This review contains narrative and conclusion spoilers for "Squid Game."
"Squid Game" may appear to have appeared out of nowhere to American viewers. However, it is an unsurprising huge hit.
The drama, which Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has stated is on course to become the streamer's most-watched series ever, has dominated charts around the world, presenting as compelling confirmation of the company's worldwide strategy. While it's encouraging that so many people are interested in a project that they're watching with subtitles (or dubbed), there's nothing particularly innovative about people flocking to a project that gives them the best of both worlds.
Hwang Dong-"Squid hyuk's Game" describes a competition with 456 participants in which the winner receives unlimited money if they survive a harsh gauntlet of catastrophic occurrences. The first stage, a version of "Red Light, Green Light," in which those who move after "Red Light" are gunned down, borrows from children's playground activities, lending a certain simple irony to how brutal they become. For example, more than half of the competitors are gunned down in the first stage.
More than half of the competitors — approximately 200 people — are eliminated, and "Squid Game" isn't bashful about displaying viscera. The violence is both strangely personal and impersonal: while the competitors' lives are cut short in a brutally honest manner, the shooters are masked game personnel (or, in the case of Red Light, Green Light, a robotic doll). Random functionaries administer death, and we know far less about them than we do about the game's players. What we gradually learn, thanks to the technique of a broken-in investigator, is that they are completely bought-in, following their own set of rules and believing strongly in a game they've worked hard to depict.
This reality — that both players and gamemakers are tied by need and an odd attachment to the competition's rhythms — has simple, basic lines. It's structurally sound and appears to be brilliant at first glance. So does the show's structure in the beginning, when surviving contestants are given the option to leave after the first massacre, only to return against their choice because they are desperate for money. (With a North Korean defector and a Pakistani migrant worker, their situations offer a legitimately fascinating cross-section of modern Korean culture.)
Violence is shown plainly there, as it is here, with the richness coming from the ornate trappings around death and gore. Murder is fetishized as a tactic to raise the stakes in an ill-defined political debate without offering a solution. The theme of economic equality lingers heavily in the air before the killings begin in both "Joker" and "Squid Game," with "Squid Game's" large cross-section of the modern Korean underclass finally explored more as avatars of unluckiness or injustice than as characters.
As the story progresses, it becomes evident that the Squid Game has a variety of purposes, including the harvesting of human parts from the dead and providing entertainment for a chattering class of wealthy individuals — some of whom are depicted as white Westerners — who wager on the outcome. There doesn't seem to be much to say about the first episode, save that it's astonishing that the series discovered a way to be even more affectively straightforward and unconcerned with exposing how the human body may fall apart. Concerning the second, there appears to be inadequate irony or even genuine comprehension that the play is urging its audience to do much the same thing as the despised viewers. One individual, for example, arrives at the Squid Game viewing party and immediately begins threatening and violating a young functionary, resulting in an attempted coercive sex act.
It's striking that the show feels compelled to underline that those who watch the Squid Game for entertainment are morally degraded in comparison to folks who, say, watch "Squid Game" for entertainment. There's a having-it-both-ways insistence, similar to "Joker," that a culture capable of causing violence is fundamentally sick and deranged, while simultaneously playing out a hugely exaggerated depiction of ill derangement in a manner calculated to be maximally stressful and hilarious.
To be clear, even before Hwang's writing dramatically stretches it out, there is a clear distinction between spectatorship of real-world and fictitious violence. However, if the bodies had been slain in the service of a more fascinating principle than that inequality is bad, it might be simpler to discern the distinction. The game was, in essence, meant for entertainment and to discover if people can be decent, according to a season-ending chat between the game's winner and its architect.