Squid Game Review

Introduction

Squid Game serves as an unsubtle but gripping comedy that is quickly gaining international acclaim because of its straightforward yet ruthless premise that taps into the recent rise in class-warfare storylines.

The foundation for the show's popularity was established as early as 2000 when the Japanese horror game Battle Royale gained an underground following for its brutal teen murder scenarios. The show is presently on course to become Netflix's greatest original television series of all time.

Earlier in 2019, Todd Phillips' Joker and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, which each took a very different approach to the massive gap between the rich and the poor, respectively swept awards season.

Right in the middle of this chasm, there is a game called Squid Game, where 456 desperate players try to make it through six brutal versions of kid-friendly games in the hopes of winning a life-altering 45.6 billion won (about �28 million).

When it comes to the gaming tournament itself, writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk shows real inventive flair, from the inclusion of a spooky, mechanical doll with bunches in the opening game to the uniforms that separate the competitors from the elusive masked guards?teal sportswear for the first group, and hot-pink boilersuits for the second group.

Violence is always carried out in a hard and unrelenting manner. A savage nighttime riot is photographed using infrared technology, contestants are shot at close range in large groups, and swing sets are covered in blood. As the games go, an entertainment component is added to further twist the metaphorical dagger already buried (mainly) deep in the sides of the competitors.

Plot Overview

At first appearance, the series' narrative appears to be quite straightforward. A few hundred people consent to participate in the tournament, which has a billion-dollar jackpot. But after the players' demands are revealed in the movie, the game of squid takes on a new significance to the story.

Players who lose are waiting to die. Although it is difficult to halt play, it is feasible to halt the majority's choice in the contest.

456 individuals consented to take part in the contest. They include the indebted player Song Ki Hoon and Son's friend Cho Sang Woo, who stole cash from customers of the business he worked for. Oh Il Nam, player 001, is afflicted with brain canc

Participants can choose from a total of six games. After a brief overview of the games' essential elements, the significance of the television series The Squid Game will grow more apparent.

The playground has a big doll at one end, and players are led there. Participants must have enough time to cross the site to the opposite side while the doll sings and her skull is turned away so she won't notice them sprinting. You are unable to move when the doll ceases to sing and turns. The participants who the doll notices are labelled losers and are shot.

201 players are still alive after the initial match, and the majority of them decide to terminate the competition. The players are dismissed. But eventually, 187 players choose to pick it back up again.

There are four teams made up of returning players. Each team is given the option of selecting a circle, triangle, asterisk, or umbrella from the available shapes. The objective of the assignment in the following level of the Squid Game is to shape cookies from the solidified sugar without breaking it. 10 minutes total for the run. Organs from deceased participants are taken and sold.

After an entire evening of carnage orchestrated by the players themselves to enhance the payouts, only 80 of the 108 who had advanced to the second phase are still alive.

Teams of ten players are formed from the participants. The groups that will compete against one another are chosen through a lottery. The group that successfully pulls the string over itself prevails. Half of the contestants are gone by the conclusion of the round. Interesting! The director claims that he purposefully kept the game's rules straightforward and uncomplicated. He also chose the title "The Squid Game" so that viewers would focus more on the movie's content and less on trying to decipher the game's mechanics.

Pairs of players are formed. Each receives ten stones. The player asks the opponent if his hand is even or odd while holding a few stones in the hand of his hand. The amount of stones the opponent holds in his hand is taken if the opponent's guess is accurate. If not, he surrenders his stones. Whoever steals 10 stones from the opposition is declared the winner. Only 16 contestants move on to the next phase as a result.

A bridge with two tracks is in before of the players. One of them is constructed of sturdy glass that can support even two people, while the other is flimsy and will break under a person's weight. Ki Hoon, San Woo, & Kang Se-baek's girlfriend all succeed in getting across the bridge. Cho nevertheless murders the girl later.

Friends are scheduled to face one another in the final round. Each of them should switch to being a defender, and the other to becoming an attacker. The object of the squid game is to reach the painted mollusc's head. Each participant is holding a knife.

Son suddenly decides against stabbing his friend who is prone on the ground. San Woo, however, uses the knife to slit his own throat. 45.6 billion won are won by Song Ki Hoon. After winning, Son goes home, but there is no sign of his mother. After a while, Son discovers that the game's developer was an elderly man with the number 001. But the game goes on even if the old man passed away.

