Squid Games is a 2021 Korean Netflix original series that has taken mainstream pop culture by storm. Ever since its arrival people all over the world have been raving about the show’s quality and ability to keep you on the edge of your seat, fully invested in its characters. Critics and fans alike have already dubbed Squid Games the best show of the year, and Netflix’s best show in years. However I happen to take exception to this sediment.
Squid Games follows the main protagonist Seong Gi-hun, a man down on his luck, who gambles to try and make money for himself and his family. He is eventually kidnapped and when he awakes is surrounded by 199 other people in a facility that forces them to play a game of life or death, with the winner receiving billions of dollars. All the contestants in the game are poor, jobless, homeless, or dying slowly.
Episode one introduces this concept very well and has an ending that will leave viewers surprised and horrified at the same time. It’s a slow beginning with the majority of the episode taking time to establish characters and their financial struggles. Overall its an ok first episode, slow at first but it picks up and leaves you wanting more.
Episode two is by far my favorite episode. Without trying to spoil anything, the contestants do find a way out of the game and return to their lives. However we are shown very quickly that the lives they are returning to are miserable. They’re all still in debt and living on the streets trying to survive. This leads to certain players trying to persuade other former contestants to rejoin the game. We see the slow transition of Seong from a man completely against the idea of a life and death game turn into a desperate man who realizes he has nothing to lose. It’s a great dissection of the characters and further adds an element of sympathy to everyone involved in the game.
Episode three is where the show goes all in on the life or death aspect of the game. This is the episode where we are finally in the full swing of things, and it makes a lot of room for death, and gore, and torment. Since this episode focuses on the violence so much, the characters are left in the back seat for this one. We see some people use clever tricks to gain an advantage in the game, and we see the desperation of other characters who think death is imminent. However the human interactions and the subtle moments characters share in episode two are gone.
After episode three I became worried that the show would continue to up the violence and downplay the character’s arcs, and I was right to be worried. As the show went on I felt like I was watching a tame Saw movie, instead of an interesting character study and deconstruction of the power wealth has over society. The killing did nothing for me and the games themselves weren’t too interesting. They do get better as time continues but they just aren’t clever unlike the Saw movies. Id like to preface I hate the Saw franchise, they’re cheap, idiotic films made for a quick cash grab. With that being said the traps in the films are at least creative for the most part. This is what squid games were missing, creative games that put the character’s morals to the test. Instead it just kinda falls flat.
Do I hate Squid Games? No, I don’t. I think it has decent ideas and the way certain shots mirror images to famous paintings such as The Scream by Edvard Munch, Rothschild’s Surrealist Ball, and Relativity by Maurits Cornelis Escher’s is an incredibly clever way to give context to a character’s feelings and situations. Aside from that and the first two episodes, I was left unimpressed and confused by the attention it’s receiving. You can easily skip this one, there is nothing groundbreaking about Squid Games besides the amount of money it has made for a Korean television show, at an estimated value of 900 million dollars. It’s not a bad show and if you have nothing else to watch and or do then I would check it out, for the first two episodes at least.