The Squid Game

[T42]

+1 for subtitled

I enjoyed it, but

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The participants in the game, with the possible exception of the North Korean defector and the Indian immigrant, are pretty much failures in life. They are gambling addicts, incompetent doctors, failed priests. That is why they are lured into the game. They are horrible people, and this really comes out in the game with constant betrayals.
The lead character is one of the most annoying and pathetic of them all, right up until the end.

He only has one person in his life who depends on him, wants him, and he lets her down completely. Arsehole.
It is good that they maintain consistency, but annoying that he learns nothing from his experience.

Realistic in that respect, though.

[Croft]

I didn't see them as arseholes, but, as you said, flawed, like all of us. It's just that circumstances amplify those flaws.

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Whereas the superficially kindly old gentleman turns out to be anything but.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I didn't see them as arseholes, but, as you said, flawed, like all of us. It's just that circumstances amplify those flaws.

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Whereas the superficially kindly old gentleman turns out to be anything but.

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There was a big foreshadowing with him being #001. Anyone who had watched The Prisoner would have guessed that.

My 'arsehole' comment wasn't collective, but specific. Main character, abandoning and letting down his daughter, yet again.

[Jakob]

Finished it yesterday. First 2 episodes were really good. Kinda fell apart with the introduction of the VIPs. Would have preferred a happier ending.
7/10.

[Hot Flatus]

[Hot Flatus]

Went to the new Japanese food stall in the food arcade today. Turns out the proprietor is South Korean, not Japanese.

Yes, we discussed Squid Game. He hadn't watched it, but said he used to play Squid Game as a child 😄

[Ham]

I've acquired a Netflix sub almost by accident, so clicked on the Squid Game. It appears that I have the overdubbed version, which I find intensely annoying - how do I get a subtitled version? Anyone know? Do I have to find an 'ookey version?

[Jaded]

I just changed the language in settings to Korean

[Ham]

Ah yes.... Netfix noob error, thanks.

That's better.

[Jaded]

 

It is definitely better in the original language.

[Ham]

A few episodes in, and I am distinctly uncomfortable with this as entertainment. That is, both the proffer and acceptance of it as suitable for consumption and sensation. You could argue that it's just a grown up "Lord of the Flies", but the concept that you can postulate a world where armies of people are prepared to do their job to make evil happen, including feeding bodies into cremation ovens is deeply troubling. It's probably that which leaves me wondering whether I'll continue. After all, stories showing man's capability of descent into hell are nothing new, even if this does turn the volume up to 11.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I think it is well made and the characters are believable.

It troubles me that many people seem to think that "this is great".
It seems to escape them that the principle characters have lost out in society, they all have gambling issues (gambling directly, gambling with other people's money) or have lost money and power by ripping off other people. They are dregs, tbh.   (Just to be clear, I don't put people in the category of 'dregs' because they are badly off, but because of their behaviour. One of the worst in the Squid Game is one of the wealthiest.)

Maybe there is something about the concept of ripping people off, being abusive and destructive, being rewarded that appeals to many.

As previously agreed on this thread

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the consistency of behaviour of one of the main characters, right to the end, has an appeal, in that it recognises that is very difficult for people to change.

What do I get out of it?  It is a good program in exactly the same sense that Lord of the Flies is a good book. All too believable extremes of human behaviour.

[Hot Flatus]

A few episodes in, and I am distinctly uncomfortable with this as entertainment. That is, both the proffer and acceptance of it as suitable for consumption and sensation. You could argue that it's just a grown up "Lord of the Flies", but the concept that you can postulate a world where armies of people are prepared to do their job to make evil happen, including feeding bodies into cremation ovens is deeply troubling. It's probably that which leaves me wondering whether I'll continue. After all, stories showing man's capability of descent into hell are nothing new, even if this does turn the volume up to 11.

And yet cremation is a normal, daily occurrence in every town, and the most common way of disposing of bodies.