On the way to the airport, Kee Hong, who is determined to travel to America to pick up his daughter, observes a man gaming with the same stranger who initially enticed him to the game. Son takes the man's business card and makes a call to learn who is currently behind the game. Interesting!

The contact information on the company's credit card happened to belong to a South Korean who, by chance, received a tonne of calls from series fans. Even the purchase of a phone number was offered to the individual, but he declined.

Visuals And Cinematography

Squid Game became a worldwide sensation in 2021. The South Korean survivor drama centres around a competition where 456 participants risk their lives to play a series of lethal children's games to win a sizable cash reward.

Squid Game became a worldwide sensation in 2021. The South Korean survivor drama centres around a competition where 456 participants risk their lives to play a series of lethal children's games to win a sizable cash reward.

Creator, as well as writer, & director Hwang Dong-hyuk, created a compelling narrative that rocked us to our very cores by taking anything innocent and fusing it with the class as well as economic discrepancies.

While Lee Hyung-Seok, an Emmy-winning cinematographer, helped create a strange visual environment that made Squid Game look unlike anything else, Dong-hyuk's artistic direction created a show unlike any other. The cinematography of Hyung-Seok gave the players' fictitious environment an understanding perspective.

In Episode 6, "Gganbu," Hyung-Seok explains how he went about filming the emotionally charged finale scene with Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae) & Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su).

The artificial world is illuminated by a sunset that was photographed with a Horizont, which Hyung-Seok remarks isn't often utilised these days, as the players are drawing close to the conclusion of the fourth game. Instead of opting for a realistic aesthetic, Hyung-deck used the panoramic Horizont to produce an imbalance and unease of the "fake world" as opposed to employing CGI sunsets like the Mandalorian and shooting in the setting sun.

This bizarre brightness contributes to the feeling that something innocent has been lost. This is further highlighted by the stark contrast between the colours and the red colours, the setting, and the game's design, but Hyung-Seok discerns a deeper significance.

Gi-hun receives the last marble from Il-Nam, and as he raises his head back into the light, the camera zooms in to capture his emotional condition. Il-team is still expressing himself in the shadows, making it difficult for the audience to comprehend what he is attempting to communicate as he says "gganbu."

Although Hyung-Seok dislikes close-ups that don't show any background, this scene requires a personal camera to capture this poignant moment. "I ended up utilising a lot of close-up shots for each line and each teardrop caused by these professional actors contributed to telling the story effectively," says Hyung-Seok.

Although delicate, Hyung-deok's art doesn't ignore what is going on in the characters' surroundings. The terrifying elegance of Squid Game is how this particular moment is situated inside a wider and more cruel reality.

Director And Writing

Hwang Dong-hyuk had no idea how his feature script from 2008, which was about a bunch of people in need enjoying a game of death or life, would ever be made into a movie. But ten years later, he proposed to Netflix the concept for Squid Game as a TV show, and to his astonishment, the suspenseful drama soon became a worldwide sensation with over 1.65 billion views just a few days after its premiere.

Squid Game has successfully transitioned into award season and has received an unprecedented 14 Emmy nominations, which makes it the first not fluent in English language programme to be nominated for Greatest Drama Series. The achievements keep coming. Writing and directing.

Is there a concept or picture that you utilised as your starting point before you even started composing Squid Game? he was asked in an interview.

He responded: The first sport that came to mind was Red Light, Green Light, and that is what has always kept me interested in bringing that to the screen. I imagined a very large, enormous desolate field or playground with a massive doll positioned at the end and a huge crowd of people attempting to avoid the giant doll's eyes as they approach. It would be a massacre if they were discovered and shot to death.

I wondered how viewers would react if this sort of thing surfaced on television. Would they be surprised? That, I believe, was where my production ideas first came to me.

When we successfully carried it off, I had been seeing the picture in my mind for more than ten years, and because I had successfully realised this vision in my head, the event brought back an abundance of recollections and feelings to me.

Production

Maybe Hwang has become as wealthy as the competitor who takes home the grand prize. I'm not that wealthy, he claims. I do, however, have enough. I have sufficient resources to eat. And I'm not getting a bonus from Netflix.

