the rich enjoying the spectacle or those organizing it, but nearly every single player they highlighted. When push came to shove, most decided to betray or take advantage of those they considered friends. While those who tried to keep their humanity and their trust in others often faced quickly the consequences for not being ruthless. It wasn't until the very last game when the main character finally realized this and decided to change by trying to save his rival and former friend even if that meant walking away empty handed when the win was already his. That's why the VIPs were surprised when that happened, because in their minds, just like in that of the old man latter on during the big reveal, humans will always act selfishly.
A ritual not mentioned that rich Asians participate in and that the Squid Game reminded me of is the torture and killing of bears in front of diners before bear paw soup is prepared.
You make the best case for the show I have seen.
One should note that the translation apparently is bad. I live in in NOVA which is chock full of Korean Americans. Netflix cheeped out on translation so apparently the show suffers from that per folks who know the language. Also there's a ton of insider Easter eggs you would only know if you were Korean or lived there.
Kevin. you've become a crotchety old man.
The Squid Game vaguely reminds me of that 1960s cult TV show The Prisoner.
I wish there were more than 9 episodes.
It's a mashup of Hunger Games, The Prisoner, and My Mister.
The Squid Game reminds me of reality TV shows like Survivor rather than The Hunger Games.
In an interview, Susan Collins said that reality TV was one of her inspirations for the novel.
Can't we focus on the real villain here? Serial drama!
Every single dang show these days is a serial drama (even so-called comedies!). When I was a kid we use to call this kind of thing a soap opera. Now we call it "prestige television". No story line needs to make sense. The only thing you need is twist after twist and cliff hanger after cliff hanger to make your show "binge worthy".
I'm all for serial dramas if they're done well. My own sense is the quality has declined over the last decade or so.
There are lots of movies based on novels. Almost none of them--even the famous ones like The Big Sleep or To Kill a Mockingbird come close to doing justice to the complexity of the novel because of time constraints. Serial drama is a way to represent those novels on screen much more faithfully and therefore much more interestingly. I wish somebody tried their hand at Mockingbird--we could do with a good drama on the topic that is not as cliched and harmless as the famous movie.
Really good examples from PBS (originally British of course): Pride and Prejudice or Bleak House.
You are talking about a limited series or mini-series. Not at all the same as serial drama.
I agree that serial drama can be done well. I don't necessarily object to serial drama but I do object to the fact that is has essentially taken over television completely. The only episodic shows left are the ones aimed at old people like NCIS and its ilk.
With so much serial drama of the middling sort I ask myself why I'm even watching. It's clear that no storyline will ever truly be resolved. A bunch of random events and unearned cliffhangers will keep popping up. I do miss the satisfaction I used to feel at the end of an episode where something was actually resolved.
Plenty of story lines get resolved or wrapped up in today's serial dramas (some more completely than others, to be sure). Breaking Bad, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, The Americans, Homeland, Six Feet Under, Sopranos and Mad Men all off the top of my hide. (Sopranos is a more arguable case, for sure, but there definitely was a "wrap up" —Tony's crew gets dismantled in a gangland war, and then — per the David Chase — gets capped at a restaurant).
I agree but...
Peter Thiel buying a monopoly on a life saving drug and jacking up the price several hundred fold: Is this really that far from this fiction?
Kevin would drive his Porsche to be one of the VIPs that’s why he’s mad
I enjoyed it because I wanted to, not because it was particularly good. It was visually interesting. I think my dislike for the characters (however poorly performed) influenced my dislike of the story overall.
I found myself more and more curious about all the guards' backstories and what held them in those positions. Sadly, the 'surprise' ending was pretty obvious from the beginning, though the explanation offered was lacking. I do agree that it ended rather unfulfillingly, and I can't imagine watching a second season of that.