But...I know where you are coming from with this. I too wondered whether it was a direct reference to the Holocaust, but I'm not sure. I genuinely don't know if the Holocaust is a reference point in South Korea in the way that it is in the west. Experience of the far east suggests possibly not. Just as there is general ignorance of south Korean history here, I suspect there is ignorance of our history there. It may be that the Holocaust does not have the same resonance.

The coffins resemble presents. The metaphor is that death is a gift. The participants chose to be there, and it was purely in the first game that they were unaware that all but one would die. They elected to remain in the full knowledge of this, preferring the likely odds of a violent death over the life they had outside the game.

[Ham]

I don't think I have a problem with the participants, after all there's the established (possibly flimsily) moral background that for them life is hell outside at least inside the game they can feel masters of their own destiny. The Evil Mastermind is no real problem, either. Where I struggle is with the enablement by the innumerable support cast, the desensitising implicit with that set up, with the cremation scenes joining the dots. That's the "special" kind of evil that happened in the holocaust, and so many other atrocities throughout history. Is it worse than hordes of stormtroopers zapping the good guys to death? It certainly feels so, and I suggest it was intended to. Yes, I agree with you that in Korea there may be different attitudes to death, the holocaust is unlikely to figure in the national consciousness, but I don't buy that it wasn't immediately obvious to the Producer and Director. According to that Wiki-thing

....he had initially written it in 2009, he was unable to find a production company to fund the idea until Netflix took an interest around 2019 as part of their drive to expand their foreign programming offerings.

[Hot Flatus]

Certainly it will have been obvious to Netflix producers, I agree. I guess the point is that it may not have been burnt into the consciousness of the Korean writer in the way that is of us in the west. The Koreans have their own tragic history etched in their souls, as do the Cambodians, the Indonesians, the Rwandans and so on, as you suggest. Yes, it's a "special" kind of evil.

But you've made me reflect here, because probably for about 20 years I've been unable/unwilling to watch certain kinds of film, whereas prior to that I had no issue. I saw Schindler's List on release. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I found it moving, troubling of course. But I wouldn't watch it again. Nor any film of that sort that depicts things that actually happened. Even war films.

Fantasy violence? Sure, no problem, so that is probably why Squid Game is viewable for me. I didn't enjoy the killing and cremation, and I found the series profoundly disturbing, but in an a priori sense rather than empirically. That shit didn't happen. Somebody made it up, so I can cogitate on the metaphor without being troubled by realities.

I think the turning point for me probably was going to Cambodia in the 90s, and seeing the Killing Fields (actually, they were everywhere. There wasn't just one) and the S21 torture centre.  Both were ordinary and banal, but horror lay not so far underneath. The S21 was a re-purposed school. Looked like any other city school. The Killing Fields looked like a park or a memorial garden, up until the point I tripped on something, looked down, saw that it was a bone poking out of the soil, at which point I noticed all the little fragments of fabric embedded in the soil, visible in between the blades of grass. I was standing right on top of mass murder.

[Ham]

Well, I got over myself. It is after all a morality play. A rather odd and offbeat modern morality play, but just the same. Excellent acting and editing carrying the story, somewhat heavy handed event semaphore, possibly for their American audience? - but oddly entertaining none the less. My previous disquiet still stands, but as an artefact of our times it is just part of the story; having watched through the whole thing, the workers appear to be a crossover between Metropolis and Stormtroopers, the Metropolis reference strengthened by those Escher staircases.

There's an awful lot to unpack and far more subtlety than first appears. I'm not sure I would watch again in a hurry, and I'm going to watch Metropolis again, first (which happens anyway every few years) as I can't make up my mind whether there's more Metropolis buried there or not.

I don't agree with all of the Graun's article on the subtitling as I think that many times the acting and directing conveys subtlety that the words miss. But, it has pointed me to Lupin which I am trying to watch in the original - the 0.75x playback speed helps a lot in that respect.

[rogerzilla]

I've started watching it and enjoyed the first two episodes   it's unintentionally funny in a Bond movie way, more so than The Hunger Games (which suffered rather from J. Law's plastic appearance and acting).  I sort of want to visit South Korea now.

[T42]

Finally persuaded MrsT to try it, and she's enjoying it.