As per the terms of the original deal, Netflix paid me. It appears unjust. The fifty-year-old South Korean director has after all earned several hundred million dollars for his employers. This month, Squid Game surpassed Bridgerton as being the most popular Netflix programme ever. Leaked documents indicate that the nine-episode run's production cost was �15.5 million, or $1.75 million per episode.

That investment has yielded exceptional returns. The series is estimated to be valued at �650 million by Netflix, having increased subscription numbers by 4.4 million and garnered 142 million households' attention.

Perhaps Hwang ought to have negotiated a performance-based clause, especially because it was so stressful for him to plan, write, and direct that he ended up losing six teeth. "It was exhausting on a physical, mental, and emotional level. As we were filming, I continued coming up with fresh concepts and revising the episodes, which increased the workload.

Sound Design And Music

Park Min-joo & 23, Squid Game deftly incorporates traditional music to further hammer home the "chaos-confusion" motif, in addition to its instantly recognised recorder bit in "Way Back Then" from the initial soundtrack created by Jung Jae-il (who also composed the music for Parasite).

Haydn's "Trumpet Concerto" is playing as the primary protagonist Seong Gi-hun initially arrives on the island. After writing it in 1796, Joseph Haydn composed this symphony in his latter years and dedicated it to a close friend. This energetic, cheery trumpet solo, written for a then-uncommon instrument, especially among period-instrument aficionados, was ignored for more than a century before it was adopted as a standard in classical music. After valves trumpets became a staple in orchestras in the late 1800s, the concerto went dormant until some point in the 1930s.

Soon after, "The Blue Danube" plays as a signal for everyone to enter the winding staircase that leads to each fatal game. This song, which was written by Johann Strauss in 1867, is regarded as one of the most well-known works of classical music

In episode four, when the group of worn-out players queue up to receive their meals following overcoming the Dalgona candy challenge, Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" may be heard. "Serenade for Strings" was written as a tribute to Mozart, although it stood out from the Russian composer's significantly more fervent and patriotic "1812 Overture" in many ways.

The mellow, flowing music of Squid Game stands in dramatic contrast to the situation, as the more powerful players are plotting to remove the weaker competitors by murdering them while they are unconscious.

Even though it's not a classical song, "Fly Me to the Moon" deserves special recognition for flooding the speakers as the first game, "Red Light, Green Light," is silently montaged in its entirety.

The enigmatic masked gentleman watches from the warmth of his opulent home as bodies contort in pain and appear to dance to the lovely jazz music. One cannot but be struck by the startling contrast in this short-lived game, delivered by Shin Joo-won, as she sings, "In simple terms, I love you."

Shin summarises her sentiments after seeing Squid Game in a conversation with Pop Sugar, which pretty well sums up our feelings: "Watching the television series, I could completely empathise with those who entered the competition, and I was able to comprehend the harsh realities of an extremely competitive society."

There is no doubt that Squid Game's societal issues?beyond its entertainment value?hit a bit too close to home for some people, particularly for those who are having a hard time fitting into today's society.

Theme Of The Drama

The "uncanny valley" feeling that sneaks up on you whenever you are least expecting it is a common thread that unites all the competitions in Squid Game. The eerie robot with bunches is shown in the initial game standing on top of a barren tree

The players are first informed that everything within the arena is false and manufactured, except the fact that they are about to die. The roof closes when the game is over, but not until the flock of birds flies off into the distance, emphasising, even more, the horrifying fact that the losers, as unwilling participants, have no way of getting out.

Chae claimed that it took a while to finish the marble game set. Players are placed in an environment that resembles a village with dwellings that are designed to bring back memories as they pass by residences that remind them of their childhood homes, all based on the subject of "gganbu," which refers to close and trustworthy friends.

A fake sunset, in addition to numerous additional effects like actual weeds & sand, as well as real doorknobs from the 1970s, further blur the boundary between fiction and reality. "To create a three-dimensional set, we assembled two-dimensional sets similar to those found in theatrical productions. Players would thus encounter a wall when they opened a door, trapping them in a cycle from which there was no way out.

Review Of Squid Game

"Squid Game" can seem to have appeared out of nowhere to American viewers. But its success is not shocking.

The series, which according to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos is on track to surpass all previous viewing records, has dominated charts around the world, providing glaring evidence in favour of the streamer's worldwide strategy. While it's encouraging that so many individuals are interested in a project that they're viewing with captions (or dubbed), it doesn't feel very innovative for people to swarm to one that gives them the option of having it both ways.

Both gamers and game developers are tied together by need and a certain commitment to competitive rhythms; it has simple, straightforward lines. It has a sound structural design and appears sophisticated at first glance.

The early format of the programme also plays a role in this; after the first carnage, the survivors are given the option to leave, but many of them decide to come back of their own volition because they are so desperate for the money. (Their situations, which include a North Korean defector with a migrant employee from Pakistan, provide a genuinely fascinating cross-section of current Korean culture.)

We are now compelled to consider the possibility that the slim chances of surviving in the story of the squid might be preferable to none in contemporary society given the terrible reality they encounter both in their adventures and at home.

However, this is only the series' starting point, and little further is developed from it. The stakes and level of inhumanity in "Squid Game" keep going up indefinitely. (Its first salvo of several hundred dead bodies seemed tough to beat, yet it surpasses itself in players' savagery, which alternates somewhat crudely with astonishing displays of mercy.)

Hwang Dong-hyuk, the show's creator, has emphasised that he developed the series' script in 2008, before learning about more current works with comparable themes, such as "The Hunger Games" book as well as film series. If we're comparing the two, I'd say that "The Hunger Games" series implicated the audience more explicitly, which could be the reason its final instalment saw a decline in popularity and isn't often brought up now. Nobody desires to have their enjoyment of life criticised. The artwork that this most immediately reminded me of was the far more complimentary 2019 movie "Joker."

There, as currently, violence is shown flatly, with the elaborate decorations surrounding death and gore serving as the embellishment. As a technique to increase the stakes in a vaguely political discussion without offering a solution, murder is fetishized.

The idea of economic equality is heavily broached in both "Joker" and "Squid Game" before the killings begin, with "Squid Game's" diverse portrayal of the contemporary Korean underclass eventually being examined more as avatars of bad luck or injustice than as characters.

And in both instances, meticulously crafted visual landscapes?namely, homages to 1970s Scorsese and neon lights reminiscent of amusement parks and rustic childhood imagery?appear to have been constructed specifically to be interrupted by death. (It's important to note that "Squid Game's" nostalgic visual style draws heavily from Korean culture, a subject a white American critic would likely be unfamiliar with.)

The Squid Game is used to harvest organs from humans from the deceased and to amuse a chatty class of affluent individuals, some of whom are portrayed as white Westerners, who wager on the outcome as the series progresses.

There doesn't appear to be much to say about the first, other than the fact that, astonishingly, the series discovered a means by which to be even more directly affective and unconcerned about how the human body may fall apart. Regarding the second, there doesn't seem to be enough irony or perhaps meaningful recognition that the play is pushing its audience to behave quite similarly to the despised onlookers.

One person, for instance, enters the squid game-watching party and starts threatening and abusing a person he thinks is a young functionary right away. This behaviour eventually leads to an intended coercive sex act.

This argument for 455 dead people seems incredibly weak. This is perhaps the point: People who participate in the Squid Game are exposed to the trite and childish philosophical ramblings of people who, thanks to fortunate events in life, get to decide what reality is for everyone else.

But if you take the show's use of artificial blood and life to perform a character-based exploration of goodness literally, it is no wonder that it has become so popular. The audience of this show is told that enjoying fake death is admirable.

The most complex aspect of "Squid Game" is that while a spectator is enjoying something horrible, they are also tut-tutting at the system that would enable it and cheering for its destruction. This gives the viewer a sense of both enjoyment and superiority.

Conclusion

You'll experience an emotional roller coaster of tears, giggles, and heart-pounding moments when you watch a fantastic K-drama. Then there is Squid Game, which significantly raises the stakes. The tense, graphic show can occasionally be difficult to watch.

Nevertheless, millions of viewers have risen to the challenge and are enjoying the first season's award-winning story of treachery, greed, and the dangers of capitalism.

Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), Sae-book (Jung Ho-Yeon), and Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) are the only three survivors of the five frightening and life-or-death challenges. Gi-hun now cares about Sae-book and has developed a better sense of empathy. Sang-woo, however, is not on the same page.

A steak blade is left for any of the three after their celebratory supper, during which they dress in tuxedos and eat steak.

We now know that Sang-woo will go to any lengths to succeed, even if it means betraying those who are closest to him. He strikes Sae-book, who is already hurt from playing glass bridge, and she dies as the lights in the dorms go out.